It’s A Small Miracle (Part 2)
The Brave Voice of Gabriel Fernandez & the Social Workers Who Ignored Him
This article continues from Part 1
On January 29, 2013, Stefanie Rodriguez, a Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) social worker, climbed the stairs towards a second-floor Palmdale apartment. She was making her third visit in four months. Rodriguez traveled to the complex to investigate child abuse claims made by Gabriel Fernandez’s first-grade teacher, Jennifer Garcia. Garcia told Rodriguez that the young boy had been shot repeatedly in the face with a BB gun. Even more appalling, according to Garcia, the shots were fired by Gabriel’s own mother, Pearl Fernandez.
Once inside the apartment, Rodriguez interviewed Gabriel about the bruises covering his face. For the third time, despite clear DCFS policy to the contrary, Rodriguez did not separate Gabriel from his mother. It was no great surprise, therefore, that, yet again, Gabriel recanted his allegation of abuse. Instead, he told Rodriguez that he fell playing tag with his brother and sister. This explanation was sufficient for Rodriguez, who left the apartment without ordering a medical examination. By this point, it was apparent that neither she nor her supervisor, Kevin Bom, thought Gabriel was in danger of harm.
After her visit, Rodriguez and Bom made the decision to close Gabriel’s case. But, before a DCFS social worker can end an investigation, Department policy requires that they use a software tool known as Structured Decision Making. This program is employed by DCFS to score a child’s risk for abuse or neglect. According to Rodriguez’s completed assessment, Gabriel was at “…very high risk” for abuse. Under normal DCFS protocol, that outcome left her no choice but to promote Gabriel’s case. When a case is promoted, a social worker petitions a family court judge, requiring that services, such as therapy or anger management, be provided to the child’s family. In extremely severe cases, such as Gabriel’s, a social worker can also petition the judge to remove the child to foster care.
Rodriguez did none of those things. After receiving the results of her Structured Decision Making, Rodriguez walked over to the desk of Darlene Starr in the Family Preservation Unit. At the time, this small team within DCFS was led by Greg Merritt (Merritt was fired from DCFS. It was not possible to locate him for this article). Rodriguez urged Starr to place Gabriel in the Department’s Voluntary Family Maintenance (VFM) program. VFM was designed to assist children at low risk for abuse to remain in their homes, while their families worked to resolve their issues.
Based upon the “…very high risk” result of the Structured Decision Making, Rodriguez should never have considered Gabriel for VFM. But, Starr thought that Gabriel’s family might benefit from it, so she brought them into the program. (Starr no longer works at DCFS. It was not possible to locate her for this report). By referring Gabriel for a program that did not adequately address his level of peril, Starr was yet another in a long line of adults that allowed him to languish in neglect, torture and abuse.
On February 1, 2013, Gabriel’s case was officially accepted into VFM. This decision ended Rodriguez’s and Bom’s involvement with the seven-year-old. The responsibility for his supervision shifted to Greg Merritt and his team in the Family Preservation Unit. While preparing Gabriel’s file for transfer, Bom and Rodriguez had the option to check a box flagging Gabriel as a high priority. A review of their work showed the box was left blank. After receiving the documentation, Merritt assigned social worker Patricia Clement to conduct bi-weekly visits with Gabriel and his family. Department policy mandated the bi-weekly schedule, due to Gabriel’s high risk for abuse.
Clement made her first visit to Gabriel’s apartment on February 13. Her notes contain little information about what transpired (Clement was fired from DCFS. It was not possible to locate her for this story). But, Clement’s notes from her next visit two weeks later were more revealing. She described Pearl Fernandez as a victim of her mother, who never demonstrated “…any real love or positive feelings about her.” She met Fernandez’s live-in boyfriend, Isuaro Aguirre, whom she found “…a very pleasant person.” Although Gabriel was absent from school dozens of times and was obviously injured, Clement concluded, “The children are attending school regularly and doing well.”
Around the time of Clement’s first two visits, Gabriel issued another desperate cry for help. This plea came in the form of a note, found by Gabriel’s brother, Ezequiel, in which the now eight-year-old boy expressed a desire to kill himself. “I love you so much that I will kill my sonf[sic],” it read. Along with the twice-a-month visits from Clement, Gabriel and his family were also being treated by a therapist, Carmen Le Norgant. As Le Norgant was leaving a session toward the end of February, Pearl Fernandez handed her the suicide note. When the psychiatrist asked Gabriel if he was serious, he stared back at her and said, “Yes.” Worried for Gabriel’s safety, Le Norgant later informed both Clement and Merritt. A review of both their notes shows neither Clement nor Merritt took any additional action. Yet again, Gabriel’s frantic cries for help fell on deaf ears.
After departing, Le Norgant phoned 911. Upon receiving the call, a deputy from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD), Federico Gonzalez, was dispatched to Gabriel’s apartment to investigate her claims. According to a DCFS report of the visit, the deputy determined that Gabriel did not have a plan for committing suicide. A prosecution motion filed during the grand jury in Gabriel’s death revealed that the deputy made his assessment without seeing or speaking to the boy. The deputy left, after Isuaro Aguirre told him that Gabriel was fine and DCFS was involved with the family. The deputy advised Pearl Fernandez to keep an eye on Gabriel and suggested mental health services for her son.
This occasion was not the first time that sheriff’s deputies were called regarding Gabriel. Nor was it the only time they visited his home. In fact, in the eight months leading to Gabriel’s death, eight deputies and one detective were dispatched in connection with the young boy. None of them did enough to help the suffering and traumatized boy. Once again, the systems designed to protect the most vulnerable in society failed, leading to an innocent child’s death. The sheriffs’ insufficient actions in the last months of Gabriel’s life offer yet another window into the many ways the eight-year-old was forsaken, as he fought to survive heinous abuse.
The first contact by sheriff’s deputies with Gabriel and his family involved mediating a custody dispute. In September 2012, two sheriff’s deputies, Adam Hilzendeger and David Nisenoff, arrived at the home of Robert and Sandra Fernandez, Gabriel’s grandparents. They responded to Sandra’s call to the Sheriff’s Department. Sandra told the Sheriff’s Department that her daughter was attempting to regain custody of her son, who had been living with the grandparents for four years. Sandra said that she was worried because her daughter had a history of abusing and neglecting her children. According to Robert’s testimony during the grand jury, when the deputies arrived, he showed them a notarized guardianship document and school records indicating that he and his wife were sanctioned to act in loco parentis.
Despite a clearly defined Sheriff’s Department policy that indicated that child welfare “…is of paramount concern” in custody matters, Hilzendeger and Nisenoff instead sided with the child’s mother. They attempted to discredit the documents that Robert showed them. During his grand jury testimony, Robert stated that the deputies insisted that the documents were forgeries. Then, in early October 2012, the deputies moved Gabriel to his mother’s residence. That action marked the fatal turning point towards the torture, abuse and neglect that would end his life.
A few weeks later, at the end of October, a deputy, Imelda Rizo, went to Gabriel’s apartment to investigate an allegation that the boy was beaten with a belt buckle so hard he bled. According to the grand jury testimony of Sheriff’s Department homicide detective Timothy O’Quinn, Rizo wrote in an entry to her computer log that she had observed no injuries. Furthermore, the deputy recorded in her log that she saw no indications that Gabriel was a victim of child abuse.
For at least the last decade, the Sheriff’s Department policies have been unequivocal. Deputies are required to “…thoroughly investigate” every allegation of child abuse. The standard procedure is to file a police report, which contains a deputy’s detailed account of an incident. A police report relating to child abuse triggers a follow-up investigation from sheriff’s detectives. The rule states a report must be written, unless a deputy can affirm beyond a reasonable doubt that no child abuse occurred.
After visiting Gabriel’s home, according to a prosecution motion filed during the grand jury, Rizo did not submit a police report. The deputy testified in a preliminary hearing that she did not write the report after she visited Gabriel’s school, following her visit to his apartment. When she arrived, she interviewed the boy about his allegations and checked his body for injuries. “I had him lift up his shirt,” the deputy stated, saying that she didn’t observe any marks or bruises on Gabriel’s body. Rizo left after conducting the cursory examination, failing to speak to Gabriel’s teacher, Jennifer Garcia or the DCFS social workers. If the deputy had spoken to DCFS, she would have known that the boy’s mother, Pearl Fernandez, confessed to beating her child with the belt buckle.
Meanwhile, the harm being inflicted on Gabriel continued to escalate. At the end of November 2012, the seven-year-old turned up to school with a split lip, scabbed head and chunks of missing hair. At the end of January 2013, Gabriel’s face was covered in purple welts and swollen from being shot with a BB gun. Jennifer Garcia continued reporting these abuses to DCFS. The Sheriff’s Department was aware of these incidents but took no action. Yet, “…every time a DCFS SCAR [Suspected Child Abuse Report] was prepared, LASD was called by a cross report,” said Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Hatami. Hatami’s case files confirmed that deputies made no visits to check on Gabriel. They finally visited Gabriel’s home at the end of February after therapist Carmen Le Norgant’s 911 call about the boy’s suicide note.
Concurrent with deputy Federico Gonzalez’s perfunctory investigation into Gabriel’s suicide note, a sheriff’s detective, Vanessa Reddy, was fielding yet another accusation. In an unsubstantiated report submitted to the county child abuse database, it was alleged that Gabriel was being sexually abused by his uncle, Michael Carranza, and his partner, David Martinez. In the Netflix documentary, The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez, Martinez strenuously denied the charge. “The allegations were false, we never sexually abused Gabriel at all. We were not that type of parents,” he said. Despite the severity of the claim, Reddy investigated the sexual abuse in a similar manner to the seven sheriff’s deputies who inquired about Gabriel’s physical abuse. According to a prosecution motion filed during the grand jury, Reddy interviewed Gabriel but not his uncle. The detective made an entry in her computer log and did not write a police report.
On March 6, 2013, DCFS social worker Patricia Clement made her third visit to Gabriel’s family. During her inspection, Gabriel’s mother, Pearl Fernandez, told the social worker that she did not want to have any further involvement with DCFS. Despite Gabriel’s evident injuries, Clement agreed with her. The social worker averred “…that mother is overwhelmed with her own emotional pain, she is unwilling to continue counseling at this time,” and that “…there are no safety or risk’s[sic] to the children’s welfare at this time.” Clement’s recommendation? Three simple words, “Close the case.”
Pursuant to DCFS mandate, Clement required her supervisor’s approval to close Gabriel’s case. The Department’s policy manual also directed her supervisor, Greg Merritt, to scrutinize Gabriel’s entire file thoroughly. Instead, Merritt simply signed off on the assessment provided by Clement, concluding the case without so much as a second glance at her work. The termination marked the end of the Department’s oversight of the vulnerable, traumatized and abused boy.
By this point, Gabriel’s first-grade teacher, Jennifer Garcia, was acutely aware of the boy’s suffering. As she later testified, she was left largely powerless, unable to assure the eight-year-old that the harm he suffered would cease. Moreover, she only saw Gabriel when he was present at school. In the last months of his life, Gabriel’s appearance in class was sporadic at best, with attendance interrupted by many long and unexplained absences.
Still, according to Garcia’s later testimony at trial, Gabriel sought to win his mother’s approval. When he was in school, he copied sentences from books, brought them to Garcia, and asked her to put an “A” on the paper. Garcia told Gabriel to be good and never give his mother a reason to get angry. Eventually, she emailed the school’s psychologist, hoping to get help for Gabriel. The psychologist replied that there were no services available.
On April 26, 2013, security guard Arturo Miranda Martinez sat behind his desk inside an Antelope Valley Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN) welfare office. From this vantage point, he observed Pearl Fernandez yelling at Gabriel to sit down. After telling Fernandez to quiet down, Martinez turned his attention towards the little boy. Immediately, he recognized what so many other adults failed to see. Gabriel was the victim of severe child abuse. As the security guard later testified, the eight-year-old, “…turned around and made eye contact with me and I noticed he had a greenish-bluish eye — a black eye — and lumps on the back of his head. His skin was almost yellow, like he’s been starving or something.”
Martinez also observed cigarette burns on Gabriel’s head and neck and ligature marks on his wrists, as if he had been tied up. As he later recalled in an interview for the Netflix documentary, The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez:
At that point Gabriel starts walking by and he rubs past my desk, and goes like this [Martinez holds up his left arm in his right hand, wrapping his fingers around his wrist], and he looks at me with the corner of his eye, and at that point my heart dropped, like oh my God. I saw the marks. I thought, ‘Damn man, this is fucked up’. And that’s when it hit me, oh shit, child abuse.
Eventually, Pearl noticed Martinez staring at Gabriel. She hurried the boy out of the office, making sure to hide Gabriel from the security guard’s line of sight.
After they left, Martinez spoke with Maricela Corona, a GAIN agent who had just finished helping Gabriel’s mother. He asked her if she was going to report what she witnessed to the police. After Martinez pressed her, Corona got up and went to speak to her supervisor. When she returned, Corona told the security guard that the supervisor advised her not to get involved. It was near the end of the workday and the higher-ups in the GAIN office would not approve overtime. Martinez spoke to his supervisor, who also told him the same thing: leave this alone.
Despite his superior’s directive, Martinez was determined to aid the young boy. The reason he felt compelled to help, “His body was talking. ‘This is what they’re doing to me’, that’s what he was saying. Yelling. He didn’t really have to say anything. It was all over his body, screaming for help.” At the end of the workday, Corona slipped the security guard a note with Gabriel’s address and phone number. As she handed him the piece of paper, she urged Martinez to do everything in his power to “Save this kid.”
After work, Martinez made two calls to the DCFS hotline. Both times, the security guard was unable to speak with someone. He next called 911. According to a prosecution motion filed during the grand jury, the sheriff’s deputy who answered the call, Robin Soukup, screamed at Martinez that the burned child did not qualify as an emergency. Soukup gave Martinez a non-emergency number and hung up.
Following this exchange, according to court records, Martinez called the Palmdale sheriff’s station. A deputy, Jonathan Livingston, went to Gabriel’s house to investigate. Once again, the deputy wrote an entry in his computer log and did not file a police report. Livingston’s log stated that Gabriel had fallen off his bicycle. The deputy asserted that there was no evidence of child abuse, despite the numerous injuries all over the eight-year-old’s body. According to the grand jury testimony of sheriff’s homicide detective Timothy O’Quinn, Livingston’s log did not document any examination of Gabriel’s physical injuries.
After a few days, Martinez called the non-emergency number to follow up. He was told that a sheriff’s deputy went to Gabriel’s home and saw nothing out of the ordinary. During a preliminary hearing in the trial of the four DCFS social workers, Livingston testified that he saw a scrape on Gabriel’s forehead, but that it did not justify him taking any further action, which might have included removing the child from the abusive situation. “I did not take him out of the home,” Livingston stated, “I did not believe a crime had occurred at the time.” The forehead abrasion “…did not appear to be fresh,” according to the deputy.
In a motion that sought the Sheriff Department’s investigative transcripts, Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Hatami issued a stinging rebuke over the handling of the GAIN security guard’s allegations. “It is unclear why a child being burned all over his body is not an emergency,” the prosecutor wrote. “It is unclear why a police report was not filed and if the security guard was interviewed by Deputy Livingston.”
At the end of April, Gabriel returned to school for the final time. In photographs shown during the grand jury, the eight-year-old’s body was riddled with injuries in various stages of healing. These wounds included broken skin peeling off his forehead, burns and many other marks across his face, neck and left ear. One of his eyes was blackened by a bruise, the other bloodshot.
When Gabriel appeared in class, Garcia did not ask what was wrong with him. Instead, she invited the eight-year-old to work on the class assignment that day: a Mother’s Day card. The card was shaped like a house and read on the front, “Open the door and see who loves you.” Gabriel stuck his picture on the inside.
After school, Garcia called DCFS social worker Stefanie Rodriguez. This time, Rodriguez did not pick up, nor did she call the teacher back. Garcia did not know that DCFS had closed Gabriel’s case two months earlier. She was also unaware that, since the start of February, Rodriguez no longer had responsibility for oversight of the eight-year-old. In Gabriel’s Department file, there is no entry of the teacher’s final call.
In early May, Gabriel told Garcia that his eye was bothering him. The teacher sent him to the school nurse, Donna Evans, who had recently taken the position. After examining Gabriel, Evans called the boy’s mother to pick him up from school. This proved to be a fatal error. The nurse was not aware what so many others in the school knew — Gabriel was in danger at home.
After being sent home by the school nurse, Gabriel was once again absent for a prolonged period. Worried, school officials asked a sheriff’s deputy who worked at the school, Jason Lee Lasley, to investigate. He failed to visit the eight-year-old’s apartment — the school gave him the wrong address. On May 16, 2013, the deputy spoke to Pearl Fernandez on the phone. She told Lasley that Gabriel had moved to Texas to live with his grandmother. After a cursory attempt to obtain the correct address, the deputy ended his investigation. In his subsequent testimony, Lasley stated that he did not write a police report.
By this point, according to the later testimony of his siblings, Gabriel was spending most of his time tied up and locked in a wooden box in his parent’s bedroom. His siblings referred to the box as “…the cubby.” Ezequiel said he snuck his brother food from time to time. He also stated that his mother and her boyfriend would threaten him, if he did not participate in torturing Gabriel. In order to help Gabriel, Ezequiel said, he whispered in his brother’s ear to fall over rapidly when hit.
On May 22, 2013, Fernandez and her boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre, tortured Gabriel for the final time. The pair utilized their weapons of choice: a bat, a BB gun and cigarettes. After they finished torturing Gabriel, Fernandez turned to his sister, Virginia, who was frozen on the edge of the bed. According to the girl’s later statements, her mother asked her to help clean Gabriel’s blood off the floor.
After they cleaned up, Fernandez and Aguirre called 911. When the paramedics arrived, Ezequiel silently escorted them into the apartment. Once inside, Fernandez told the first responders that Gabriel had fallen while playing and that his injuries were self-inflicted. She further claimed that the missing skin on Gabriel’s neck came from vigorous scrubbing with a washcloth. The state of the boy’s motionless body told a completely different story.
The medics rushed Gabriel to an Antelope Valley hospital, where he was airlifted to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. After arriving at Children’s Hospital, doctors did everything they could to save Gabriel’s life. But, on May 24, 2013, Gabriel was declared brain dead and taken off life support. According to the eight-year-old’s autopsy, his cause of death was determined to be, “…blunt force trauma coincided with neglect and malnutrition.” As James Kemp Ribe of the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s office later testified, “I have never seen this many skin injuries on one child.”
A few days after Gabriel’s death, his teacher, Jennifer Garcia, found a note Gabriel wrote in his desk. In a heartbreaking coda it read, “I love you Mom and Gabriel is a good boy.”
In the aftermath of Gabriel’s tragic death, there was a reckoning with the many ways various social safety nets failed the vulnerable boy. DCFS received the greatest scrutiny. Yet, even with an investigation by a blue-ribbon commission, little to nothing changed at DCFS. Public sentiment was largely against the four social workers who oversaw Gabriel’s care in his last months. Immediately following Gabriel’s death, they were terminated. But, what became of them after they left DCFS?
Several months after his firing, Kevin Bom found employment in a San Bernardino Courthouse as a child custody counselor. In a report prepared by CBS Los Angeles, he held this position until his history with DCFS came to light. Stefanie Rodriguez and Greg Merritt fared little better. According to contemporaneous reports, Rodriguez moved out of state but was unable to escape her association with Gabriel in the media. Meanwhile, Merritt stayed in Los Angeles and found work stocking beer at the Antelope Valley Fairgrounds.
In May 2014, Patricia Clement spoke out against the public’s perception of the four social workers. By this point, as another CBS Los Angeles report indicated, Clement was, “…unemployed, bankrupt and in danger of losing her home.” The reason she agreed to sit for the interview was to make this point: DCFS expected too much from its social workers. “We don’t get supported, we get accused and it feels like they don’t care,” Clement stated, “That’s the tragedy of the whole system.” Ultimately, Clement laid the blame for the failures in Gabriel’s case on “…too many cases, too much paperwork and not enough time.”
“Do you think you let him down or that you share any of the responsibility?” reporter Cristy Fajardo asked. “No…well,” Clement hesitated, “I wanna say no, I believe no. I’m sure that would make people unhappy with me but, you know, I did the best I could with what I had.”
