A Story Crying Out for a Happy Ending

It will be a year this month since the beginning of the end of their family, since the secrets stopped and the headlines began. The littlest ones can forget, but the eldest daughter is in sixth grade. It is in her--in the eyes she got from her father, in the panic she feels when her brothers start crying, in the way she keeps biting her nails.

Maybe you recall her family’s story; maybe you couldn’t bring yourself to read it, a tragedy that began to unravel in the Angeles National Forest on a winter day: The Mexican man with seven children by his wife and six more by her younger sister. The police. The 5-year-old boy, Ernesto, buried in the shallow grave.

A year this month. In America, the father had told them, this was the poor man’s funeral, but the girl knew better. She had seen what happened to Ernesto, seen the beatings, felt the lash of her father’s belt, the slam of his fist. Ernesto had been her half-brother, one of the throng of her father’s children in that squalid garage in the San Fernando Valley where their father also kept his younger woman, forcing them all to sell corn on the streets.

“When my dad got pissed, he’d hit everybody--me, my brothers and sisters, my mother,” the girl says almost inaudibly, glancing up from under long black bangs. Ernesto just got it the most. She’d shush his moaning, but nothing mattered. He slept like a dog in the corner. An autopsy revealed nine broken ribs, scars from whippings, legs that were deformed because they’d been broken and left unset.

A year this month. When the police happened upon the child’s burial, it gradually came out--the death of Ernesto. The death of another half-sibling, Lupita, 2, when she’d wet her pants five months before. A year this month since her father and his women were arrested, since the girl’s ravaged family was reduced to her brothers, her sisters and herself.

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In a perfect world, a year would be time enough for some happier ending. “Terrorized Children Rescued, Placed in Loving Home.” But last year’s headlines have segued into a new trauma: What to do with the children now?

The children of the wife, Petra, are in foster care and are expected to remain there. More divisive, however, has been the matter of the six children born to the younger woman, Maria Ricardo, most of whom were battered, but none of whom were killed. A dependency court judge has ruled that the kids--who range from toddler-hood to the big sister--cannot be reunified with their mother, who, with her sister, has been charged as an accessory to murder after the fact.

By all accounts, Ricardo never beat any of the children, but neither did she keep them safe. It is said that, even if she is acquitted, she’ll never win her own children back. So they have lived for seven months now with a Salvadoran-born foster mother who says she’ll keep them all until they are 18. It’s only a promise; by law, a foster parent can dump a child with a week’s notice. Meanwhile, their county caseworker has recommended that they be put up for adoption, though the likelihood of finding someone to adopt six siblings, even when they are this beautiful, is virtually nil.

Thus, a third plan has come up, a plan that has driven the children wild with anguish: The county has suggested that they be split up and sent to more than one adoptive home. The caseworkers say their “mission is to ensure permanence,” that the kids could maintain contact. The children sobbed uncontrollably when they were told.

Next week, the children will ask the court to keep them together. They don’t have much in the way of rights. The eldest daughter is over 12 and cannot be adopted without her consent, but she has no say over her siblings. So the children have decided to protest publicly, buttressed by lawyers and therapists.

Their advocates raise questions: What’s the hurry? The children have scarcely had time to grieve their losses, and their parents won’t even face trial until later this year. Why not wait until it’s all over before acting irrevocably?

They produce letters from the mother. Te quiero mucho mi reina bonita, she writes to the eldest daughter, I love you so much, my lovely queen. Below the words she has drawn a rose in a woman’s shackled hands. The last time they saw her, a deputy said something about “medication.” The kids hugged the glass and cried for days.

This is the rest of the story, a scant year later, and it does raise questions: What kind of system leaves a wounded child feeling this unheard? Permanence is crucial, but should any “mission” be this traumatic and inflexible?

What happens when we yearn too much for perfect, catch-all answers in a world where no two hearts ever break the same?

“They don’t understand,” the eldest daughter nearly whispers, reaching out for the tiny hand of her baby brother. “We are all we have.”

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.