Infant Sisters Died After Their Cries Went Unheeded

Even for a couple known to their neighbors for fighting and drinking, the noises that night were chilling: The adults were yelling and cursing in Spanish and English and their twin infant daughters were crying uncontrollably.

Then came a frightening thud. Soon the babies’ crying subsided into silence. The silence persisted for a week. No one notified police.

On Wednesday, responding to a report from a probation officer that Yolanda Vera Camacho had missed an appointment, police went to the tiny apartment.

There, they discovered the woman’s lifeless body sprawled on the kitchen floor and the babies dead of apparent dehydration.

Now the police are trying to find the woman’s live-in companion, the babies’ father, Alfonso Penarant, a Mexican national who is thought to have fled to Tijuana.

Authorities believe the twins, almost 4 months old, died of neglect in the days after the mother died. “The babies, the babies,” said neighbor Maria Martinez, her eyes welling with tears. “They were so small. All we can do now is pray that their souls find rest.”

“Maybe if we had done something earlier, they might have been saved,” said another neighbor, who declined to give her name.

The fact that no one called police troubled Councilman Juan Vargas, who represents the low-income Sherman Heights area where the couple lived.

“I walked the property today, trying to figure that out,” Vargas said. “Neighbors just don’t seem to care anymore about neighbors. We’re trying to re-create a caring neighborhood in Sherman Heights and this is a serious setback. It’s very disturbing.”

But Catholic Msgr. Joe Carroll, who runs a program providing services to the poor and homeless near Sherman Heights, said reluctance to call police is not unusual for a neighborhood where some residents are illegal immigrants and others have criminal records.

“People in poor neighborhoods tend to be very private,” Carroll said. “They don’t want to get involved in other people’s business and they’re very gunshy of contacting the police.”

The grisly sight in the apartment left both neighbors and veteran police officers shaken.

“I’ve been in investigations a lot of years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Capt. Ron Newman. “We’ve had children die but never just from neglect.”

Police on Thursday contacted a family member of Camacho’s in Tijuana who had reportedly been in contact with Penarant, in hopes of convincing him to surrender for questioning. If Penarant, a native of Michoacan, does not surrender, it is possible he could be detained by Mexican police assisting their San Diego colleagues.

“We have ways of reaching out,” Newman said.

Benjamin Flores, a longtime resident of the area, said the deaths “make you wonder if God has forsaken us. What did those babies do to deserve to die that horribly?”

Neighbors recalled frequent arguments in Apartment 409 between Camacho and Penarant, whom they described as a short, youthful-looking man with multiple tattoos.

Police Lt. Ray Sigwalt said that the couple had a history of domestic violence--a point confirmed by neighbors.

“There was drinking and fighting all the time,” said Martinez’s teenage daughter, Angelica.

“She told me that he gave her a black eye when she was pregnant,” said Frances Farrar, another neighbor. “She said living with him was like walking on eggshells.”

The fighting apparently continued last week. “There was a very bad argument last Wednesday,” said Laura Norris, another neighbor. “Then we heard a thud and crying from the babies and then nothing at all.”

A week later, when police arrived at the couple’s apartment, the officers reported smelling an ominous stench. Once inside, they found Camacho sprawled on the kitchen floor, with two bottles of milk beside her body.

Police speculate that she may have been starting to feed her infant daughters--Yvonne Yvette Mirsha and Yvette Angelina Marie--when she died.

One girl was found on a couch in the living room, a second on the bedroom floor, wedged between a bed and a television stand. Both babies were dressed in T-shirts and diapers.

Autopsies are planned today on all three victims; Camacho may have died from one or more blows to the head, but determining the cause of her death will be difficult because of the body’s poor condition, officials said.

Until the autopsies, police have declined to call the case a murder, labeling it only “a suspicious death.”

Camacho, 40 and a native of San Diego, was serving three years’ probation on a drug charge; she had also been convicted in San Diego and Los Angeles of prostitution, burglary, petty theft and possession of stolen property.

According to court records, she had 10 other children, most in foster care.

In 1997, Camacho wrote a plaintive letter to a Superior Court judge, asking for probation and rehabilitation treatment after her latest heroin arrest.

“I realize I have an addiction strong and I have no control over it,” she wrote. “I have done nothing with my life as I originally planned and God’s will for me. I think I hurt him by wasting my talents and energy in the devil’s work. I want a clean, sober life but feel I cannot obtain that by my own will. . . . I realize I have been close to death many times and I am not ready to leave this earth.”

Camacho was sentenced to drug rehabilitation but failed to complete the program. Her probation was revoked and she served several months in jail before being released and once again placed on probation in 1999.

Neither Camacho nor Penarant, also 40 and a onetime construction worker, was employed. For several months, Penarant’s brother lived with the couple. The family is thought to have been receiving public assistance.

Camacho received her prenatal care at a local community clinic that provides free services to poor women, and neighbors said the babies were born prematurely and had to be hospitalized.

That history may have affected the timing of the babies’ deaths, which will be one of the key inquiries of the autopsy.

If the babies indeed had been premature or were ill, death could have been hastened, said Dr. Martin Stein, a professor of pediatrics at UC San Diego. Heat in a closed apartment could also be a factor.

Ordinarily, said Stein, a onetime associate of Dr. Benjamin Spock, infants cannot last more than a few days without fluids and nourishment. Without fluids, he said, dehydration and then shock sets in.

“Finally, the blood cannot circulate adequately to the kidneys and brain and those organs shut down,” he said.

Camacho and Penarant moved into the upstairs unit at the four-plex shortly before their daughters were born on May 4. Although the family was new to the apartment complex, neighbors had thrown a baby shower for Camacho and posed for pictures holding the babies in their pink receiving blankets.

“They were beautiful,” said Angelica Martinez.

Dean Marchant, owner of the apartment building, said of Camacho, “She was so proud of her kids. They were adorable girls.”

Community organizers in recent years have tried to reverse the fortunes and spirits of Sherman Heights, which in the early decades of San Diego’s history was an elite neighborhood where Victorian homes provided panoramic hilltop views of San Diego Bay. The homes were popular with sea captains and their Eastern-born brides.

But in recent decades, the neighborhood changed and it is now dotted with high-density apartment complexes. Many, like that occupied by Camacho and Penarant, have peeling paint, bars on the windows and unkempt yards. The neighborhood is often the first stop for Latino immigrants, some of them illegal.

Thursday, the walkway outside the apartment was occupied by a barrel full of crushed beer and malt liquor cans. “He drinks, they fight,” said Jesus Gonzalez, who lives down the block. “It’s a bad way to live, man, a bad way.”