Father Gets 19 Years for Scalding Son

A 27-year-old Oxnard man was sentenced to 19 years in prison Friday for plunging his infant son into a bathtub of scalding water after the boy soiled himself.

Alfredo Esquivel pleaded guilty in February to corporal injury to a child and felony child abuse in the 2001 incident involving his son, Fabian.

In return for his guilty plea, a charge of torture was dismissed.

“Based on the law, it was the maximum sentence we could receive,” Deputy Dist. Atty. David Lehr said after Esquivel’s sentencing hearing in Ventura County Superior Court.

“I wish the law would have allowed for a more severe sentence.”

During the hearing, Esquivel, a former gas station attendant convicted in 1999 of hitting his 5-year-old daughter with an electrical cord, did not make a public statement but did submit a letter to the judge, Lehr said.

“The words ‘I’m sorry’ were there,” the prosecutor said. “But the emotion behind the words were, ‘I ... feel sorry for myself.’ ”

Esquivel’s son was three days shy of his third birthday at the time of the Dec. 21, 2001, incident.

The toddler suffered second- and third-degree burns on 20% of his body from the waist down and has had to undergo repeated surgeries.

Esquivel’s wife, Maria, pleaded guilty last year to child endangerment with great bodily injury and was sentenced in February to five years in prison.

In the hours after the incident, the couple initially tried to treat the boy with home remedies, then took him to Mexico.

There, the boy’s grandmother took him to a Tijuana hospital, which eventually transferred him to the UC San Diego Medical Center.

San Diego authorities then notified Oxnard police.