Life of Tears and Hope for Beaten Baby’s Family

At an age when toddlers normally walk, talk and play with toys, 19-month-old Ignacio Bermudez rocks in an infant swing.

Sturdy and round-faced, he is a handsome, healthy-looking boy. But his only sounds are a baby’s coos, and his tightly clenched fists reach out for nothing.

Eighteen months ago, Ignacio, called Nachito by his family, became front-page news as the tiny victim of a vicious beating by a most unlikely attacker--a 6-year-old neighbor boy.

The assault sparked passionate debate about how society should respond to very young children who commit heinous crimes. Some were horrified when a Contra Costa County deputy district attorney, insisting that the young attacker knew the difference between right and wrong, filed a charge of attempted murder against him. Others applauded the move.

The case faded from public view only after a Juvenile Court referee ruled that the assailant could not understand his offense and sent him to a group home for deeply disturbed children.

But the violent two-minute encounter between the two boys has forever altered their lives and the lives of their families.

“It’s very sad for me to see [Ignacio] in the state he’s in,” mother Maria Carmen Bermudez said, sitting in the cramped living room of their two-bedroom house. The boy’s two brothers and sister played near his swing.

“I ask God to cure him, to alleviate him, to give him health,” she said.

Doctors say nothing less than a miracle will restore Ignacio to health. Indeed, it may take a miracle for the boy to ever see, walk or talk. He may never eat food more solid than the Gerber baby fare he now gobbles at a rate of 12 jars a day.

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“His is a brain at rest. It just doesn’t grow like we would like for it to,” said Dr. Robert Haining, the neurologist who supervises Ignacio’s care and measures his development every six months.

Damage to the boy’s brain, Haining said, “was global,” meaning large parts on all sides have died and will not rejuvenate.

Such a verdict, Haining said, is hard for any parent to accept.

“The problem is that we all, as parents, develop expectations for our kids,” he said. “Having those hopes and aspirations one day, and then the next day finding your child will be dependent on you for the rest of his life is devastating. The stress on a family is enormous.”

The baby’s father, also named Ignacio, knows about stress.

“Everything in our lives has changed,” he said. “I worry all the time: What is going to happen with my boy?”

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On that April evening in 1996, the Bermudezes had left Ignacio with his 18-year-old stepsister, Maria, while they went to the grocery store with their older children.

Their trip took only 30 minutes.

But when the family returned, the home was surrounded by police cars. The couple’s son, they were told, had been hurt badly and was on his way to Childrens Hospital in nearby Oakland.

As the infant fought for his life, attached to a respirator, the stunned parents were told his assailant was a 6-year-old who apparently had entered the family’s home with two 8-year-old buddies to steal a plastic tricycle.

Before the trio made off with the toy, the 6-year-old spied the baby in his bassinet. As he later demonstrated using a doll in a videotaped interview with police, he pulled Ignacio from the bassinet, dropped him on the floor, then repeatedly punched him in the face, kicked his head and whacked him with a stick.

Asked by the officer why he beat the baby, the boy offered a chilling reply: “ ‘Cause I decided to.”

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Prosecutor Harold Jewett, head of Contra Costa County’s juvenile crimes division, concluded that the 8-year-olds had not participated in the assault. He focused on the youngest boy, whose mother brought him to the police station after he told her of his actions.

The prosecutor was convinced the boy knew what he was doing when he beat Ignacio. And so, at 6, the child became the youngest American ever charged with attempted murder. He also became the youngest ever housed in Contra Costa’s Juvenile Hall, where he wore uniforms several sizes too large and slept with a stuffed animal.

After court-appointed psychiatrists said the boy suffered from multiple personality and learning disorders and did not understand the consequences of his act, Jewett reduced the charge to assault with intent to commit bodily harm. The Juvenile Court referee then declared the boy a victim of parental neglect and sent him to the group home. His transition into the facility was rough. He sometimes shoved or hit other children.

But his attorney, John Burris, said his client, now 7, is doing well. He is undergoing intensive psychotherapy and is being tutored. His mother, Lisa Toliver, visits regularly and hopes to one day be reunited with her son.

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“The county is doing a wonderful job with this boy,” Burris said, adding that the child should never have been threatened with criminal prosecution.

But Jewett said he has no regrets.

“I still consider him to be a threat to the community,” said the prosecutor, who receives periodic reports on the boy’s progress but is barred by law from discussing details.

What he sees troubles him enough, Jewett said, that if the 7-year-old “were to be released from the facility, if someone were to attempt to return him to his mother as though nothing had happened, I would definitely bring charges again.”

The baby’s father said he wishes nothing but the best for the boy who beat his son.

“He is in the right place now, with doctors who will take care of him,” Ignacio Bermudez said in Spanish, as an interpreter translated. “I hope that someday, he will forget what he’s done and lead a normal life.”

But he said he and his wife relive the events of that awful night, sometimes in their conversations, sometimes in their nightmares.

“My wife and I talk about this a lot. We end up crying,” he said.

Bermudez, who works at a fiberglass plant, moved to a night shift to be able to help his wife with Ignacio and the other children. He sleeps only a few hours when he comes home before rising to begin the ritual of care. The couple has moved to a housing project about two miles from the apartment where the beating occurred. They have a burglar alarm and a small fenced yard where they watch their children play.

“I’m always nervous about them, always vigilant with them,” said Maria Carmen Bermudez, also speaking through an interpreter.

Ignacio suffers from frequent brain seizures and takes daily medication to control them. He catches cold easily and often has ear infections. He is restless and seems calm only when rocking in his swing or strapped into a car seat in a moving car.

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Four days a week, a driver from the county’s mental health regional center picks him up for four hours of therapy and care. Once weekly, the county school district sends a therapist to the home. She places musical toys with brightly colored, moving picture screens close to Ignacio’s face in an effort to train him to see.

She encourages the family to stimulate him by calling to him, placing objects in front of him, stroking him.

When out of his swing, Ignacio usually lies where he is placed, although he recently learned to roll over. Pulled to a sitting position, he can hold himself upright for brief moments.

His eyes gaze blankly at the world, oblivious to the children playing around him, but then he starts and appears to respond when his father or mother calls loudly to him. These tiny triumphs encourage his parents.

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“I’ve never lost hope,” the father said. “I believe that every parent has the obligation to fight for their children, to struggle on their behalf.”

The mother said she has little time to think of the future. Her days are filled with the mundane tasks of caring for Ignacio, 4-year-old Elias, 3-year-old Javier and 2-year-old Carmelita.

As Ignacio grows--he is of normal size for his age--it gets harder for her to cope, Maria Carmen Bermudez said.

“He’s getting very heavy,” she said. “The day is going to arrive when I won’t be able to carry him. Some days, when he just cries and cries and we don’t know what is hurting him, I just sit down beside him, and I cry too.”

Several months ago, her husband took all four children to a Mexican restaurant for dinner and ran into Toliver, the attacker’s mother.

Toliver held Ignacio, asked how he was doing, asked the boy’s father to have his wife call her and talk. Ignacio’s mother never made the phone call.

“I do not speak English,” she said when asked why. “And there is nothing that I could have said to her.”