At least 13 calls were made to the child abuse hotline about Anthony’s welfare. But child protective workers missed numerous opportunities to intervene before Anthony’s death, according to dozens of interviews. What happened?
Anthony’s parents, Heather Barron and Victor Avalos, were still teenagers when Anthony was born. Avalos left for Mexico soon after, seeing his son grow up through occasional video chats but never again in person. Anthony’s mother raised the family with earnings from a part-time job at Subway and $793 in monthly welfare benefits, according to DCFS records.
Anthony verified the account to a caseworker who interviewed him at school. Further interviews revealed that his mother had not gotten him counseling and that Anthony was acting sexually inappropriately with another child, according to DCFS records. But internal reviews showed that caseworkers placed children, including Anthony, into the program even after the department’s risk-scoring tool evaluated them as being at “high” risk of abuse.Caseworkers did not remove him from his home even after he wrote a suicide note, appeared in school with wounds from BB pellets shot across his face and told his teacher that his mother abused him, according to records.
Wendy Wright, another counselor at the Children’s Center who spent significant time with Anthony and his mother, called the child abuse hotline that October to report that Barron grabbed one of Anthony’s siblings violently and dragged him across the room, consistently talked about her children in derogatory terms and displayed “nothing but anger toward those children.”
Dixon would later testify about her role in the Fernandez case before Gabriel’s death. In 2017, she told the court in the criminal case against Gabriel’s caseworkers that she witnessed extensive injuries but withheld the information from the child abuse hotline, despite state law requiring her to report all suspected abuse.After Dixon was assigned to Anthony’s case, the focus of her counseling to reduce the abuse in the family was directed at Anthony, not his mother.
DCFS workers also did not locate and interview Leiva at any point over the three years they investigated the family, even though they suspected he was at the home regularly on nights and weekends, the case notes show. Sciortino told the child abuse hotline that she doubted the abuse claim but wanted it recorded “to cover our butts.”
By September 2015, Anthony was enrolled at Lincoln Elementary School in Lancaster. In talking with Anthony, Vice Principal Gia Greaux had become increasingly dismayed. When Heather came to pick up her children, David and his wife physically blocked her from taking them and called 911. Sheriff’s Deputy Michael Gellardo responded and called the child abuse hotline to report what had happened.
He also told the hotline worker that Leiva was a member of the MS-13 gang and that he was afraid of what he would do next. Vernon then called Dixon and two other Hathaway-Sycamores counselors who had been working in the home for seven months. They were supportive of Heather Barron’s parenting during the discussion. “Each service provider reported that they have never heard anything from the children about abuse and neglect,” Vernon wrote.
In later testimony before the grand jury that indicted Heather Barron and Leiva for murder, Vernon said her decision relied on the children recanting their prior claims of abuse. She testified that she was unaware that victims of abuse often retract their accounts. Near the end of 2016, at least one more call to the child abuse hotline arrived regarding Anthony’s family, but details in the department file are scant. Caseworkers marked it “unfounded.”
The following night, Leiva allegedly dropped Anthony repeatedly on his head, according to grand jury transcripts. When Heather hesitated to let her see her nephew, Maria crouched at her feet, on her hands and knees on the linoleum floor, to plead with her to allow her to see the boy. In the months since Anthony’s death, his siblings have answered questions — often reluctantly — for detectives, prosecutors and grand jurors, providing a graphic and poignant coda, all the while professing their love for theirAnthony’s 8-year-old sister told investigators he was forced to kneel on his bare knees on dry rice “a lot,” often from the time he returned from school until it was time for bed. It was such a common practice that his knees were scabbed, never healing.
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