Did the System Fail Baby Boy Sanchez? : Protective services: Experts say a state law that favors preserving the family may place children in danger, as with a mother now accused of murder.

Francisca Maria Jimenez Sanchez looked scared and confused as she talked of her two newborn babies, one of them dead now and the other allegedly brain-damaged.

“I just pray prayers,” she said, hunched behind shatterproof glass in an interview room at the Ventura County Jail. “And I ask God to get me out of this place.”

The migrant farm worker from a tiny Mexican village called San Felipe y Santiago is charged with murdering her newborn son last July by dropping him into a portable toilet in an onion field in Saticoy and leaving him to suffocate.

She is also facing trial for attempted murder on a charge that she tried to flush another newborn infant down the toilet of a house in Oxnard the year before.

The child’s death this year horrified Ventura County residents, who donated a tombstone for the grave of the infant known as “Baby Boy Sanchez” and marked it with toys, flowers and letters of sorrow.

And the subsequent allegation that there was a similar incident a year earlier--one that may have been ignored or possibly too easily forgiven by the legal system--has sparked added concerns from child advocates throughout the state.

In that case, according to county prosecutors, Sanchez tried to flush another minutes-old son down the toilet but was stopped by her roommates. Nonetheless, the county Juvenile Court returned the baby to her custody.

Not until several months later, after her baby’s face was burned by a hot bottle that Sanchez allegedly left in his crib, did the courts permanently remove the child from Sanchez, the prosecutors say.

To Amy Kaplan, spokeswoman for the California Consortium for the Prevention of Child Abuse, the questions raised about the return of Sanchez’s first child are familiar. Such cases, she said, are all too common.

“This is the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “This is just one case. This is going on all the time.”

What actually took place, however, is shrouded in the secrecy that surrounds the decisions made by the courts when children are involved. Sanchez, who immigrated to the county in 1989, seems as mystified as anyone about the sequence of events.

As she talked to The Times last week, she said she could not discuss the fate of the child who died this year because of advice from her attorney.

At one point in a 30-minute interview, she described the two incidents involving the newborn children as accidents.

“It was a mistake,” she said. “I can’t give you many explanations.”

But when asked if she was aware that she might have been violating the law by her alleged actions, she responded: “I thought about it after it happened, but it was too late by then.”

Later, she strongly disputed that she had ever mistreated the surviving infant, Jose Luis.

“I love him very much. I want to see him. I want to get him back when I get out,” Sanchez said.

“I would come home from work every day and hold him in my arms,” she said softly, her eyes lighting up. “I would bathe him, clothe him with his little clothes, and then I’d feed him.”

She added with a sad smile, “He ate more than me.”

The loving words from the mother in jail contrasted starkly both with the nature of her alleged crimes and the view of prosecutors that Sanchez is little more than a cold-blooded killer.

“She didn’t want a baby. He was a burden to her,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Nelson said. “It’s what makes anybody kill anybody else. She didn’t want him alive.”

They also contrasted with testimony earlier this month at a preliminary hearing to determine if there was enough evidence to try Sanchez for both the alleged murder and attempted murder.

Margarita Lima and her husband, Adrian, testified that they sublet a room to Sanchez in their rented house on Campbell Way in 1990 because they needed the extra rent money and she needed lodging while picking in the onion fields.

Margarita Lima testified that she rushed downstairs on May 11, 1990, when she heard her husband’s shouts and saw Sanchez in the bathroom.

“I (was) still able to see Francisca put down the handle of the toilet and push the baby down,” she testified. “So I went in and pushed her, and I took the baby.”

Lima said she tied off the child’s umbilical cord with a hair ribbon and took him upstairs to safety while her husband rushed to a neighbor’s phone and summoned help.

The paramedics arrived and put Sanchez onto a gurney, but when police tried to hand her the baby, “she put her hands down,” Margarita Lima testified. “She wouldn’t hold him.”

Jose was treated at St. John’s Regional Medical Center for severe respiratory distress and a head injury that caused bleeding inside his skull. Prosecutors have said he suffered brain damage as a result.

No charges were filed then because Oxnard Police interviewed Sanchez but not Margarita Lima, Nelson said.

Nelson said Sanchez told police, “I just had the baby, and the baby went in the toilet. And just then, my roommate came in and saved the baby.”

But police never heard about the allegation that Sanchez was trying to flush the infant down the toilet because they didn’t talk to Margarita Lima, Nelson said.

Ventura County juvenile authorities took Jose from Sanchez soon after that incident, but a foster mother brought him over for an hour or two at a time so Sanchez could breast- and bottle-feed him.

In an interview last week, Margarita Lima questioned why authorities ever let Sanchez near Jose again.

“The social workers said she did it out of ignorance. I couldn’t understand,” she said. “I couldn’t understand why they kept bringing the baby back after what happened.

“At first, Francisca seemed like a very nice person, but she changed after she had the baby. My children said she hit the baby. I never saw it because I wasn’t here, but my kids would tell me about it.”

Within a few weeks, a closed hearing was held in Juvenile Court, Nelson said.

Present were the Limas and Rose Moore, Jose’s caseworker from Child Protective Services.

It is unknown what the witnesses, the social worker and Jose’s attorney told Juvenile Court Judge James McNally about Sanchez’s alleged attempt to flush her son down the toilet, or her treatment of him during feeding visits.

But at the hearing’s conclusion, Nelson said, the judge signed an order returning Jose to his mother’s custody.

A few months later, in August, 1990, came the incident that separated Sanchez from her son for good.

Sanchez went to work early, leaving a bottle in the crib, Nelson said. When Margarita Lima went to check on the baby, she noticed the bottle had burned his face from jaw to ear, leaving a permanent scar, Nelson said.

“Apparently, it got infected,” Nelson said. “It caused enough concern that the child was being abused.”

This time, authorities took Jose permanently and put him in a foster home, Nelson said.

She said that Rose Moore, the Child Protective Services social worker who handled Jose’s case, must have known of the Limas’ allegations about the events following his birth.

But the truth about what Sanchez did to Jose--and how much the Juvenile Court judge knew--remains in a sealed file, obscured by attorneys and child welfare officials who say the law prevents them from even acknowledging that his case exists.

Moore has refused to comment, as have her supervisor, Doug Miller, and John H. Pattie, a lawyer appointed to represent Jose.

State law forbids anyone involved in a Juvenile Court dependency case from discussing it outside the courtroom, to protect the child’s privacy, Pattie said.

“Overweening liberalism is what caused it,” Nelson said of the court’s decision to reunite Sanchez and her son.

“And an absolute refusal to look at wrong behavior and call it wrong behavior, and a lack of a capacity to judge one’s fellow man.”

But Assistant County Counsel Mary C. Ward, who represented Moore during the Sanchez hearings, said of Nelson’s criticism: “It’s a lot easier to Monday-morning quarterback than it is to make the decisions at the time the evidence is presented.

“Certainly I don’t think anybody would say judges don’t make decisions they don’t regret at some future time. But they’re working with the facts they’re given at the time.”

Ward said the California Welfare and Institutions Code dictates that a child cannot be taken from his parents’ custody unless there is clear and convincing evidence that he would be in danger of physical or sexual abuse upon returning home.

“The law is really weighted in favor of returning the child to the parents, even if that means with court supervision,” she said.

Children’s advocates around the state criticized the system for its handling of the Sanchez case.

But they said such decisions are not uncommon when state law has geared the system toward the preservation of the family whenever possible, and when society has hobbled it with a massive caseload that sometimes causes it to make bad judgments.

“Somebody dropped the ball here, obviously, and it’s probably a lucky thing the first child was eventually moved away from the home,” said Jan Lawrence Handzlik, a Los Angeles attorney and past director of Friends of Child Advocates, a support group for attorneys who represent children in Los Angeles County Juvenile Court.

The California Consortium for the Prevention of Child Abuse and other groups agreed that the Sanchez case is not unprecedented.

“This is one case that’s tragic and frightening, and it seems to me . . . we certainly have sound reason to wonder whether this mother could care for a child,” said Judy Nelson, executive director of the Children’s Bureau of Los Angeles.

But Judy Nelson added that such cases can happen when immigrants like Sanchez collide with the overloaded Juvenile Court system.

“The experience of coming to this country and not knowing the language, and being unable to get a job and too poor to get food puts people into a very, very difficult situation,” Judy Nelson said. “I’m not sure you can expect usual, rational, normal behavior when they’re in such a complete panic that they cannot meet their own personal needs, let alone the needs of a child that comes along.”

Prosecutor Carol Nelson said of Jose: “He has undergone a lot of trauma. He seems to be doing much better, and he’s had excellent medical care. We have high hopes he’ll be OK.”

Her investigator, Robert Velasquez, said, “One doctor put it, ‘Developmentally, he’s catching up.’ ”

Sanchez, who is due to be arraigned in Superior Court on Wednesday on the charges of murder and attempted murder, said she never abused Jose and was not home when he was burned. She only hopes to get out of jail and see her son again.

She said she never hit him and that he seldom cried.

“How could he upset me?” she asked gently.

Not a hint of anger or resentment crept into her voice during the interview. But she was guarded in her comments.

“I don’t know if I can answer that,” she responded, even to such questions as the names of her mother and father. “You should ask the lawyer.”

Her babies were fathered by two different men, she said. She hasn’t spoken to either of them since she was arrested and does not want to, she said.

Her father and two brothers, all of them farm workers, still live in Mexico, she said. Her mother died recently. None of her family members know that she is in jail, and she wants to keep it that way.

In fact, she said, she hasn’t received a single visit since her arrest Sept. 13.

“I don’t know what they think of me,” she said of her fellow workers and former roommates.

In Oxnard, she said, she didn’t make any friends and rarely left her apartment.

“I’m not the kind to go out dancing,” she said. “I just like to work.”

Besides work, her only activity was going to church on Sundays, she said. She described herself as a Christian evangelist.

She was polite but anxious to end the interview.

“You see, I’ve never been in jail before,” she repeated apologetically. “I’m a little bit depressed.”

Only since her arrest has she received any information about birth control or abortion, said Sanchez, who cannot read or write.

“I never gave any importance to the whole thing,” Sanchez said of birth control. “I learned a lot of things in jail. Had I learned them earlier, I wouldn’t be here today.”