Community Stunned by Month-Old Baby’s Beating

Four-week-old Ignacio Bermudez fought for his life in a hospital intensive care unit Wednesday, as police and this anguished community tried to fathom why so tiny an infant could have been so viciously attacked by three neighborhood boys only 6 and 8 years old.

Police say the boys, who all lived in the impoverished Iron Triangle section of this community northeast of San Francisco, confessed to entering the Bermudez apartment Monday night and beating the baby after taking him out of his bassinet. Then they made off with an older sibling’s Big Wheels tricycle.

“Richmond has a reputation as a tough town, but I grew up in this town, and this is not Richmond,” said a troubled Police Sgt. Michael Walter. “I’ve never, ever seen anything like this in my life. This is an anomaly. Everybody in this Police Department is shocked and worried about the community.”

The police switchboard was flooded Wednesday with callers asking to establish a fund to help pay Ignacio’s medical costs, Walter said.

“People are devastated,” he said. “They are calling in sympathy with all the families involved.”

The baby was listed in “extremely critical” condition Wednesday at Children’s Hospital in Oakland, breathing with the help of a respirator. The attack left him with compound skull fractures and internal bleeding. His distraught parents were keeping a round-the-clock vigil at his crib and doctors were unable to say if he would recover.

The three boys were taken into custody Tuesday on suspicion of attempted murder, conspiracy and burglary, Walter said. But because they are so young, it is possible no charges will be filed against them.

None had been in trouble with the police before. The 6-year-old lives with his mother, and the 8-year-olds, twin brothers, live with their mother and grandmother.

Walter said both mothers were “devastated and sharing the grief” of Ignacio’s parents. Both mothers had accompanied their sons to the Richmond police station.

Prosecutors have until 2 p.m. today to bring the boys before a judge for arraignment, said Harold Jewett, head of the juvenile unit of the Contra Costa County district attorney’s office.

Jewett said Wednesday, however, that he has yet to decide whether he can meet the “high burden of proof” required to press charges against suspects so young.

The law requires that the boys knew what they were doing when they committed the crime, or they must be set free, he said. If charges are brought against them, the three will be tried in Juvenile Court.

For now, the 6-year-old is the youngest-ever inmate at Contra Costa Juvenile Hall. He and the twins are being held in a special unit under “constant supervision,” said Terrence Starr, chief probation officer at the facility.

Starr said that special tutors are being brought in to provide schooling for the children, and they are being kept away from the other youngsters in custody, who range in age from 13 to 18.

Police said they believe the youngest boy came up with the idea of stealing the tricycle and may have initiated the beating. When they were questioned on Tuesday, the boys were unable to say why they attacked Ignacio, Walter said. He declined to say if they have expressed remorse for the assault.

But neighbors on Chanslor Avenue, where the Bermudez family lives in a modest, four-unit corner apartment, described the 6-year-old as a troublemaker who, with the twins, had often harassed Ignacio’s mother. Sometimes, they said, the 6-year-old threatened other children with a stick.

“They would bother the mother, fight with the little children around here,” said Porfiria Vazguez, 34, who lives across the street. Vazguez described Carmella Bermudez, the baby’s mother, as “a nice lady” who had trouble shooing the boys away when they would enter her house and bother her and the children.

“It wasn’t shocking that they went into the apartment,” she said. “What was so shocking was that they could be capable of doing that to a little baby. You don’t expect a little child to do something like this to a baby.”

She said that Ignacio Bermudez, the infant’s father, is a working man “who is just trying to do the best he can for his family, under the circumstances. People have to understand that sometimes you can’t move out of a neighborhood, even when you would like to.”

Vazguez, who has lived in the Iron Triangle all her life, said crime there has been declining in recent years.

“But there is still the occasional drive-by shooting,” she said. “Ninety percent of the people who live here are good, but 10 percent cause problems.”

According to police, the assault, which lasted two minutes, took place while the infant’s baby-sitter, his 18-year-old stepsister, was in the bathroom.

His parents and two older siblings had gone to the grocery store. They were out of the apartment no longer than 15 minutes, Walter said.

Police say the boys pulled Ignacio from his bassinet, then repeatedly punched and kicked him and hit him with a stick. By the time the stepsister emerged from the bathroom, they had disappeared. She found the baby lying silently on a bed, his face bruised.

Neighbors, meanwhile, saw the boys running from the house with the tricycle, Walter said. One stopped the 6-year-old, took the tricycle and returned it to the Bermudez home.

The news Wednesday that three of their young students were in custody for the attack on the 4-week-old left teachers and administrators at nearby Lincoln Elementary School trying to cope with what had happened.

Principal Marco Gonzalez said he gathered his teachers before the start of classes Wednesday to “help them try to make sense of this” for their students. He said he told the teachers to be honest if their students asked why. No one, he said, can answer that.

“No one can explain it,” said Gonzalez, who would say little about the three accused boys. “Maybe those children don’t know the difference between right and wrong.”

Gonzalez said many of the school’s 550 students--preschoolers to fifth-graders--have “seen more than a child should experience.” Virtually all of them, he said, qualify for the federally subsidized lunch program available to children below the poverty line. News of the assault did not unduly traumatize the students, he said.

“Our children have a lot more resiliency than people give them credit for,” Gonzalez said. “Some of it is because they’ve gone through so much--they are victims of poverty, some are victims of crime, some are victims of bad luck.”

Despite the horror of the attack, Walter said he is determined to emphasize that Richmond’s high crime rate has recently dropped, through a combination of what he said is widespread community effort and new community-policing programs, some of them federally funded.

“Last year we had only 27 murders” in the blue-collar community of 85,000, Walter said. “That is half the number of the year before.” Violent crimes overall, he said, slid 27%. “We’re very proud of what is happening in this city,” Walter said. “We think we’ve turned a corner and we’re starting to head back the other way.” What happened to Ignacio, he said, “is not our city.”