Grandmother’s Warning About Abuse Fails to Save 2-Year-Old

In the days before her grandson’s death, Magdalena Lupercio had begun the process of trying to win custody of the 2-year-old child.

The boy had been living with Lupercio and her daughter, 20-year-old Ruth Lupercio, when Ruth decided to move out and demanded that her son Isaac go with her. Family members said Ruth Lupercio told them that she needed the child to qualify for welfare.

Pasadena Superior Court records show that, even though the county Department of Children’s Services had evidence suggesting that Ruth Lupercio was a heroin addict who had beaten Isaac, an agency social worker told Magdalena Lupercio that she was powerless to keep the child while authorities investigated the allegations.

Found Beaten to Death

On July 4, 1984, eight days after his mother had moved out with him, Isaac was found fatally beaten in a cheap motel in Burbank where his mother and her boyfriend had been staying. The child died of massive bleeding caused by blunt-force trauma, in a makeshift bed in a room littered with fast-food wrappers and hypodermic needles. An autopsy report revealed that the child suffered more than a dozen blows to the head and may have been sodomized before he stopped breathing that morning and his mother called police.

Last week, Pasadena Superior Court Judge Coleman A. Swart sentenced Ruth Lupercio to six years in state prison after she pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter in her child’s death. Swart rejected a state Department of Corrections recommendation stating that Lupercio had spent more than a year in jail while awaiting trial and that nothing would be gained by additional imprisonment.

Burbank police are still seeking Lupercio’s former boyfriend, Eric Retana, who they say has fled to Costa Rica and is believed to be involved in the killing. A warrant has been issued for his arrest on charges of violating parole in a burglary conviction, police said.

Unanswered Questions

For Magdalena Lupercio, who still sobs uncontrollably at the mention of her grandson’s name, the disposition of Ruth’s case has left many unanswered questions.

For 15 months, she has searched without avail for official explanations of why the county trusted her grandson’s care to a mother who, according to court records, had admitted her heroin addiction and who was suspected of abusing her child. The grandmother had already won legal custody of Ruth’s first child, a 4-year-old boy. The fathers of both boys are unknown to family members, they said.

“I’ve asked the county to give us copies of their records but they refused,” Magdalena Lupercio, 52, said in an interview after her daughter’s sentencing. “We’ve called and left messages, but no one ever returned our calls. Then they told us that Isaac’s records are private and we can’t see them.”

Court documents show that Ruth Lupercio was under investigation for three incidents of child abuse when social worker Jackie Waltman--over the strenuous objections of Magdalena Lupercio--informed Ruth on June 25, 1984, that the county could not prevent her from taking her son with her. A month earlier, the grandmother had twice taken Isaac to the hospital after he returned from outings with his mother with severe bruises on his face and head.

A Los Angeles police detective working the special child-abuse unit was the first official to respond to hospital reports of possible child abuse. The detective, Jim Brown, said he recommended that children’s services petition the courts on behalf of Magdalena Lupercio and request that she be given custody of the child.

Brown said he did not have sufficient evidence to place the child in the county’s protective custody but warned the grandmother two weeks before the child was taken that Ruth should not have the child while custody was being decided. At the time of Isaac’s death, the Department of Children’s Services had not initiated the petition nor had Magdalena Lupercio completed the necessary paper work for custody.

Detective Said to Keep Child

“The detective told me not to let Ruthie take the baby under any circumstances,” Lupercio recalled. “ ‘Don’t let that baby out of your sight,’ he said. He said he was sure that we would be able to win custody. But he said we should be patient because it would take some time.

“But the social worker told Ruth that she could have her baby. I told her, ‘Do you know what you’re saying? If something happens to that baby, who’s going to be responsible? You know my daughter can’t take care of him.’

“I told her that I wash my hands clean, that if anything happened to that child, it would be her responsibility.”

The Department of Children’s Services has refused to comment on many aspects of the case, citing the need for confidentiality in cases involving juveniles. But Mary Hayes, a spokeswoman for the county agency, said the social worker had little choice but to apprise the mother of her rights while the investigation was continuing.

“There’s no crack in the system,” Hayes said. “The social worker did the best thing and that was to monitor the situation and work with the family until the investigation was completed.”

Hayes said Brown, who requested the intervention of children’s services, was responsible for determining if the child needed to be placed in protective custody. Brown’s decision not to do so, Hayes said, indicated to the social worker that the question of abuse was an open one. Hayes said that, if the social worker had later determined that the child was in danger, she could have requested protective custody either through the police detective or the courts.

‘A Lot of Second-Guessing’

“A lot of second-guessing is involved anytime you take a look back at a case such as this,” Hayes said. “It’s a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking.”

Court records show that Isaac was taken to a Mission Hills hospital on May 13, 1984, after Ruth Lupercio had brought the boy home from a party with bruises and cuts. The mother said the boy had caught his head in a metal gate.

Two weeks later, according to court documents, the grandmother took the child to a Sun Valley hospital after he suffered similar injuries on a second outing with his mother.

“Every time Ruthie would take the boy, she would return him and something would be wrong,” said Lupercio, who lives with her husband in Pacoima. “He would be bruised. He would be burned.” The Department of Children’s Services knew that but still let the mother take him, she said.

Doctors examining the boy at Sierra Memorial Health Center in Sun Valley noted that the child had been seen in another emergency room two weeks earlier. They listed the cause of injuries as “suspected child abuse” and quoted the grandmother as saying the child’s mother was a “drug abuser with a lot of emotional problems.”

Hospital Contacted Brown

The hospital then contacted Brown, a four-year veteran of the unit. Brown said that the injury reports filed by the hospital indicated possible abuse but that he needed more specific allegations before he could place the child in protective custody. Brown said he went to the Lupercio home and found a “grandmother that was doing a good job of caring for the child.”

He said Magdalena Lupercio told him that her daughter was living “on and off” at home and that, each time the mother took the child with her, the child would return home with injuries.

“At the time, I did not have enough to suspect full-blown abuse,” Brown said. “All I knew was what grandmother told me. I had absolutely nothing independent of the grandmother. I had a child who couldn’t talk, an injury report and a mother who I couldn’t locate to interview.”

Brown said he recommended to social workers that they petition the court asking that custody be awarded to the grandmother. He confirmed that the last thing he told Magdalena Lupercio was that she should not let the baby out of her sight.

“I can understand that someone wants to place blame for what happened, but I don’t know if blame can be placed,” Brown said. “I don’t know that anyone did anything wrong.”

On and off for three months before the child’s death, Ruth Lupercio was living with her mother and stepfather. Family members said the boy was fine as long as Ruth, Magdalena or Ruth’s older sister, Martha Balderas, watched over him at home.

They said the abuse always took place outside the home when Ruth left with Isaac to visit Retana. They said that whenever they confronted Ruth about burns on Isaac’s hands and lips, or bruises on his face, she would say that the child had had an accident. She denied that Retana, who was not the child’s father, was physically abusing the boy.

“Ruth would slap him when he misbehaved but nothing out of the ordinary,” Magdalena said. “The abuse got bad when she began seeing that guy. But Ruthie always protected him” from Retana, she said.

According to family members and court records, Ruth Lupercio joined the Latin Times street gang as a teen-ager and was given the nickname “Cloudy,” a sobriquet she proudly had tattooed on her hand. She ran away from home for the first time at 13. In the years that followed, family members said, she often left home for months at a time. At 16, she gave birth to her first child. The boy has been in the care of his grandmother since birth.

Family members said Ruth never seemed to care much for her first child, and at one point she did not see the boy for more than a year. Instead, they said, Ruth doted on little Isaac.

“She loved the baby,” Magdalena said. “She bought beautiful clothes for him. She wanted everything for him. You should have seen the big, beautiful party she gave him for his first birthday.”

If her daughter is guilty of anything, Lupercio insists, it is the guilt of allowing others to abuse her child. She believes an addiction to heroin may have prevented her daughter from exercising better care and judgment.

Testimony at a preliminary hearing in July, before Ruth Lupercio agreed to a plea-bargaining arrangement, suggested that Lupercio and Retana both abused the child during their week’s stay at the Burbank motel.

Jose Abel Mendez, a cousin of Retana who stayed with the couple in their room, testified that Lupercio and Retana sometimes struck Isaac after injecting themselves with heroin.

On the night of July 3, Mendez testified, the child was sick and vomiting as Mendez and Lupercio left the motel to steal stereos from cars. He testified that Retana stayed behind with the child and watched television. Mendez told the court that he and Lupercio returned to the room about 4 a.m. after stealing several car stereos. Before falling asleep, Mendez testified, he and Ruth noticed that the child was having trouble breathing.

The next morning, Lupercio later told police in a lengthy statement, she awoke to discover that her son had stopped breathing.

“Eric woke up Jose and told Jose to start praying because the baby had stopped breathing,” Lupercio told police. “I started praying, too. It was a regular prayer, a Christian prayer like ‘Jesus help this baby. Your blood is the holy something.’ He was saying it a lot. We didn’t know what was going on. . . . Then I ran out of the room.”

Until her guilty plea, Lupercio had maintained that her son’s death was caused by food poisoning, that she had accidentally fed the child a rotten ham sandwich.

Magdalena Lupercio said her daughter, who will be eligible for parole in two years, only recently has begun to accept responsibility for Isaac’s death.

“Ruthie is paying for her crime,” she said. “We all are paying for Isaac’s death.”

Brown said it was the first time one of his cases ended in the death of a child.

“It’s probably the single biggest fear of any detective working in this unit,” he said. “I was hurt. You get so wrapped up in the syndrome ‘take the child, take the child.’ Here was an opportunity to leave the child at home with his grandmother and it backfired. But we just didn’t have a case against the mother. It just wasn’t there.”