The dad and mom of a 4-year-old Palmdale boy pleaded no contest Friday to murdering and torturing their son, in a case that introduced renewed scrutiny on Los Angeles County’s youngster welfare system.
Ursula Juarez, 30, and Jose Cuatro, 32, have been accused of killing their son, Noah, in July 2019, only a month shy of the boy’s fifth birthday.
In an Antelope Valley courtroom, each sat masked and in orange jumpsuits subsequent to their attorneys. Noah’s great-grandmother sat close by, often crying and surrounded by her household and relations of different murdered youngsters.
Cuatro pleaded no contest to first-degree homicide and torture and faces 32 years to life in jail. Juarez pleaded no context to second-degree homicide and torture and faces 22 years to life in jail.
Their sentencing is scheduled for April 30. They each waived their proper to attraction.
After 6 p.m. on July 5, 2019, Cuatro and Juarez summoned authorities to their Palmdale residence complicated. “Assist, please, anyone,” Cuatro informed a dispatcher in a panicked 911 name. The dad and mom claimed that Noah had been swimming within the complicated’s pool and stopped respiration.
Noah Cuatro in undated picture. Noah died July 6, 2019.
(Handout)
However when paramedics arrived, they discovered the boy unconscious in his household’s residence and have become suspicious.
“Issues have been simply not including as much as what the daddy had already informed us — that this youngster is down in a pool for over half-hour, and abruptly now he’s dry with a pair of tan shorts that weren’t moist,” firefighter paramedic Chad Sullivan testified.
On the scene, Noah’s physique confirmed “mottling” round his neck — an indication of strangulation, in response to case information.
Within the emergency room, the boy had bruises throughout his chest, legs and arms, with a big mark on his brow, Det. Susan Velazquez testified.
“You knew in your coronary heart that there was one thing extra that he couldn’t inform us, that his physique was telling us a narrative, and we wanted to determine what was occurring,” Velazquez mentioned.
Noah died the next day, July 6, at Youngsters’s Hospital Los Angeles. A bunch of docs and nurses gathered spherical his physique, holding his arms as he took his final breath.
Dr. Carol Berkowitz, a UCLA pediatrician, examined the physique and concluded that though Noah had “so many accidents,” together with rib fractures that have been at the least two weeks outdated, he died from suffocation.
Consultants additionally discovered trauma on the boy’s rectum however couldn’t decide what had penetrated him to trigger the accidents.
Jose Cuatro pleaded no contest in reference to the killing of this son, Noah Cuatro, and faces 32 years to life in jail.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
A grand jury indicted Cuatro and Juarez in 2020, charging every with one rely of homicide and one rely of torture.
Juarez was additionally charged with youngster abuse that’s more likely to trigger loss of life, and Cuatro was charged with assaulting and sexually penetrating a toddler beneath 10. The kid abuse, assault and sexual assault fees have been all dismissed as a part of the plea deal.
Cuatro’s case — one in a string of high-profile deaths of youngsters within the Antelope Valley, together with Gabriel Fernandez — prompted renewed scrutiny of L.A. County’s Division of Youngsters and Household Providers.
Ursula Juarez sheds a tear throughout a listening to, the place pleaded no contest in reference to the killing of her son, Noah Cuatro.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
Noah’s great-grandmother, Eva Hernandez, filed a lawsuit in opposition to L.A. County in 2020, accusing DCFS of failing to forestall Noah’s loss of life and neglecting to totally examine and cease abuse by his dad and mom. Attorneys for Hernandez not too long ago requested a decide to compel former DCFS Director Bobby Cagle to reply questions beneath oath about Noah’s case.
The lawsuit facilities on a singular a part of Noah’s case: From delivery, the boy was beneath the company’s watch.
As a new child on the hospital, DCFS whisked him away from his dad and mom as a result of the company accused Juarez, his mom, of abusing an toddler half-sister and inflicting cranium fractures. Noah’s first weeks of life have been spent biking via foster houses till he ultimately reached Hernandez’s house.
With Hernandez, Noah fashioned arguably essentially the most consequential and loving bond of his transient life, generally addressing his great-grandmother as “mommy,” in response to his youngster welfare information obtained by The Occasions.
And through his time away, Noah’s dad and mom developed a grudge in opposition to DCFS, feeling that the company had robbed them of the primary months of caring for his or her son.
Shortly earlier than he turned 1, Noah returned to reside along with his dad and mom after DCFS couldn’t show the allegation of abuse in opposition to Juarez. As soon as beneath their care, his well being took a tailspin. His dad and mom missed a number of medical appointments, prompting Kaiser Permanente to alert L.A. County’s youngster abuse hotline of potential neglect.
Investigating additional, social staff realized that Noah had gained just a few ounces from February 2015 to October 2016 and remained at round 17 kilos, a dramatic halt to his development.
“He appeared very skinny. His eyes have been hole,” mentioned Jennifer Montano, who labored on Noah’s case on the time. Juarez claimed Noah ate an excessive amount of, which made him vomit and thus not acquire weight.
For the second time, case staff eliminated him from his dad and mom, citing their neglect and his dire well being. For a time, he lived at a house within the San Gabriel Valley for medically fragile youngsters, the place he gained a number of kilos and his growth accelerated.
Jose Cuatro, proper, and Ursula Juarez, second from left, pleaded no contest in reference to the killing of their youngster, Noah Cuatro. Additionally they waived their rights to attraction.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Occasions)
Noah returned to reside along with his great-grandmother, who recalled him as “a vivid little boy.”
“On daily basis, he’d inform me, ‘Grandma, you recognize what time it’s? It’s time so that you can maintain me and inform me you’re keen on me,’” Hernandez mentioned in an interview.
After almost two years of residing aside, Noah’s dad and mom needed him again once more. His great-grandmother pleaded that Noah keep along with her. “They by no means bonded with Noah,” Hernandez remarked to a caseworker, “and I believe that’s why they deal with him the best way they do.”
Regardless of DCFS opposition, a decide dominated that Cuatro should return to his dad and mom.
Throughout his final yr alive, DCFS grew more and more alarmed by the boy’s state of affairs, along with his lead case employee telling a juvenile courtroom decide that his dad and mom have been isolating him and that it was “almost not possible” to evaluate his well-being.
An aunt, Maggie Hernandez, made an nameless name to the kid abuse hotline, one among a number of allegations of mistreatment the company acquired concerning the boy. His aunt reported that Noah would say his “butt hurts” and that his mom “wasn’t feeding him.”
“If he’s vocalizing one thing’s fallacious and he’s having night time terrors,” his aunt mentioned, “I really feel like one thing’s occurring.”
Noah’s social employee, Susan Johnson, documented marks on his proper arm and neck together with a “massive bruise” on his left arm. When requested what occurred when he did one thing fallacious, Noah informed Johnson, “I get hit.” When the case employee pressed for particulars, he’d backtrack, saying, “I don’t get hit.”
Johnson secured an order to take away Noah from his dad and mom and have him bear a medical or sexual abuse examination.
Had the social employee carried out the removing, Noah would probably be alive.
However Johnson was finally blocked from separating Noah from his dad and mom and even confronted accusations that she was biased and had an “agenda,” a Occasions investigation in 2021 discovered.
Johnson vented in an e-mail to her fast supervisor, “They appear to not imagine that my considerations are legitimate.” She protested to a senior DCFS administrator and later testified she was “upset” by her removing from Noah’s case.
“I couldn’t imagine that they did that,” Johnson testified. “No person had ever taken me off a case like that.”
In Johnson’s place, DCFS assigned a staffer who appeared sympathetic to Noah’s dad and mom and, in an e-mail, faulted the boy’s great-grandmother, Hernandez, for inflicting Johnson “to have doubt with the household.”
“I really feel like as a Division we now have been choosing on this household,” the DCFS staffer, Maggie Vasquez-Ducos, wrote about Juarez and Cuatro in a July 3 e-mail, three days earlier than Noah was killed.
Cagle, then the director of DCFS, stood by his workers’s dealing with of the case in a 2021 interview with The Occasions.
“It’s very tough for, I believe, the general public particularly to grasp why these choices have been made, however I’m assured that the choices that have been made have been the correct ones,” Cagle mentioned then.
After Noah’s loss of life, Eva Hernandez was given custody of Noah’s three surviving siblings. She is within the means of legally adopting them, in response to information filed earlier this month in her lawsuit.
