In court on Wednesday, a California teen described the relentless assaults inflicted on his 8-year-old …
NEWS: 8-Year-Old’s Big Brother Details the Horrific Abuse He Suffered from Mom’s Boyfriend Before His Death
In court on Wednesday, a California teen described the relentless assaults inflicted on his 8-year-old brother that lasted for months until, at last, the little boy was dead.
Los Angeles County prosecutors argued Gabriel Fernandez was the victim of an eight-month-long campaign of terror by his mother and her boyfriend, who were “conspiring together to deceive everyone in order to torture [him] to death,” after he moved in with them in 2012, NBC Los Angeles reports.
On Wednesday, according to local TV stations CBS Los Angeles and KABC, Gabriel’s 16-year-old brother, Ezequiel, testified in horrific detail about the abuse the boy suffered at the hands of Isauro Aguirre.
Aguirre, 37, is on trial in L.A. Superior Court for the murder of Gabriel’s May 2013 death.
Gabriel’s 34-year-old mother, Pearl Fernandez, was also charged with murder in the boy’s death. Her trial is on pending.
Both have pleaded not guilty and face a possible death sentence if convicted.
Gabriel Fernandez
According to news reports, the evidence and testimony in Aguirre’s trial has left both court observers and jurors stunned — sometimes gasping or sobbing at what they learned.
Aguirre’s attorney John Alan said in court this week his client is “guilty of murder” and does not deny the “unspeakable” abuse but that he should not face the special circumstance allegation of torture, according to NBC Los Angeles.
Alan said Aguirre became enraged before the boy’s final beating but “never intended for Gabriel to die.”
According to Ezequiel’s testimony, Gabriel was beaten daily and was forced to eat cat feces and cat litter.
When paramedics were called to his home on May 22, 2013, he was found naked, with a cracked skull, several shattered ribs, severe burns and BB pellets around his body, according to the L.A. Times.
He was declared brain-dead and taken off life support two days later.
Gabriel’s death prompted criminal charges against some of the social workers who were involved in the boy’s care after they were allegedly negligent.
All of the accused social workers have reportedly pleaded not guilty.
A subsequent L.A. Times investigation found that, according to court documents, multiple L.A. sheriff’s deputies were also fined following Gabriel’s death. The paper reported earlier this year that “deputies visited Gabriel’s home multiple times … [but] found no signs of abuse and did not file paperwork that would have led specially trained detectives to do more investigating.”
Isauro Aguirre in court in 2013
Ezequiel told the jury this week that his brother suffered regular beatings, allegedly at the hands of Aguirre and his mother, and was gagged and bound without food or water for hours in a small, locked cabinet he called the “box.”
The couple would allegedly laugh during the beatings, he testified.
Ezequiel said that Aguirre would pick up his brother by the neck and drop him to the floor when he passed out, would pepper-spray him in the face, make him eat cat litter and feces, use a belt buckle with a metal hanger to beat his naked body and shoot him in the face, chest, legs and groin with a BB gun.
Ezequiel said that on one occasion, Aguirre hit Gabriel’s head so hard on a wall that it left a mark.
He also testified that Aguirre and his mother would allegedly force Gabriel to eat rotten food — and when he threw it up, they would force him to consume his own vomit.
“My mom and her boyfriend made Gabriel eat spoiled stuff or expired stuff,” he testified. “One thing I remember is expired spinach. He threw it up, and they made him eat it off the table.”
When asked if Aguirre made him eat his vomit, Ezequiel responded, “Yes.”
The teen, who was 12 years old when Gabriel died, said his mother and her boyfriend had allegedly threatened to beat him up if he alerted people to Gabriel’s abuse and told him to lie to social workers if they asked about how Gabriel received his injuries.
He told the jury that his mother and Aguirre allegedly focused their wrath on Gabriel and didn’t abuse him, his brother or sister.
Prosecutors said at the start of Aguirre’s trial that he was motivated, in part, by a belief that Gabriel was gay.
Gabriel Fernandez
“This wasn’t about drugs. This wasn’t about mental health issues,” L.A. County Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Hatami told the jury on Monday. Aguirre was abusive “because he didn’t like him … he believed Gabriel was gay, and to him that was a bad thing … he did it out of hatred of a little boy,” Hatami said.
Gabriel’s 14-year-old sister, Virginia, also testified this week at Aguirre’s trial, according to KABC.
She said she regularly witnessed the beatings and that her brother was forced to wear pink leggings and a pink shirt to school.
On the night of Gabriel’s death, she told the jury, Aguirre “knocked the air out of him and he fell over, and he didn’t get back up.”
“So they picked him up, they threw him in the shower and they kept yelling at him to wake up,” she testified. “And when he didn’t wake up, my mother decided to call the police. And she told me to grab a rag, and we cleaned most of the blood that was on the floor.”
According to CBS News, Aguirre’s trial is expected to last from six to eight weeks.
At least 86 children died during a 10-year period while in the custody of a giant for-profit foster care company…
NEWS: Senate Finds 86 Children Died In Care Of Giant For-Profit Foster Care Firm, Citing BuzzFeed News
At least 86 children died during a 10-year period while in the custody of a giant for-profit foster care company, according to an investigation by the US Senate Committee on Finance. In only 13 of those deaths did the company, The Mentor Network, conduct an internal investigation, the committee found.
The Senate committee said the company “falsely” claimed that its child death rate was in line with the fatality rates in the overall foster care system.
The Senate probe started in part because of a series by BuzzFeed News that profiled problems at the company, which was the largest for-profit foster care provider in the country. In one case a 2-year-old girl who was placed at a home run by Mentor was murdered by her own foster mother. In another case, a series of boys were sexually abused by a Mentor foster father, whom Mentor paid as a foster parent for years despite his history of red flags. He had requested that he be sent boys who were “male, white, any age.”
Milam County District Attorney
Two-year-old Alexandria Hill was murdered by a foster mother recruited and trained by the US’s largest for-profit foster care company, The Mentor Network.
Though Mentor denied the claim, employees told BuzzFeed News that the pursuit of profits sometimes took priority over child welfare. (The company is owned by Civitas Solutions, Inc., which recorded $1.4 billion in revenue last year and trades on the New York Stock Exchange.) As BuzzFeed News reported in 2015, profit margins in the business can be very high. For Mentor, BuzzFeed News reported, earnings before taxes and amortizations could be as high as 44%.
As a result of the committee’s investigation, the chairman, Orrin Hatch, and its ranking member, Ron Wyden, introduced legislation Monday to require states to disclose the contractors they use in privatized foster care, and to report to the federal government how those contractors perform.
In privatized foster care, states or local governments outsource child welfare duties to companies or nonprofit organizations. Those entities then hire the caseworkers, recruit, screen, and train foster parents, then place children with them.
The Senate, for its extensive probe, surveyed all 50 states, but the results, the report discloses, were too inconsistent to be useful in comparing foster care providers. Seventeen states didn’t even respond. “Some States collect information, perform reviews, and maintain data in paper files that are never entered into any electronic databases or that are never synthesized into a single report or review,” the committee noted.
The Senate committee saved some of its harshest language to condemn a report that Mentor submitted in which the company claimed its fatality rate was not high. Mentor said that its death rates “are comparable with national norms.’’
But the committee said that the conclusion was “false,” “inaccurate and misleading.” In fact, the committee said, “MENTOR’s death rate among foster children is 42% higher than the national average.”
The committee also criticized the company’s incident reports, which it said were “incomplete” and included “inaccurate information and diagnostically implausible conditions.”
Mentor reported a total of 86 deaths between the fiscal years 2005 and 2014. Of those deaths, 23 had been categorized as “expected” by the company, presumably meaning that the child was suffering from a grave illness, while 62 were “unexpected.” (In one case, the company didn’t provide that information.)
In an email to BuzzFeed News, Mentor said that it had just provided the Senate with updated figures indicating that 94 children died over a longer period, fiscal years 2005–2017. The company said that 56 “had medically complex conditions and/or a diagnosis (es) that would cause premature death.” The company said other deaths were out of its control.
Mentor also said that although the Senate reported that there were only 13 internal investigations of child deaths at the company, “This number does not represent the actual number of investigations.”