Facing Tragedy, Pastors Put Their Faith on Hold

As pastors, Ronnie and Yvette Rodriguez ministered to former gang members and recovering drug addicts like themselves, all in the name of doing the work of God.

They say they never sought reward for their service. But they never expected to be punished either.

So why, they ask, did God take their Alyssa?

The child’s death reverberated in her hometown. Her funeral drew 2,000. A churchgoer who was caring for the 4-year-old was charged with smothering the child. But for the girl’s parents, the unimaginable death and the trial’s mixed results brought deep frustration and a painful sense of betrayal.

How could they love a God, they asked, who gave them Alyssa and then allowed her death?

And then came their doubt: Maybe there isn’t a God.

*

Long before Yvette, 36, and Ronnie, 37, met, they said, they lived in parallel universes of drugs.

As a bored teenager in Chula Vista, Yvette turned to meth and stole to support her habit. She had a son out of wedlock, and left him with his grandmother in her childhood home while she lived on the streets.

Ronnie said he grew up in nearby San Diego, watching his parents snort and smoke drugs. Dad bought a home with drug money. After he went to prison, Mom sold it for drug money. By the time he was a teenager, Ronnie was doing heroin.

Their lives intersected when a judge sent each to residential drug treatment programs run by Victory Outreach, a 37-year-old Christian ministry that runs dozens such homes worldwide.

In early 1997, Yvette and Ronnie met at a San Diego Victory Outreach church. They were drawn to each other’s emerging faith and became licensed ministers during their courtship.

They were married the next year and moved to Montclair, where they supervised a church-run house similar to those where they had lived. Alyssa was born while they lived there. “I prayed and prayed for a little girl,” Yvette said. “When she came, I couldn’t imagine how life could be any better.”

When Alyssa was 5 months old, the family took over another Victory Outreach drug-treatment home in Ontario. The family shared one room in the two-story house, and a rotating cast of men bunked in the others. When Ronnie’s stepfather, a pastor in the Ontario Victory Outreach, became terminally ill in early 2003, Ronnie and Yvette became its pastors.

Because of the religious environment that enveloped the home, Alyssa’s parents said they rarely worried about her being around men with such hardened backgrounds. The men indulged her by playing dolls and tea party. Together they blossomed, Yvette said.

“When they interacted with my child,” Yvette said, “these men would transform from gorillas to teddy bears.”

They used the men’s stories and their own to teach Alyssa about God’s love. In turn, church was the highlight of her week, and she refused to eat dinner until everyone had prayed.

The girl, with wide, brown eyes, waist-length light-brown curls and a love of jewelry, graced the home with her energy. Her vocabulary, with words like “actually” and “regardless,” belied her age.

In August she started preschool and, by the third week, had filled a notebook with drawings. One showed her family: parents, half-brother and Cha-Cha, her Chihuahua. The foreground was dominated by a cross drawn in thick white crayon.

*

On Sept. 28, a balmy Tuesday, Ronnie and Yvette went to the church office five minutes away to install a computer. They left Alyssa with Veronica Trejo, one of the women in the Victory Outreach program. Trejo, a 42-year-old mother of six and a former meth addict, can be seen in the grainy home video of Alyssa’s first birthday.

The parents instructed Trejo: Pick up the house a little, and change Alyssa’s pants so she would be ready for school that afternoon. And since she bathed the night before, don’t give her another.

But the child insisted on a bath, standing naked in the tub and asking permission to turn on the water. Trejo said no.

“I hate you,” Alyssa told Trejo, according to the woman’s account to police.

San Bernardino County prosecutors said Trejo snapped, crushing Alyssa’s face to her chest. Traces of the girl’s DNA were found on Trejo’s red tank top.

“She literally squeezed the life out of [Alyssa],” prosecutor Jason Anderson would later tell jurors.

After pulling open the pink rose-printed shower curtain, another church member found Alyssa in the bathtub.

Paramedics tried to revive Alyssa on the living room floor. At the hospital, Yvette touched Alyssa’s little hand, now cold. The coroner ruled that she had died of asphyxiation.

A memorial for Alyssa drew 2,000 people to an Ontario church. She was buried in a long, white dress and an angel necklace. A tiara was perched on her curls. Her favorite baby boy doll was placed in her arms.

Alyssa loved infant boys so much, her parents believe, that she left them with a gift.

Yvette became pregnant a month after Alyssa’s death, and the couple are expecting a boy this month.

Even as Yvette grows heavier with child, she and Ronnie drive every Wednesday to Alyssa’s grave in Bellevue Memorial Cemetery in Ontario.

After the cemetery grass has been mowed, Ronnie scrubs and polishes the marble headstone until it shines. They adorn it with pinwheels, leis and a picture of her favorite cartoon character, Dora the Explorer. Angel statues and a plastic tiger sit on the stone, inscribed with her name and a small cross.

Soon after their child’s death, Ronnie and Yvette started disengaging from religious faith. Their first step: resigning as pastors.

“We had devoted our lives to helping people, then one of those people turned around and took away something so precious to us,” Yvette said. “If this is some twisted test of my faith, I admit that I failed.”

In January, finding it too painful to live in the house where Alyssa died, they bought their own home in Ontario.

But the memories followed.

In the backyard sits Alyssa’s Barbie jeep, its cotton-candy pink plastic fading in the summer sun. Poster-size photos of the child -- smiling with a birthday lei around her neck in one, clutching a gold medal around her neck after winning a footrace in another -- hang next to the family computer and in both bedrooms.

Her toys rest on a shelf above her parents’ bed.

The trinkets comforted Alyssa’s parents while they awaited Trejo’s trial for second-degree murder.

In opening statements to the jury, the woman’s defense attorney blamed the other churchgoer working in the house. Trejo’s lawyer said the other woman, who weighed nearly 300 pounds, probably sat on Alyssa while putting pants on the child, and inadvertently suffocated her.

The DNA on Trejo’s shirt? It happens when you’re a babysitter, the defense lawyer said. The smears weren’t from a child sobbing as she gasped for breath, but from the strawberry ice cream Trejo had fed Alyssa that morning.

Alyssa’s parents say if someone shares the blame for her death, it is God.

“Sometimes I can’t help but think God is punishing us for doing good,” Ronnie said, burying his head in his husky, painter’s hands. “Then I think it’s more cruel than that, that he wanted to get back at me for what I did when I was younger. He waited until I had Alyssa so I would feel the most pain possible.”

The trial lasted seven days, and jurors deliberated another three before acquitting Trejo on May 26 of second-degree murder and voluntary manslaughter. But they deadlocked on other serious charges: involuntary manslaughter and assault on a child causing death.

Ronnie was dazed. “You keep on wondering what could have been done differently, not just during the trial but in our whole lives,” he said. “Maybe it was a mistake to devote our lives to this. Maybe we should have just let God do his work without us.”

Still, the couple have taken small steps back to religious faith. They attend Victory Outreach’s San Bernardino church on Sundays. But they still aren’t ready to return to God’s work.

“God took everything from us,” Yvette said. “We have nothing left to give to anyone else.”

Then they were asked one more question that struck at the heart of their Christian faith: Could they forgive? In so many words, that question was asked by prosecutors who were debating whether to retry Trejo on the remaining charges or drop the case.

For now, the Rodriguezes cannot forgive. They asked that the woman be retried.

While the case was in limbo, Trejo was free. She was ordered to return to the Rancho Cucamonga courthouse Friday to learn what the district attorney’s office had decided.

The week before the hearing, the Rodriguezes were told that prosecutors were leaning toward dropping the charges. Angry and disappointed, the couple begged them to reconsider.

On Friday, Superior Court Judge Craig S. Kamansky in Rancho Cucamonga allowed prosecutors to drop the remaining charges.

“Based on the evidence I heard,” he said, “I don’t believe that a jury of 12 people could ever agree on a conviction.”

No one from Alyssa’s family was at the three-minute hearing. Their conflict with prosecutors over whether to pursue the other charges pushed them closer to God.

Without any legal finality, they started to realize he might be their only source of closure.

“Veronica will be judged, whether it’s in this life or by God,” Yvette said. “With nothing else to hold on to, we have to start believing that.”