commentary by Patrick Moore
Six months ago I received a lecture for casting aspersions upon foster parents and Child Protective Services’ case workers. The woman who criticized my criticism pointed out that I was focusing on bad foster parents and corrupt case workers rather than realizing that these miscreants are the exception, not the rule. I took the advice to heart and have since bent over backwards to be fair and balanced with respect to this issue.
Yesterday, however, the Huffington Post and other media sources reported a case of such shocking malpractice (for lack of a better word) on the part of the Los Angeles County child welfare workers that the mind recoils in horror. (In fairness, this is not a foster care case; rather, it is perhaps the most horrific case of child abuse by a biological mother and her boyfriend that I have ever encountered.)
Graphic grand jury testimony reveals details of the abuse suffered by an 8-year-old Los Angeles County boy allegedly battered to death by his mother and her boyfriend.
Court documents made public Monday show Gabriel Fernandez was doused with pepper spray, forced to eat his own vomit and locked in a cabinet with a sock stuffed in his mouth to muffle his screams, the Los Angeles Times reported ( http://lat.ms/1o9x6pK ).
The Palmdale boy died in May 2013, days after he was hospitalized with injuries including a cracked skull, broken ribs and burns.
The victim’s mother is Pearl Fernandez and her boyfriend is Isauro Aguirre. They are in jail awaiting trial after pleading not guilty to murder charges with special allegations of torture.
As part of their investigation of this case, the LA Times reviewed more than 800 pages of testimony. In a Times article, Soumya Karlamangla, Abby Sewell, and Laura J. Nelson describe the many ways in which the agencies who are supposed to protect our children allegedly dropped the ball:
Several agencies investigated allegations of abuse before Gabriel’s death without removing the boy from the home. On multiple occasions, deputies went to the family’s apartment or to Gabriel’s school to investigate reports of abuse and of the boy being suicidal. Each time, they concluded there was no evidence of abuse and did not write a detailed report.
Timothy O’Quinn, a sheriff’s homicide detective, told grand jurors that there was no indication that deputies had removed any of Gabriel’s clothing to check for signs of abuse.
Investigators searching the family’s apartment after Gabriel’s death found bloodstains, BB gun holes and a wooden club covered in his blood, according to testimony.
In short, Gabriel remained with his mother and her boyfriend despite several investigations by social workers. As a result of this incident, there have been calls for sweeping reforms to the Los Angeles County foster-care system because child welfare workers failed to remove the boy from this “house of horrors”. Two supervisors and two social workers were reportedly fired while others involved in the case received letters of warning or were reprimanded.
The beginning of the end came for poor Gabriel on May 22, 2013, when Pearl Fernandez phoned 9-1-1 to report that her son was not breathing. According to testimony, when sheriff’s deputies arrived at the apartment, she told them her son had fallen and hit his head on a dresser. The paramedics found Gabriel naked in a bedroom. He was not breathing and BB pellets were embedded in his lung and groin. He died two days after the 9-1-1- call.
“It was just like every inch of this child had been abused,” testified James Cermak, a Los Angeles County Fire Department paramedic.
Because of several delays in setting a preliminary hearing, frustrated prosecutors convened a grand jury which returned an indictment on July 28th.
During his testimony before the grand jury, Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Hatami told the jurors that Fernandez and Aguirre deliberately tortured the boy to death. They did their best to conceal their atrocities with forged doctor’s notes and lies to the authorities.
“For eight straight months, he was abused, beaten and tortured more severely than many prisoners of war,” Hatami said.
Two of Gabriel’s siblings, both of whom are minors, testified that the abuse worsened as Gabriel’s death approached. He was forced to eat cat feces, rotten spinach as well as his own vomit.
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Gabriel was born in 2005. Shortly thereafter, he was sent to live but relatives and ended up with Fernandez’ parents for an undisclosed period of time. Unfortunately, Fernandez reclaimed Gabriel and two of his older siblings in 2012.
A mere two weeks after Gabriel moved in with his mother, his first-grade teacher called social workers and reported that the boy’s mother had hit him with a belt buckle hard enough to make him bleed. Not unexpectedly, drugs appear to have been involved, and Gabriel apparently demonstrated to the teacher that he knew how to snort cocaine despite his tender age.
Gabriel’s teacher, Jennifer Garcia, testified that she called county services several more times after the child came to school with various injuries included an injured lip which a social worker shrugged off as a “blister”.
At one point, Gabriel wrote a suicide note that was discovered by a counselor at a children’s center. She informed the authorities who once again shrugged it off because Gabriel did not describe the specifics of how he intended to kill himself.
One of the deceased victim’s siblings testified that their mother had told them to lie to social workers whenever they came to check up. He stated that he did lie “because I thought she was going to do the same things to me.”
Gabriel’s school remained vigilant and school officials asked a deputy to investigate his many absences because they suspected child abuse. The deputy claimed that he was initially given the wrong address but that when he eventually reached Gabriel’s mother by phone, she told him Gabriel had moved back to Texas and was living with his grandmother.
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It sounds like Gabriel’s school did their level best to rescue the boy but that no one else cared enough to expend enough effort to get at the truth. Drugs were obviously involved, a fact that deputies could hardly have been unaware of. Furthermore, when reports of suggested child abuse with the same victim and the same parents surface over and over again, it seems pretty obvious that “where there’s smoke there’s fire”.
With respect to the abuse itself, I suspect that inflicting pain on the helpless quickly becomes addictive, and thus like any other form of addictive behavior, the addict must inflict more and more pain to gain the satisfaction he or she craves.
Many people who hear about this case will respond by saying that if convicted of first degree murder, Fernandez and her despicable boyfriend Aguirre should receive the death penalty, and I would not be that surprised if they do due to the torture allegations. However, since there is apparently a moratorium on actual executions in California, they may wile away their existences of Death Row for quite some time.