Child-Abuse Case May Be ‘Tip of the Iceberg’ : Crime: A woman who allegedly killed a newborn may earlier have tried to kill her other son. She insists she is innocent; children’s advocates say officials too often return youths to abusive parents.

Hunched behind shatterproof glass in an interview room at the Ventura County Jail, Francisca Maria Jimenez Sanchez looked scared and confused as she talked of her two newborn babies, one of them dead and the other allegedly brain-damaged.

“I just pray prayers,” she said. “And I ask God to get me out of this place.”

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

She is also facing trial for attempted murder, for allegedly trying to flush another newborn down the toilet of a house in Oxnard the year before.

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

And the subsequent allegation that there was a similar incident one year earlier--one that may have been ignored 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 her 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 take the child away from her, 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.

“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 in 1989, seems as mystified as anyone about the sequence of events.

Sanchez, who talked to The Times last week, said that, on advice of her attorney, she could not discuss the fate of the child who died this year. 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,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Carol Nelson. “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 murder and attempted murder.

Margarita Lima and her husband, Adrian, testified that they sublet a room to Sanchez in their rented Oxnard house in 1990.

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 while her husband rushed to a neighbor’s phone and summoned help.

Jose was treated at a hospital 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.”

Police never heard about the allegation that Sanchez was trying to flush the infant down the toilet, 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 feed him.

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

“At first Francisca seemed like a very nice person, but she changed after she had the baby,” Lima said. “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 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 anyone told Juvenile Court Judge James McNally about Sanchez’s treatment of the child. But at the hearing’s conclusion, Nelson said, the judge signed an order returning Jose to his mother.

A few months later, in August, 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 Lima, who was supposed to be watching the baby, went to check on him, she noticed the bottle had burned his face from jaw to ear, leaving a permanent scar, Nelson said.

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

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

Despite that decision, questions remain about why Sanchez was reunited with the child in the first place.

The social worker, Moore, declined to comment, as have her supervisor, Doug Miller, and John Pattie, a lawyer appointed to represent Jose. Pattie cited state law barring comment on juvenile court dependency cases.

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

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,” Ward said. “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 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.

Judy Nelson, executive director of the Children’s Bureau of Los Angeles, noted that such cases can happen when immigrants such as 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.”

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 throughout the interview.

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

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.

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.”