Thank you for the suggestion. I used the 1 MHz output pin on a UNO ISP to pin 8 and the unit came back to life. Scoping the other unit showed zero volts on both pins 7 and 8 (the crystal pins).
This led to discovering that the two mini boards that I received had a build error. One of the ~20 pf crystal caps was swapped with the 100nf cap on the reset input line. Exchanging the caps set both boards to working correctly. I'll post a photo of the cap locations if anyone needs it. Their physical size difference was the clue.
I guess they shipped with fuses set for the internal r/c clock and when I loaded the bootloader I set the fuses to would should have correct for a 16 mhz crystal, thereby rendering it doa.