Bfore 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez was allegedly beaten to death by his mother and her boyfriend, they doused him with pepper spray, forced him to eat his own vomit and locked him in a cabinet with a sock stuffed in his mouth to muffle his screams
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Gabriel's mother, Pearl Fernandez, called 911 on May 22, 2013, to report that her son was not breathing. She told sheriff's deputies who arrived at the apartment that Gabriel had fallen and hit his head on a dresser, according to testimony. When paramedics arrived, they found Gabriel naked in a bedroom, not breathing, with a cracked skull, three broken ribs and BB pellets embedded in his lung and groin. He died two days later.
"It was just like every inch of this child had been abused," testified James Cermak, a Los Angeles County Fire Department paramedic.
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Fernandez and Aguirre deliberately tortured the boy to death, hiding their tracks with forged doctor's notes and lies to authorities, Deputy Dist. Atty. Jonathan Hatami told the grand jury. "For eight straight months, he was abused, beaten and tortured more severely than many prisoners of war," Hatami said.
The abuse worsened in the months leading up to Gabriel's death, according to testimony from two of his siblings, both of whom are minors.
They said Gabriel was forced to eat cat feces, rotten spinach and his own vomit. He slept in a locked cabinet and wasn't let out to go to the bathroom. Fernandez and Aguirre called Gabriel gay, punished him when he played with dolls and forced him to wear girls' clothes to school, the siblings said.
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On the day of the fatal beating, Fernandez began hitting Gabriel because he didn't want to pick up his toys, his older brother testified. She dragged him into a bedroom, where Aguirre joined her, and the siblings heard screaming and banging, he said. "And that's when it all stopped," said the brother, 13. "It just went quiet."
Gabriel died as a result of blunt-force trauma and child neglect, James Kemp Ribe of the L.A. County coroner's office told the grand jury. "
I have never seen this many skin injuries on one child," he said.
Soon after his birth in 2005, Gabriel was sent to live with relatives. In October 2012, Fernandez reclaimed Gabriel and two of his older siblings from her parents.
Two weeks after Gabriel moved in with Fernandez, his first-grade teacher at Summerwind Elementary School called social workers to say that Gabriel's mother had hit him with a belt buckle and made him bleed. Gabriel had demonstrated that he knew how to snort cocaine, she testified.
The teacher, Jennifer Garcia, said she called the county several more times after the child came to school with a bloody lip, black eyes and bruises on his face. A social worker who followed up on the complaint about his injured lip said it was a blister, according to testimony.
In the spring, a
counselor at a children's center called 911 after discovering a suicide note Gabriel had written,
according to testimony. Authorities dismissed the complaint because he had no specific plan to carry out a suicide, records show.
Gabriel's siblings said their mother had told them to lie to social workers who came to check on them. His brother said he did it "because I thought she was going to do the same things to me."
A week before Gabriel's death, school officials asked a deputy to investigate his many absences and what they suspected was child abuse. The deputy said he was given the wrong address and that when he eventually reached Gabriel's mother by phone, she told him her son had moved to Texas with his grandmother.
...and i cant access her fb, it just goes to my timeline so pooh on that
