On the afternoon of June 11, 2008, paramedics responded to a 911 call at the Santa Maria apartment of Sylvia Dominguez, her boyfriend Gabriel Peralta, and the couple’s three children. Dominguez’s 3-year-old foster son Gilbert, her sister’s biological child, wasn’t breathing—the apparent victim of a drowning.
Gilbert Dominguez never regained consciousness.
Visible cuts and bruises on the young boy’s body drew the attention of police, and detectives launched an investigation. At first, Dominguez claimed Gilbert had choked on peanut butter while in the bath, but in follow-up interviews, her story changed, and prosecutors eventually charged the couple with first-degree murder.
Despite maintaining her innocence throughout preliminary hearings, Dominguez pled guilty to a lesser charge of second-degree murder on Dec. 22, admitting she purposely drowned Gilbert in the bathtub, upset the young boy had urinated on himself. Peralta, who prosecutors alleged allowed the abuse to occur, pled guilty to felony child abuse.
Dominguez was scheduled to return to court on Jan. 27, where she’ll receive 15 years to life for Gilbert’s murder. Peralta will likely get 12 years behind bars for his role.
Gilbert’s death prompted an investigation by the Santa Barbara County Civil Grand Jury in 2009. At the time of his murder, the boy was under the protection of the county’s Child Welfare Services (CWS) and a dependent of the Juvenile Court, which placed him in Dominguez’s care in March 2006. Gilbert’s mother, according to court testimony, abused methamphetamines, and Gilbert himself was born an addict. His biological mother’s custodial rights were eventually terminated in April 2008.
Because Gilbert had behavioral and speech problems, social workers from CWS and Sojourn, a Santa Maria-based child services center, paid in-home visits to Dominguez’s home on a regular basis. According to the Grand Jury’s report, CWS investigated complaints from neighbors about yelling and crying in the home, determining the allegations to be unfounded. A separate CWS unit investigated bruises on Gilbert’s body and scratches on his face, but determined them to have been inflicted by his younger cousin.
After the birth of Dominguez’s third child in 2007, social workers noted the family was under increased stress, according to the report. Gilbert was crying and screaming more, and regressed from his toilet training. In February 2008, one social worker offered to remove him from the foster home, and others expressed concerns of inadequate supervision.
“Retrospectively, the point could be raised that the cumulative impact of all these issues should have raised a red flag,” the Grand Jury concluded. “While CWS staff recognized the need for improved parenting skills and contracted for outside support to meet that need, in no interview was there any concern raised that the child might be a victim of abuse.”
Looking back on the case, Kathy Gallagher, director of Santa Barbara County’s Department of Social Services, said CWS did all they could do for Gilbert, given the situation.
“There wasn’t anything we could have done differently that would have prevented the child’s death,” Gallagher said. “With the information we had, the role the mother was playing, the role the aunt was playing, there was nothing we could have done within the law.
“You can’t be in somebody’s home 24 hours a day,” she added, “People just snap. … That’s what happened to little Gilbert.”
Though the Grand Jury concluded CWS workers followed established procedures and determined there was no overt indication Gilbert was being abused, they did find communication lacking among social workers from different divisions. The jury recommended regular reviews with all workers, periodic face-to-face discussions, and interviews with all people involved in a child’s care.
Gallagher said CWS has made several changes since the Grand Jury’s report, to the extent allowed within state regulations and confidentiality concerns.
“When we’re dealing with an open case, we don’t have the freedom to share information and talk about the case, even with other people in professional staff,” Gallagher said. “We can’t divulge information when we talk with neighbors and family members, so there are a lot of legal limitations.”
Besides working with advocates in Sacramento to gain more legal leeway, Gallagher said CWS has improved documentation, adding more follow-up interviews and making efforts to centralize information previously scattered among the agency’s different departments.
“Now, knowing what happened, were there any clues, was there anything we missed?” Gallagher said. “After the fact, now that we’re looking at those records, it sure would have been helpful to know some of that information.”
Child abuse on the rise?
Gilbert Dominguez’s death is just one of several recent high profile abuse cases to jar the Central Coast. On Aug. 11, 2010, Orcutt foster parent Bertha Mae Savoy and her nephew, Duane James, were arrested and charged with six counts of child abuse. The Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s office alleges Savoy and James, who lived next door to each other, beat nine foster children in their care, in some cases denying them food and shelter.
On Dec. 17, a Santa Maria jury found Lompoc resident James Lujan guilty of second-degree murder, two counts of torture, and assault on an infant in the beating death of 4-year-old Diego Callas, his girlfriend’s son, in June 2009. Lujan was also found guilty of abusing another child in 2006.
In Diego’s case, though the young boy’s family claims they reported prior abuse to CWS, Gallagher denies it, claiming Lujan was never investigated.
“That’s often the pattern after a child dies,” Gallagher said. “The family members will claim they made reports, but we had no reports.”
According to Ann McCarty, associate director of the North County Rape Crisis and Child Protection Center in Santa Maria, the incidents that make the news—like the Lujan and Dominguez cases—only mask the full scope of the problem.
“What everybody has to keep in mind is child abuse is happening,” McCarty said. “We’re busy every single day. Sometimes our child welfare advocates and individuals doing the front line work are just running from crisis to crisis. Being on top of it doesn’t necessarily happen anymore.”
Child deaths from abuse are thankfully a rare occurrence. Statewide, according to the California Department of Justice, 79 children died as a result of abuse in 2008. There were 76 fatalities in 2009, the last year the state has data.
In Santa Barbara County, the Department of Social Services reported one fatality in 2007, three in 2008, two in 2009, and none in 2010. All of the deaths occurred in North County.
Overall, about 70 percent of the county’s reports of child abuse come from the North County, records show. In 2010, CWS investigated 1,345 claims of child abuse/neglect in the Santa Maria area; of those, 214—or 16 percent—were substantiated. The agency investigated an additional 773 cases in Lompoc, substantiating 149 of them. Overall, substantiated reports in Santa Maria have declined steadily, from 419 cases in 2007 to 214 in 2010.
According to statistics from the city clerk’s office, Santa Maria police arrested 30 people for felony child endangerment in 2010, up from 28 the previous year, but down from the 34 arrests made in 2008. Misdemeanor endangerment arrests have risen steadily from 11 in 2007 to 22 in 2010. Felony child abuse arrests in the city jumped from 24 in 2008 to 46 in 2009. There were 33 people arrested for the charge in 2010.
“The reports we’re getting are increasing in severity,” Department of Social Services’ Gallagher said. “They’re coming later, after the abuse has occurred. People are waiting and then reporting. There’s been a slight increase in substantiated reports.”
The figures have led the county to focus child abuse prevention efforts on the North County, Gallagher said. After Sojourn folded, the county’s Alcohol, Drug, and Mental Health Services (ADMHS) approached Cecilia Rodriguez, executive director of Child Abuse Listening and Mediation (CALM) to ask them to expand to Santa Maria and Lompoc.
“The need as we’re finding in Santa Maria is huge,” Rodriguez said. “There are a lot of at-risk families.”
It takes a village
For 40 years in Santa Barbara, CALM has sought to prevent and treat child abuse through teaching parenting skills and providing support for foster children. With the largest unemployment rate in the county in Lompoc and highest rate of foreclosures in the county in Santa Maria, the area has become a top priority for CALM, which targets families experiencing
poverty, isolation, or a lack of education.
“What happens when parents are stressed is they sometimes tend to take it out on their children,” Rodriguez said. “Or they could be so preoccupied with the stressors in their lives, they tend to not pay attention to the lives of their children.”
Through CALM’s “Great Beginnings” program, at-risk parents are identified before their children are born, taking into account factors such as age, mental illness, depression, and drug use. To prevent another child’s death, Rodriguez said, families need early support.
“A parent who is really attached and bonded with their child is less likely to abuse that child,” Rodriguez said. “There’s just so much to be done really early. It’s all about prevention.”
Early prevention is the main goal of the Santa Barbara County Child Abuse Prevention Council, a coalition of 21 members and agencies who coordinate child abuse responses and raise awareness of the issue countywide. The council currently has sights on partnering with teachers of young children, educating them to look for early signs of abuse.
“Once kids are in the system, we’re playing a different game,” council chair Barb Finch said. “It’s preventable, but it has to happen early on, and everybody has to be invested in it in our community.”
With more families considered at-risk in the North County, according to Katharina Zulliger, coordinator of the Santa Barbara County KIDS Network, intervention must happen much earlier to be effective.
“Child abuse and neglect is preventable,” Zulliger said. “There’s an actual role that we all can play in it. It’s such a challenge to have that perception in the public eye changed.”
Zulliger said more education is needed for childcare providers on how and when to report abuse. Even if the report doesn’t lead to an investigation, she said, the suspicion aroused could still be an important step in getting help for a family.
According to a study by the University of California Berkeley, which analyzed data for the Santa Barbara region from 2009 to 2010, only 3 percent of child abuse reports came from neighbors, family, or friends of the abused child. About 90 percent of allegations in Santa Barbara County came from mandated reporters: teachers and health professionals required to report any suspicion of abuse.
Early detection in schools is also at the forefront of efforts by the North County Rape Crisis and Child Protection Center, which puts on puppet shows in classrooms to teach children about improper physical contact. Also, through the group’s ChildSAFE program, therapists teach North County schoolchildren to “Say no, get away, tell someone,” a program encouraging children to speak out about abuse.
According to McCarty, the organization’s associate director, many cases are disclosed through the program, and many more will come to light as her organization and others continue to educate the community about what to look for.
“It’s amazing the number of children who are being victimized that are told at a very young age, ‘Don’t tell anyone, this is our secret,’” she said.
Handing over the reins
The ability of social workers to maintain services amid funding shortages is a major concern of many county organizations going into 2011. So far, Child Welfare Services has remained relatively immune from the budget cuts that have gutted other government agencies. In 2010, the county’s Board of Supervisors elected to backfill a $1 million cut from the state, enabling services to continue unimpeded.
Only 5 percent of CWS’s budget comes from the county, with the remaining 95 percent from state and federal coffers.
That relationship, however, appears to be changing.
As part of his proposed state budget and “historic realignment” of state government, Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing putting primary control of CWS completely in the hands of individual county governments.
Details of the realignment are still being hammered out, and a look at the proposed budget provides few clues about what it could mean to county service levels. Santa Barbara County CEO Chandra Waller is currently analyzing the budget for local impacts, and Department of Social Services’ director Gallagher said it’s too early to tell what to expect.
However, Gallagher is worried the agency will have to eliminate the Family Preservation Program, an abuse prevention effort serving about 150 families each year. The program is intended to keep children at home with their families and out of foster care, a more expensive and less desirable option for the agency.
The potential shakeup in CWS has others worried about the effects on the nonprofit organizations with which the county contracts.
“If [Gov. Brown] says this is the county’s problem and there’s not the resources to make it work, then it’s not a good suggestion,” the Child Abuse Prevention Council’s Finch said. “Whether CWS is given to the counties or kept by the state, there really needs to be a broader coalition happening to make sure families are getting the help they need.”
Even if CWS survives the next round of cuts unscathed, Finch is concerned funding reductions to other social services will impact reports of child abuse.
“Families who are already under stress are going to be under even more stress when resources are pulled out from under them,” she said. “That could be a very dangerous situation as far as the safety of kids.”
The North County Rape Crisis and Child Protection Center has so far been shielded from budget problems, but McCarty sees changes ahead in 2011.
“[This year] is looking the bleakest for us,” she said. “We know there are some funding streams that are completely going to dry up.”
McCarty said her organization would likely be forced to look for money from private foundations to maintain its current level of services. In the long term, however, the onus to prevent child abuse is on teachers, neighbors, family members, and the rest of the community-at-large.
“People need to take the blinders off,” she said. “It’s easier to turn away and say, ‘Someone else is going to deal with it,’ but then what happens is we have a Gilbert, we have a Diego.
“There is no reason in this world why children should die,” she added. “It’s unacceptable.”
Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas can be contacted at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 27 – Feb 3, 2011.