Warning signs are missed by social workers, and two children die at home

About one in 10 efforts to reunify troubled families ends in failure within one year and, in extreme instances, in the deaths of children. Sometimes, as in the case of Isabel Garcia, child welfare workers fail to detect warning signs. Other times, as in Angel Montiel’s case, they faithfully document injuries and other concerns but fail to interpret them correctly and are not obliged to investigate further. Here are their stories:

Isabel Garcia

Summoned to a crowded apartment in Pomona, paramedics found 2-year-old Isabel Garcia on her back on the bedroom floor, her eyes rolled up toward the top of her head. Her lips were blue.

The toddler had bruises on her legs, scabs on her toes and swelling to her face, police said.

But none of those injuries killed her that night in May 2008.

Isabel, an autopsy found, had starved to death -- at home, two months after child welfare officials deemed that she, her five siblings and their parents, Gabriel Garcia and Lupe Lopez, were all doing well.

For two years, the family had been supervised by social workers, who investigated at least 12 allegations of abuse and neglect from 2004 to March 2008, according to files obtained by The Times through public records requests and a court order. Only one allegation was substantiated.

In March 2006, the month Isabel was born, she and her siblings had been put in foster care because of their father’s drug abuse and their mother’s inability to protect them, records show. A judge ordered the parents onto a “family maintenance plan” that included drug testing and counseling.

Fifteen months later, parents and children reunited.

“In the beginning, Isabel had a very difficult time adjusting, since she had been in foster care since she was a couple of months old,” a social worker reported in February 2008. “Isabel is now relating well with her parents as they all continue in their adjustment phase.”

The next month, social workers examined new allegations of abuse and neglect. They deemed them unfounded, said the family no longer needed supervision and closed the case.

Two months later, Isabel was dead. She weighed 18 pounds, 7 ounces, records show -- about 5 ounces less than she did 13 months earlier, while still in foster care.

Lopez, 28, told detectives that Isabel was “always sad” but insisted she was healthy and well fed, her injuries the result of accidental falls and scrapes with a sibling.

“I didn’t kill any of my children,” she said. “You guys think of me as a bad person. I’m not.”

Gabriel Garcia, 27, had moved out earlier and blamed his wife for their daughter’s death. On the night she died, he was jailed on a drug charge.

Both parents were charged with murder after an autopsy. They have pleaded not guilty.

Trish Ploehn, Los Angeles County’s child welfare director, said her agency is using Isabel’s case to better train social workers, many of whom are young and lack the experience to recognize when a child is underweight. Ploehn also hopes to add nurses to family visits.

Two social workers were fired and four others suspended for their handling of the case, Ploehn said.

“There was lots of attention to this family, lots of visitation to this family, but I believe that the observation of this child that she appeared to be OK was something we missed,” she said. “She obviously wasn’t OK.”

Angel Montiel

Angel Montiel was born with his mother’s meth in his bloodstream, and he and three siblings spent the next year in foster care because of it.

But instead of blaming herself for the temporary removal of her children, their father says, Andrea Montiel blamed Angel -- right up until she killed him.

“I think she just snapped and whatever was going on in her life, she took it out on Angel,” Giovanni Garcia said in June, a month before Montiel pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter and child abuse charges in the April 2007 death of their son.

The killing of 2-year-old Angel -- whose battered body revealed a history of abuse including a broken leg that was never set -- put asunder once and for all a San Pedro family that Los Angeles County child welfare officials had worked hard to keep together.

After testing positive for methamphetamine at birth, Angel was placed with a foster mother, Debra Pruitt, who also took in one of his siblings.

“Everybody called him lover, because he was a lover,” she recalled. “He made you like babies.”

As time went on, Pruitt said in an interview and in county documents obtained by The Times, she warned social workers that Angel’s parents mistreated him during visits.

After one overnight stay in July 2005, Pruitt reported bruises on his forehead and said he’d been “beat up.” A social worker concluded that the marks were not from abuse and that Pruitt might be exaggerating because she was “very attached to the children and is interested in adopting them.”

All four children were reunited with Montiel and Garcia after the couple completed months of parenting classes, drug testing and other “family preservation” requirements.

Angel was “a loner” who never fit in, Garcia said, and neither he nor Montiel warmed up to him. It didn’t help, he said, that the boy was close to Pruitt.

“He looked at us like, ‘Who the hell are you guys?’ ” he said.

Whenever Angel got hurt while alone with Montiel, Garcia said, she always had an explanation: He’d fallen, or hit his head on a crib, or lost his teeth to a rocking horse.

It wasn’t that social workers missed the injuries, said a child welfare expert who reviewed the file at The Times’ request. But they might have interpreted them differently had they been better trained, and department policy did not require them to probe further.

“When we teach risk assessment, these are exactly the kind of phrases we look for,” said Jorja Leap, an adjunct professor of social welfare at UCLA. “Children do not fall this way, children do not lose teeth this way.”

Garcia kept his suspicions to himself, he said, because he feared the county would again take his other children.

Then one night in April 2007, Montiel called him at work and said Angel wasn’t breathing.

She and her father took him to a nearby hospital, where doctors determined he’d been dead for hours, records show. An autopsy found dozens of injuries, some fresh and some healed, including broken bones and burns.

Originally charged with murder, Montiel pleaded no contest to manslaughter and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Garcia said he is estranged from her and hopes to get their other children back. But he said county officials have given him little hope, noting his failure to protect Angel -- a point he didn’t argue.

“Like I said, if I would have done something about it, maybe my son would still be alive.”

kim.christensen@latimes.com

garrett.therolf@latimes.com