Mystery Shrouds Children’s Deaths

Maybe it could have happened only here, on the social and economic fringes of a country whose language the women did not speak.

Two sisters, isolated from their family, sat silently as the man who was husband to them both allegedly murdered two of his children. Even when he buried them in makeshift forest graves, they told no one.

Had police not happened upon some family members as they patted the earth down on 5-year-old Ernesto in the Angeles National Forest in March, it seems likely that his death, and the earlier death of his sister Guadalupe, would remain family secrets.

Petra Ricardo, 35, told authorities she was a weak Mexican woman who was not brave enough to stand up to her husband, Marcos Esquivel.

In jailhouse interviews, she and her sister, Maria Ricardo, told The Times that they believed Esquivel when he told them the deaths were accidents and that in the United States, poor immigrants bury their dead in the woods.

Still, their acceptance of all that happened--most remarkably Petra Ricardo’s unwillingness to tell a soul that her daughter was also buried in the forest, even after her son’s remains were found and her husband and sister arrested--baffled an entire community. But no one was more puzzled than the women’s brothers.

“I don’t understand,” said Eledino Ricardo, the eldest of seven Ricardo siblings, from his Chicago-area home. “I don’t know what was happening with these women.”

Interviews with the Ricardo sisters, their siblings, neighbors and authorities reveal a fuller picture of how the family lived, offering a glimpse into the cramped, converted-garage apartments and long hours of hard work that many poor illegal immigrants endure in the United States.

While that backdrop helps explain how the family largely escaped official attention, it sheds no light on how those circumstances could have led a father to murder and two mothers to conceal the chronic child abuse and eventual deaths of two children.

Even the poorest of the poor do not discard dead children in the woods back home in rural Mexico, Eledino Ricardo said, and he cannot imagine a woman hiding the deaths from her relatives. But then, the family was always surprised at what Petra Ricardo was willing to forgive her husband.

Lifelong neighbors from the same small rancho in Mexico’s Guerrero province, where everyone worked the corn and bean fields, the couple married and started a family 17 years ago.

Petra Ricardo had three boys, two of them twins, and relatives said everything seemed fine in their home. That is, until Esquivel allegedly abducted his wife’s 15-year-old sister, Maria.

Esquivel told his father-in-law he needed to go to a nearby town, the Ricardo brother said, and asked the elder man for permission to take Maria to keep him company and help him carry the twins, then 6 months old. The father agreed.

Instead, the family says, Esquivel tossed the infants in a field and took off with Maria. The children were found later by Eledino Ricardo and another of his sisters.

“They were laying in the dirt in full sun,” Eledino said. “It was pure coincidence that I was walking past there.”

He said he called police, but the Mexican authorities never found Esquivel. Later they heard that Esquivel had taken his wife’s teenage sister and run off to Los Angeles.

“My father wanted to go get them, but I told him no,” Eledino said. “If he went to Los Angeles, he was going to kill Marcos with his bare hands.”

Maria Ricardo, who now goes by the name Juana, says she remembers little about how she came to the United States with Esquivel, whom she considers her husband.

She does recall that they came illegally, crossing over mountains.

“I was a young girl,” the 28-year-old woman said quietly from a visitation room in the Los Angeles Women’s Central Jail. “I’m not exactly sure what happened . . . but little by little I learned to love him.”

Esquivel did not break off his relationship with his wife, however. “He would write her and write her and tell her to come to Los Angeles,” Eledino said.

Against her family’s advice, she eventually followed Esquivel to Tijuana, then to the United States, bearing him five more children.

“She would criticize Marcos and talk bad about him. My father would tell her to just leave him and find another man, but she wouldn’t,” said Natividad Ricardo, another sibling. He said Petra always blamed her sister for running off with Esquivel.

“She said if Maria had not gotten involved with him, she would be happy with him today,” Natividad said.

Relatives say they never again heard from Maria Ricardo.

“I know she’s my blood and my sister and it hurts me to say this, but she got what she had coming to her. Why didn’t she call us when we were looking for her?” Natividad Ricardo asked. “They both would have been better off without him.”

Esquivel and the Ricardo sisters are being detained pending a preliminary hearing July 14 in San Fernando Court.

Sheriff’s detectives investigating the child deaths said there is no doubt that Esquivel, 34, controlled his women and children, principally by force.

The Ricardo sisters individually called police or social workers several times to report having been abused by Esquivel, according to authorities and court records.

He was arrested on domestic violence charges in 1989 and 1993 and pleaded guilty in both cases, authorities said. Each time he was sentenced to two years’ probation. In the 1993 case, he was also made to perform community service and complete a batterers’ program.

In 1996, Maria Ricardo complained to Los Angeles police that Esquivel hit her and her daughter. Misdemeanor domestic violence charges were filed, but Esquivel fled prosecution and the case was never resolved.

Boy’s Life of Abuse

Police suspect--but cannot prove--that Esquivel abused all his children. What they know for certain is that 5-year-old Ernesto was beaten from infancy, said Los Angeles Sheriff’s Det. Christine Carns.

The final, fatal blows came the night of Feb. 28, Carns said, when the little boy, too weak from injuries of previous abuse to even walk, was crying and falling asleep instead of eating.

The following day, Esquivel went to Petra’s apartment and told her that her son had died of a heart attack, Petra said.

She said she remembers standing beside Esquivel’s Honda Accord and staring at her son’s limp body on the floor in the back of the car. As Esquivel told her he would make funeral arrangements, she noticed a bruise on the boy’s forehead.

An autopsy revealed Ernesto had nine broken ribs--some new fractures, some old, Carns said. His legs and right forearm were deformed from breaks that had not healed properly because of a lack of medical attention. His right forearm and left leg were broken, probably from trying to defend himself during the fatal attack. He had a black eye, head trauma, bruises on his face and a tooth was protruding through his lip.

The kindergartner was malnourished, weighing just 44 pounds. His body was covered with sores. He had a scar across his navel from being beaten with a wire and suffered from ulcers, the detective said.

Petra swears she did not know the children were being abused, that she believed Esquivel when he told her the deaths were accidents at the hands of other children.

“He was bringing me my kids dead and I don’t know why,” Petra Ricardo said.

Guadalupe, affectionately called Lupita by her family, was fatally beaten five months before her brother’s death because she wet her pants, Carns said. She was 2 years old.

Maria Ricardo told The Times she was not present when Lupita was allegedly beaten in the garage apartment she shared with Esquivel.

The First Burial

Petra Ricardo said that when Marcos brought the girl to her apartment, she was limp and breathing faintly. He told her the toddler had gotten sick after her brother gave her something to eat.

“She was half-dead and half-alive,” Petra Ricardo said. “She died in my arms.”

She said Esquivel forced her and some of the children to bury the girl surreptitiously. As Lupita lay in the earthen grave in a brush-filled area off Little Tujunga Canyon Road, acid was poured on her body to hasten decomposition, Petra said. The girl was wrapped in plastic and blankets and covered with dirt.

Petra Ricardo said she was too afraid to tell anyone about the deaths, particularly Lupita’s. She believed Esquivel when he told her the girl died at her brother’s hands, she said, and she didn’t want to get the boy in trouble.

“I am paying for that damn fear I had. If I did not say anything it’s not because I had pity for him,” she said of her husband. “I hate him with all my soul.”

But Lupita’s death seemed to change nothing in the Esquivel clan’s daily life.

Neighbors who saw the women and children selling ears of roasted corn from street carts said they seemed like so many other immigrant families, working long, hard hours. Their lives, however, were not the average immigrant experience.

Petra Ricardo lived in a converted one-room apartment at the back of an Arleta house with two of her sons, Juan and Ediberto, who worked with her selling corn in the northeast San Fernando Valley.

Esquivel told the landlord that he lived and worked in Valencia and needed a place for only his wife and children.

He actually lived a few miles away, in a garage apartment with Maria, the couple’s six children and Petra’s other five children.

The family slept on two mattresses on the floor of the tiny, filthy apartment on Desmond Street. The sisters never spoke.

Esquivel handled the money, drove the car and ran the street-side family business. He paid the $450 rent on each apartment. He bought the provisions and roasted the corn. At the end of the day, he collected the money that the women and children made.

Petra Ricardo said Esquivel would get mad at her because she only made about $50 a day, when her sister raked in $130, she said. Even the older boys made about $60 each.

She would later tell her brothers that she and the children were afraid of Esquivel, that he would threaten them. She said her husband would get angry if she or the children ate any of the corn they were supposed to sell.

But authorities have questioned how afraid she truly was. Three times she called the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services, complaining that her husband beat her, and authorities put her and the children in battered women’s shelters, said Carns, the sheriff’s detective. Each time, Petra called Marcos to pick them up, and then they moved so authorities could not find them.

“They had plenty of opportunity but they just continued to hang with this guy and have babies with him,” Carns said of the sisters.

In a brief jail interview, Esquivel said the death and injuries to his children were all accidents and that he believed that poor immigrants in the United States buried their children in makeshift graves. He would not elaborate, however.

He also refused to discuss his relationship with the women, saying it was “personal.” But he spoke of Maria Ricardo as if she were his wife.

Maria insists that Esquivel was not an abusive father, just a strong disciplinarian. She said the family worked hard because they wanted to get ahead, that the children wanted to work. She said they often talked about saving their money and returning to Mexico and that she is confident the charges against them are a temporary misunderstanding.

“Everything is going to become clear,” she said.

She was arrested on March 1, after deputies on routine patrol saw a car parked off Lopez Canyon Road and stopped to investigate. They found Esquivel, Maria Ricardo and three of Esquivel’s children burying Ernesto in the forest.

Esquivel was charged with murder and child abuse and Maria Ricardo stands accused of accessory to murder after the fact.

The children were put in protective custody. All 12 of Esquivel’s living children, including Petra Ricardo’s newborn boy, were eventually placed in foster homes. A sympathetic community united to give Ernesto a proper burial at San Fernando Mission Cemetery.

In the weeks that followed, Petra Ricardo finally began talking to her neighbors. Her brothers, to whom she had not spoken for years, tracked her down after hearing news reports about the arrests of Esquivel and Maria. Petra began talking regularly to her brothers.

But she never revealed the secret of Lupita’s death. It was the children who finally had the courage to tell the truth.

“They felt very sad for their little sister and they were not going to leave her cold and alone in the mountains anymore,” Carns said.

At a supervised family visit at a park, Jose Antonio, 13, told his mother what he was going to do.

“You have to be strong, Mom. I know you think it was me but it wasn’t. It was my dad,” she recalled him telling her about the little girl’s death. With his father in jail, he said, “now we can tell them about Guadalupe.”

Petra said she and her children talked about going home to Mexico. Now, they decided, everything was going to be OK. But last month, after the children led police to Lupita’s grave, Petra Ricardo was arrested on charges of accessory to murder after the fact.

As she was led away from her Arleta apartment, Petra told reporters that she was innocent.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” her brother Natividad said. It was the first he’d heard about the little girl.

“To this day,” he said, “I can’t believe she was covering that up.”