Opinion: Social workers need to be held accountable for Gabriel Fernandez’s death

To the editor: As a retired children’s social worker who was with the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services for nearly 20 years, I was appalled and disgusted after reading about the death in 2013 of 8-year old Gabriel Fernandez. (“4 L.A. County social workers to face trial in horrific death of 8-year-old boy,” March 20)

While I and most social workers were aware of his horrific death at the time, the apparent lack of compassion, common sense and social work skills that contributed to this child’s preventable death is inexcusable and unimaginable.

According to court records, Fernandez died after “months of torture and abuse”; his case should be a wake-up call to all children’s social workers and their supervisors who choose to ignore evidence of repeated abuse and to minimize a child’s injuries, as the caseworkers here are accused of doing. I hope justice will be served when these four social workers stand trial.

Timmie Saltzman, Los Angeles

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To the editor: As a mom, I could only make it through two-thirds of this article, to the point where little Gabriel begged his first-grade teacher for help. There is only so much of this I can take.

As I see it, there were two ways to save this child’s life: His teacher could have taken him home with her and faced jail time, or he could have been put in an orphanage, which I realize don’t exist anymore. Trying to get a massive bureaucracy to save him was obviously pointless, even though that it is precisely what it was set up to do.

I don’t want to ever have to read about this again. We need to bypass the social services and go directly to law enforcement and stop expecting small children to defend themselves. Maybe the answer is to have teachers go directly to law enforcement instead of social workers.

Jane Warden, Malibu

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