Emerging From the Shadows After Life of Isolation, Abuse

For most of her life, Melissa was the family slave.

She was kept out of school and often forbidden to speak at home. She was forced to do the household chores and lapped water from the toilet. She was beaten with a vacuum hose, burned with an iron, hit with a belt buckle and allegedly sexually molested.

When strangers came around, Melissa was sent to the closet to hide.

But the 19-year-old El Monte woman has been freed. And now she is playing catch-up after a life as an urban “wild child”--an innocent who grows up isolated from society, only to later confront it. Suffering from slight mental retardation and cerebral palsy, Melissa is just now learning to read, write and make her way in the outside world.

Her story is based on interviews with family members and child welfare professionals and copies of Juvenile Court documents obtained by The Times over the last three months. Experts say the reports of her life, replete with details worthy of Dickens, represent one of the most extreme examples of cruelty to a child they have seen--short of murder.

“This is one of the worst cases of abuse I can recall,” said Andrew Bridge, executive director of the Alliance for Children’s Rights and a national children’s rights advocate.

What makes Melissa’s story especially remarkable, he and others said, is how an American-born child seemingly vanished from the view of all the institutions charged with caring for and protecting kids.

But she wasn’t always invisible, nor were her problems.

Years ago, welfare workers temporarily seized Melissa and her siblings after discovering child abuse. Some time later, police arrested her stepfather at least twice on suspicion of hurting family members.

But it wasn’t until her older half sister Gloria blew the whistle two years ago that authorities intervened again. Gloria and other family members agreed to be interviewed and furnish documents with the hope of sparing other abused children.

The Times has agreed not to use the last names of Melissa, Gloria and other siblings, because they are alleged victims of sexual molestation; their last names are different from their mother’s and stepfather’s.

The stepfather, Tito Dominguez, 56, was arrested and released in 1997 by police, who said there was insufficient evidence to charge him with sexual abuse. Records show that he has since moved to El Paso, although relatives there say they haven’t seen him for three years.

Why did Melissa’s mother treat her daughter so viciously?

Maria Salcedo, 41, could only say she felt “stuck with her.” Salcedo said she was also acting out of fear and frustration over threats Dominguez made to tell authorities that she never sent her daughter to school.

Neither Salcedo nor Dominguez has been charged. But after inquiries by The Times, El Monte police renewed their investigation. “We’re not saying this didn’t happen,” said Assistant Police Chief Bill Ankeny.

For her part, Melissa has spent the last two years trying to deal with what occurred. She is attending a special school in Alhambra, where she has progressed to a third-grade vocabulary, and is in weekly therapy, where she is still unraveling complex emotions about her past.

“I know my mom did wrong not sending me to school,” she told The Times, pausing awkwardly between each word. “She take me in the bathroom. She’d hit me with a belt buckle. She make me go in the closet a lot.”

Clad in jeans and a University of Michigan T-shirt, Melissa looks like a typical teenager. She grins as she talks about living with her half sister, named last year as Melissa’s conservator.

Under Gloria’s care, Melissa has had her first glimpse of the ocean, seen her first big-screen movie and gone to the mall.

She’s learned to tell time, make change and name the president. She loves to play basketball. She holds down a $5.75-an-hour part-time job looking after severely retarded students. To help her learn written language, Gloria has labeled objects throughout the home with their names. Now Melissa can proudly spell the word “live” on her own.

Mental Capacity, Memory Diminished

Yet it hasn’t been easy fitting in. Melissa has gotten into fights at school; Gloria once found a knife in her book bag. Melissa will always carry signs of abuse, such as a capped front tooth and scars. She remembers bits of her childhood, but some memories are lost.

Doctors say they don’t know how much the persistent mistreatment--including blows to her head--contributed to Melissa’s limited recall or mental capacity, which tests show is that of a 7-year-old.

But Gloria, 26, attributes Melissa’s condition to abuse. “Given half a chance, she wouldn’t have been so slow,” Gloria said.

Salcedo, reached by telephone at her home in San Bernardino County, said she is filled with regret for taking her frustrations out on the daughter she concealed.

“I used to abuse [Melissa],” Salcedo confessed. “It was my mistake when I used to mistreat Melissa. I cry every day.

“To be honest with you, I did something sick.”

The sickness began even before Melissa was born. Salcedo “abused a variety of illicit drugs” while pregnant with Melissa and continued to do so after the baby was born in May 1980, Juvenile Court records show.

Less than a year later, in April 1981, social workers seized Melissa and five older siblings after two of the children were rushed to the hospital. The reason: They had eaten PCP, a hallucinogenic drug also known as angel dust.

Salcedo told authorities at the time that she never smoked the drug in front of the children and blamed her boyfriend at the time--Melissa’s father, an El Monte gang member--and others for leaving the drug lying around.

“During the entire conversation with suspect Salcedo, it was very apparent she was not aware of the extreme danger” that PCP exposure posed to the children, said a 1981 case report.

Authorities farmed out the children to relatives and Salcedo went into drug rehabilitation, which she successfully completed in mid-1983. Even then, social workers expressed reluctance to return the children to their mother, because they said Salcedo showed only sporadic interest in them; Salcedo once failed to visit Melissa for six months. Social workers suggested holding the children for adoption.

But in late 1983, a Juvenile Court judge ordered Melissa returned, and the next year Salcedo was reunited with all of her children. By then, Melissa’s father had been stabbed to death and Salcedo was living with Dominguez.

The court terminated its jurisdiction over the children in early May 1985, based on the word of social workers, who paid bimonthly visits to the home. They reported that Salcedo was providing “adequate” care, saying: “Minors have attended school regularly.”

Not so, Melissa.

Just shy of her fifth birthday, she should have started kindergarten the next fall. Yet 13 years later--at a time when her peers would be graduating from high school--court records would say that she had never set foot inside a classroom.

“Almost unbelievably . . . Melissa had never been to school, had never left the family home, and never had normal exposure to the environment,” Kevin Stapleton, a Covina city councilman and Melissa’s court-appointed attorney, wrote in an August 1998 brief filed in conservatorship proceedings.

“I am further informed and believe that Melissa was totally denied a traditional upbringing and was treated like a ‘slave’ by her mother and stepfather,” Stapleton wrote.

Melissa’s life was Cinderella, minus the glass slippers. She was made to do the cooking, cleaning and straightening for the rest of the family, including younger siblings, according to documents and interviews with her sisters.

And if Melissa balked--or didn’t do the chores right--there were dire consequences, two psychologists said she told them.

Often Struck by Mother, Report Says

Melissa “indicated that she was hit often by her mother when anything went wrong or when she did not complete a task as her mother wanted,” Adriana Camargo-Fernandez, a Canyon Country psychologist, wrote in a report she provided to El Monte police four months ago.

“She stated that she frequently was hit with a hair brush on the head, that her mother would bite [her] fingers and chin when angry and that she would grab her by the throat and pin her against walls,” the psychologist wrote. “According to her, her most frequent memories are being hit in the bathroom.”

Reached by telephone Friday, Camargo-Fernandez confirmed the details in her report, adding that she found Melissa credible because she recounted “too many pieces” of information to have made it all up.

Camargo-Fernandez’s conclusions echoed observations made by a psychologist who examined Melissa for the county in 1997.

“Almost all of the family members living in the home threw things at her,” the psychologist wrote. “Her mother used to pull her hair, bite her, slap her, put a sock in her mouth and once chipped her front teeth with a vacuum cleaner. . . . Melissa has multiple scars all over her body from her history of physical abuse.”

It was in part because of the bruises from daily abuse that Melissa’s mother kept her from school, the therapist wrote.

Melissa and her sisters said it was even worse; that when the occasional stranger came around, Melissa’s mother sent her to hide behind a blanket in the closet.

“It’s the place she’d always hide me,” Melissa said. “Whoever comes, she always tell me to go in the closet.”

Melissa was allowed to go into the backyard and, when she got older, to a nearby store once a week to buy groceries, she and her sisters said. But she was sent only after school hours, so as to not draw attention, they added.

There was other abuse, they said. Salcedo stood by while Melissa occasionally lapped water from the toilet like a dog. In court records Salcedo is accused of searing Melissa with an iron and she and Dominguez are alleged to have used drugs in front of the children.

Salcedo denies treating Melissa like a slave--everyone in the family had their chores, she said--but admitted she failed to stop Melissa from drinking from the toilet. “When I got her back at 4 years old, she’d drink the water,” she said.

Salcedo also denied making Melissa hide in the closet but acknowledged that she concealed her from school officials. It began innocently, she said, when she kept Melissa from school because she didn’t have inoculation records; it snowballed to the point where she decided not to claim Melissa for welfare.

“I tried to be sneaky,” she said.

Gloria and a sister said they didn’t alert authorities to Melissa or her plight earlier because they feared their siblings still living at home would be sent to foster care. “Better your mother beat you than someone else,” Gloria said.

Salcedo said she abused Melissa out of frustration over the beatings she herself suffered from Dominguez. Court records say he punched, kicked and slashed her in front of the children. Salcedo also said Dominguez continually threatened to reveal Melissa’s lack of education to authorities.

“This guy had me so crazy, he had me under his control,” she said. “I took my anger out on her.”

Salcedo says she made several calls to report domestic abuse to Baldwin Park police during the late 1980s, when the family lived in that San Gabriel Valley city. Police records show that Dominguez was arrested in November 1988 on suspicion of spousal abuse.

After the family moved to El Monte, police arrested him April 11, 1997, records show--after getting a call from Gloria and Rachel, two daughters who were living on their own. They accuse Dominguez of chronic sexual abuse over 11 years. At the time of the arrest, social workers seized eight children living at the residence, including Melissa.

Police released Dominguez, however, when prosecutors determined that there was insufficient evidence to charge him. Dominguez could not be reached for comment, but police said he had denied the allegations.

Subsequent court records allege that Dominguez had sexually abused Melissa and that her mother knew it--a charge Salcedo denies.

Meanwhile, Gloria went to court in 1997 to have herself named Melissa’s conservator. That’s when social workers began to piece together the litany of abuse Melissa suffered and when school authorities discovered she existed. Melissa entered her first classroom in September 1997.

“If a parent wants to hide a kid, it’s hard to find her,” said David R. Sandall, superintendent of the El Monte Union High School District, in whose area Melissa lived.

Experts say lawmakers have tried to close loopholes that allow children like Melissa to escape notice. One welfare reform measure enacted last year requires adults to prove that their children regularly attend school to receive their full government payments.

Police Renew Investigation

A spokesman for the county Department of Children and Family Services said he didn’t know why its predecessor agency didn’t keep a closer eye on the children.

But he said the current department would have no way of knowing Melissa suffered abuse if she were kept from “mandated reporters” such as doctors, educators and police, who are required by state law to report signs of child abuse.

El Monte police elected not to pursue a case against Dominguez after they received Camargo-Fernandez’s report five months ago. Det. Randall Lovelace, who headed the investigation, said Melissa wouldn’t make a good witness because she had a “poor recollection” and didn’t want to testify with her mother sitting in court. But last month, the department renewed its investigation.

Meanwhile, Salcedo said she is doing “everything in my power” to get her children back--a prospect that looks dim.

“Currently, there is no substantial probability of minors returning to the care of their mother and/or father,” caseworkers concluded in a Juvenile Court document filed last month. Seven of Salcedo’s children are still minors.

And the same prognosis applies to Melissa, who says she is not ready to forgive the woman who gave her life but then tried to keep it a secret.

“I don’t want to see my mom,” she said.