Chained Boy Destructive, Mother Says

The Placentia mother who chained her 9-year-old boy by the ankle to a closet bar said Wednesday from jail that the boy was destructive and refused to stay home.

“We had to do something,” said Irma Ventura, 28, in an interview at Orange County Jail. “He kept going out at night, leaving home at 10 p.m. We would tell him to stay home. But he kept leaving. For his safety, we had to make sure he would remain at home.”

Ventura and the boy’s father, Guadencia Delgado Martinez, 31, are scheduled to be arraigned today on a felony charge of child cruelty. If they are tried and found guilty, each can receive a maximum sentence of six years in prison, said Jan Sturla, supervising deputy district attorney in Orange County.

Placentia police arrested the couple Tuesday afternoon after a social worker visited the home and found the boy sitting in a plastic chair in a bedroom, chained around the ankle. The chain was locked to the clothes post in a closet.

The boy was without adult supervision and was discovered in the home with two younger brothers and a younger sister, police said. The children were taken to Orangewood Children’s Home in Orange, police said.

The social worker’s visit was part of a monitoring program by the county’s Social Services Agency, police said. Ventura acknowledged participating in the program, saying that she and the boy’s father “needed advice on parenting,” especially on handling their 9-year-old. She denied any abuse, including beating the boy.

However, when he was found, the boy was red and bruised on the face, neck and back, police said.

“He’s destructive, and he never obeys us,” Ventura said. “We decided to chain him because what else could we do? I tried to explain to the (caseworker) that we were having problems but that we had not hit him.

“But the police came and arrested us, and it feels like the caseworker and the police think we’re assassins and killers, or very bad criminals or worse.”

The social worker who interviewed the boy said he had neither been fed nor freed to go to the bathroom for 24 hours. But Ventura denied that, saying she first chained the boy on Tuesday morning before she left the house, and that he had eaten and gone to the bathroom before then.

Ventura said the boy got the bruises from a soda bottle that broke while he was playing with it. “We didn’t beat him,” she claimed.

Ventura said she and the boy’s father, who are not married, are from Mexico and have been in the United States 18 years. Their children, ages 3, 5, 7 and 9, were born in Orange County, where it has been difficult making financial ends meet, she said. None of the other three children have been troublesome, she said.

Ventura receives $4.75 an hour working as a cook in a Mexican restaurant in Placentia. Delgado makes about $6 an hour as a gardener, when work is available, she said. They leave the home early, usually before 8 a.m., and she returns home about 2 p.m. They rely on Ventura’s brother and sister, ages 13 and 15, who live nearby, to help baby-sit their children, but she admitted that is done on an informal basis.

Lately, the bills have been piling up, she said, adding to family frustrations that have included $700 monthly rent on their three-bedroom home in a predominantly Latino barrio, and $1,100 in medical bills.

In some respects, that scenario of a family laboring to make ends meet, having difficulty raising children and lacking parenting skills accounts for some of the dramatic rise in child abuse incidents in Orange County, said Larry Leaman, the county’s social services director.

In 1985, the county’s Child Abuse Registry counted 11,440 families in which abuse was suspected; that number rose to 15,198 in 1990. Last August, the registry counted 1,401 families in which a child was abused or neglected, a 17% increase from August, 1990.

Often parents who abuse their children suffer from irrational fears that the child is their enemy, said Mary Collier, director of the Fullerton district of the Family Service Assn. Nine of 10 cases of domestic violence involve drugs or alcohol, she said.

“It could be they fear that no one respects, or admires, or cares about them. Then their very own child challenges that authority, and that’s the breaking point.”

“Typically, parents move into abusing children as a result of faulty parenting skills,” said Gordon Andahl, program manager for Orangewood Children’s Home, where the four children of Delgado and Ventura were taken Tuesday. “As a parent, you don’t go to school to learn how to raise kids.”

A Juvenile Court hearing must be held within 48 hours of the children’s removal from their home, said William Steiner, executive director of the Orangewood Foundation. A judge will then determine whether they can be returned to their parents or relatives.

“Given the fact that this is an active social service case with supervision of the family for other problems, I think it’s unlikely the children will be released to their parents. All four will be remaining in Orangewood for a while,” Steiner said.

Ironically, a proposal for some type of parenting classes in Placentia, largely for Latinos and covering child-abuse laws, was rejected last year because of costs, City Councilwoman Maria Moreno said.

“The idea came from the community. Obviously the need is there . . . there’s a need to make people aware who are from other countries what the laws are here, and what constitutes child abuse,” Moreno said.