COVID disrupted the usual systems to protect children from abuse. What can be done?

Roberta Lilla sat in the living room of her rural Turlock home surrounded by photos of her grandson, David Turner, his ashes encased in a pendant around her neck.

“He was always wanting to be cuddled, loved … he was such a good baby, such a good kid,” she said through tears. “He was like my son.”

Lilla helped her daughter, Jovonna Lee Cruz, raise David for the first 6 1/2 years of his life.

But in November 2019, Cruz moved to an apartment in Modesto with her boyfriend, Eyvar Rivera, their almost 1-year-old daughter and David.

Less than a year later, David was dead, his mother charged with causing his death and both she and Rivera charged with abusing him in the months leading up to it.

Lying in an intensive care bed on life support at Valley Children’s Hospital, bruises covering his body, David died on Sept. 17, becoming one of the five children who die each day of child abuse in the United States.

Lack of education and support for overwhelmed parents, witnesses hesitant to call the authorities when their family member is the abuser and oversights or errors in an investigation can all lead to child deaths.

The coronavirus pandemic made the safety of vulnerable children even more precarious because children were secluded at home and no longer seeing the mandated reporters like teachers, school counselors, medical professionals and faith leaders who often report suspected abuse.

Supporting that fact, Stanislaus County Child Protective Services saw calls to its hotline drop by more than a third in 2020.

Child death review

In the past five years in Stanislaus County, two to four children have died from abuse every year; more children lost than should ever occur, said Chelsey Donohoo, epidemiologist with county public health who is responsible for monitoring causes of death among county residents.

“Every child death is something we should take seriously, as with unintentional and preventable (deaths), even one is worth public health intervention,” said Donohoo.

She said tracking preventable causes of death is important to see if there are resources that public health can provide or populations that need additional resources and to ask, “Is there something we can do as a community to prevent future deaths?”

In addition to Donohoo’s review, public health also convenes a child death review team.

The team includes multiple organizations and county agencies, law enforcement and social service nonprofits that are vested in the well-being of children. It reviews selected child deaths with the goal of understanding the cause and circumstances of a fatality, including looking for possible systems failures.

But the review team has not been meeting during the pandemic. David’s death, including a documented safety check by law enforcement, is an example of a case that would be reviewed.

Lilla said her daughter and the children moved out in November 2019, because she had told Rivera he wasn’t welcome in her home.

“I didn’t like the way he was punishing my grandson so I told him ... don’t come back,” Lilla said. When they left, Rivera said Lilla wasn’t welcome in their new home and her daughter cut off contact.

Lilla said Rivera would tell Cruz she needed to spank David more, make him stand in the corner for hours as punishment, and say that the 6-year-old boy needed to learn how to “be a man.”

Rivera’s attorney, Jeffrey Tenenbaum, declined to comment on the specifics of the case but said, “Mr. Rivera feels terrible about what happened. He maintains his innocence and he is looking forward to his day in court.”

Public Defender Laura Arnold, whose office represents Cruz, did not respond to a request for comment.

Lilla admitted she was aware of the spankings, saying her daughter had “broke some blood vessels” in her hand spanking David and on one occasion used a belt. But Lilla said she never witnessed what she considered to be abuse or called police about the spankings.

The first call to police about David came in March 2020, when Lilla said her younger daughter called the police for a security check on David because no one from the family had seen them in several months.

Modesto Police spokeswoman Sharon Bear said officers had gone to the family’s apartment on Oakdale Road in March to investigate a report of child abuse but found no physical injuries on David. He also denied any maltreatment.

Bear said after police went to the home, the case was forwarded to Child Protective Services but Lilla said they never followed through.

Christine Huber said CPS cannot comment on open cases. She is the assistant director of adult, child and family services, including CPS, of Stanislaus County Community Services Agency.

Whether CPS followed through or not, David remained in the home until the incident on Sept. 13, that led to his death.

Lilla believes David’s seclusion at home during the lockdown in the early stages of the pandemic, and being cut off from family, teachers and others who might have helped him, all contributed to his death.

Who’s looking out for the kids?

Just a month before schools closed, a parent volunteer in David’s first grade class became concerned about his well-being. She wrote about what she observed in a message on a Go Fund Me page for David after his death. Lilla shared the message with The Bee.

She wrote that on Feb. 18, 2020, “David asked me for help by telling me how his parents were treating him, by telling me they treat him like trash on the weekends and sometimes like candy ... I couldn’t see any visible signs of abuse, but I knew that he was not joking.”

The Bee tried to contact the parent volunteer but was not successful.

She wrote in the posts to David’s family that she told David’s teacher about an emotional breakdown he had in the classroom and the things that he told her. The Bee could not confirm the teacher was notified or if the teacher ever reported it to CPS.

She wrote about seeing David walk home with his mom in the months leading up to the lockdown.

“I would look her in the eye and want to ask her what was going on with David,” the parent volunteer wrote. “But my courage failed me, she had a certain aloof look in her eyes and I was afraid to say anything to her ... I should have confronted her anyway ... I’m sorry I wasn’t nosier.”

David had confided in that parent and it’s likely he would have confided more had she continued to see him at school.

The data suggests the abuse of even more children went unreported as a result of the lockdown in 2020. There was a 37 percent decrease in calls to the CPS hotline – from 9,425 reports in 2019 to 5,904 in 2020, according to Huber.

In 2019, 19% of the reports came from teachers compared to just 9% in 2020.

The three prosecutors in the District Attorney’s Office Special Victims Unit said teachers are the biggest reporters of suspected abuse.

Many times people are hesitant to report their own family to the police or CPS for fear of getting them in trouble or may even rely on them for financial stability.

“I had several cases like that where clearly the family knew what was happening and didn’t do anything and I think the guilt they feel afterward is immeasurable,” said Deputy District Attorney Erin Schwartz.

Her supervisor, Chief Deputy District Attorney Marlisa Ferreira added, “But by then it’s too late, the child is damaged or gone.”

Prosecuting those responsible can be difficult, too, with usually no witnesses other than the child, defendant or a hesitant family member.

“You have to remember that no matter how much children are abused or treated badly by a parent, they always love their parents,” Ferreira said.

Some kids, whether out of love or fear, won’t admit to the abuse in the first place. Others will when the bruises are fresh but change their minds when it comes time to testify.

To help alleviate children’s fears, prosecutors take them to the courtroom to get them oriented prior to a hearing. They show them the witness stand and where everyone will be sitting. The DA’s office also has a therapy dog, a golden lab named Honor, that can sit with the children while they testify.

Even after all that, Ferreira said, when some children get on the stand and have to face their parents, they lose their resolve. And when the child abuse results in death, there are often no witnesses except for the defendant.

That was the case in the death of 23-month-old Koltyn Sparks-Blackwood, of Waterford.

The child’s mother had left him with her boyfriend, 26-year-old Joseph Luke Maloney, in Sonora, while she worked a shift at the Chicken Ranch Casino in Jamestown in 2019.

While in Maloney’s care, Koltyn suffered a brain injury and a lacerated liver. He was transferred from Adventist Health in Sonora to UC Davis, where he died from his injuries on Jan. 15, 2019.

Koltyn’s paternal grandmother, Tracy Gulcynski, said she rushed to the Sacramento hospital.

“The second I laid my eyes on him; I knew that someone had hurt him,” she said.

Gulcynski believes there were many missteps that led to a two-year delay in charges being brought against Maloney.

Sonora Police were not notified of Koltyn’s injuries until about 26 hours after he was first brought to the hospital, Gulcynski said. Hospital staff in Sonora did not notify law enforcement. Staff at UC Davis Medical Center first contacted Stanislaus County law enforcement because he was from this county.

“In the meantime they missed out on … the (the suspect’s) state of mind … if there were drugs and alcohol involved with the suspect; they missed out on going to the crime scene and questioning the suspect,” Gulcynski said. “By the time everything rolled around and came together, he’d lawyered up and has never made a statement the whole two years.”

The family is now pushing for legislation they’ve dubbed Koltyn’s Law, which would require medical facilities to immediately notify law enforcement when they are treating a child with life-threatening injuries.

Maloney was charged with second-degree murder and child abuse earlier this year. The Tuolumne County prosecutor assigned to this case did not respond to a request by The Bee for comment.

Some suspects never talk, others give their own version of events

Investigators and prosecutors must establish a timeline of when injuries occur and who was with the child.

“So often we see TV shows where they are so specific on the time of injury,” Schwartz said. “It is much more vague than what we would like it to be and most certainly what I think jurors expect it to be because of what they see on TV.”

And while a jury is unlikely to have any sympathy for a parent with a documented history of child abuse, that is not always the case when the death appears to be an isolated incident.

“It’s so easy from the outside looking in to say, ‘I would never let anyone abuse a child,’ ” Schwartz said. “But when you have an actual person there and they are saying … ‘The baby wouldn’t stop crying, I was so frustrated,’ they have to listen to that person and I think (the defendant) can garner empathy in those situations.”

When does the DA file charges?

When filing charges, the prosecutors must first make sure the case meets all elements of the crime under California law.

One element required in both the charges of child abuse likely to produce great bodily injury and child abuse causing death, is that when the defendant acted, he or she was not “reasonably disciplining a child.”

Some jurors might empathize with losing patience with a child, others find corporal discipline acceptable.

“That’s what makes it hard when filing cases; I think all of us have different views as to what is appropriate discipline,” Schwartz said. “I wasn’t raised getting spanked but I know other people who were and they are completely fine with it. Unless it is really egregious, they are really hard to get guilty verdicts (on).”

Ferreira said they do keep trying, however, with the goal of preventing further incidents or at the very least having a record of it should the abusive parent end up back in the court.

“People have a really hard time wanting to believe that anyone would hurt a child,” said Dr. Kelly Callahan, child abuse pediatrician and director of the KIDS Hub Clinic for abused and foster children in Los Angeles.

She said another problem is jurors don’t always understand the complexities of the medical information about the injuries that led to a child’s death.

Callahan said that having district attorneys who are dedicated to prosecuting abuse cases has increased success in prosecutions, but DAs often don’t pursue cases that they are likely to lose. For example, if there is more than one perpetrator, it’s difficult to overcome the measure of “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“There’s nothing worse than a child’s death; obviously we all feel that,” Ferraira said. “We will definitely run it down as far and long as we can until we are sure there’s nothing else we can do to change the situation. It’s unfortunate, but there are cases you have to reject.”

Proposed legislation

Gabriel Fernandez, an 8-year-old boy in LA County, succumbed to his injuries in May 2013, after eight months of torture and abuse and at least 50 failed calls to CPS, in one of the worst cases of child abuse in recent memory.

With the heinous nature of the abuse and the glaring failures of CPS, advocates have called for new legislation, called Gabriel’s Law, to help prevent vulnerable children from slipping through the cracks.

The law includes implementing a shared database, the Child Abuse Central Index, which would be accessible by agencies involved with children. Other elements of the bill include reforms of CPS, incorporating a child abuse seminar across the educational curriculum through high school and permitting more sharing, without redaction, of records of deceased children involved in the system.

The proposed law has gone before the California legislature twice and failed both times, most recently in 2019. Those in opposition, including the American Civil Liberties Union of California, cited security risks of shared government databases with sensitive, personal information.

Defendants in court

The cases against David’s mother and her boyfriend, as well as the case against Koltyn’s mother’s former boyfriend are ongoing.

In March, a judge in Tuolumne County Superior Court found there was enough evidence for Maloney to go before a jury on charges of second-degree murder and child abuse. He returns to court in June for a hearing to set a date for the trial.

A pretrial hearing for David’s mother, Jovonna Lee Cruz, and her boyfriend, Eyvar Omar Rivera, is scheduled for May 4.

Lilla said she loves her daughter, but if the evidence shows she killed David, “Well, then, let justice be served.”

This story was produced with financial support from The Stanislaus County Office of Education and the Stanislaus Community Foundation, along with the GroundTruth Project’s Report for America initiative. The Modesto Bee maintains full editorial control of this work. To help fund The Bee’s children’s health and economic development reporters with Report for America, go to bitly.com/ModbeeRFA.

This story was originally published April 29, 2021 at 8:20 AM.

Erin Tracy

The Modesto Bee

209-578-2366

Erin Tracy covers criminal justice and breaking news. She began working at the Modesto Bee in 2010 and previously worked at papers in Woodland and Eureka. She is a graduate of Humboldt State University.