Murder Devastates Lesbian Couple

Cheryl Romo

She was an adorable little girl who had just begun forming words into sentences when her foster mothers received a phone call in late April telling them that the child was being returned to relatives and had to leave their Los Angeles home within the hour.

Two-year-old Sarah Angelina Chavez responded to the news with a firm "no." When her foster mothers tried to pack Sarah's clothes, the toddler shoved the garments back into her tiny dresser. "Sarah was devastated," Dianne Hardy-Garcia recalled. "It was awful, awful."

The caller identified herself as Josephanie Ackman, Sarah's court-appointed attorney with the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles, someone the foster mothers say they and Sarah had never met. "We had just an hour to pack up her things and to try to explain to a 2-year-old what was about to happen, even though it was incomprehensible to us," Corri Planck, the other foster mother, said. "We didn't think she was being returned to a safe place and we expressed great concern."

Five months later, Sarah was dead. The county coroner's office has yet to release a final autopsy report, but preliminary findings were that Sarah died of "blunt force trauma," reportedly to her abdomen. In simple terms, the 2-year-old was beaten to death. There are also reports that Sarah was taken to a local hospital the day before her death with a broken arm and that she left the hospital untreated.

The toddler's uncle and aunt, Armando and Frances Abundis of Alhambra, were arrested and charged with murder, assault on a child causing death, and child abuse likely to cause great bodily injury or death. In addition, narcotics were reportedly found in the home and the couple was charged with narcotics possession and intent to sell. The prosecutor in Sarah's case, Deputy District Attorney Franco A. Baratta of the Family Violence Division, said it would be premature to comment on the case.

On Oct. 27 the Abundises pleaded not guilty at their arraignment. Several family members were present, including Sarah's mother, according to Hardy-Garcia who was also there. "One family member told me that Frances said Sarah's death was an accident," Hardy-Garcia said.

How this tragedy could have happened to a child described as "spectacular and amazing" is incomprehensible to those who loved her. After learning of Sarah's death, Planck and Hardy-Garcia sent an e-mail to friends and family. The Oct. 19 message, in part, reads: "Sarah was let down time after time by the social service, legal and medical systems that should have protected her. The numerous ways she was failed are maddening and sickening. We are sharing this with you because as one of the people that shared in our joy when Sarah arrived in our lives, we think you will understand our profound grief and rage at her senseless and preventable death."

Just how was Sarah failed? Planck and Hardy-Garcia, both high-profile LGBT rights activists, contend that the child was let down from the time she entered the child protective system in January until her death Oct. 11. The couple said they were told that Sarah entered foster care because she had been severely abused and mistreated while living in the Abundises home -- and that her removal from her uncle and aunt's home was prompted by an investigation of the death of another child in Sarah's family who died at another residence. The Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) social worker emphatically told the couple that she would never recommend that Sarah be returned to the custody of her uncle and aunt. "Every night Sarah would wake up crying at 2 a.m.," Planck said. "She slept fitfully." Added Hardy-Garcia: "We had concerns she was abused."

L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's office has launched an investigation into the circumstances surrounding Sarah's death while in DCFS' care. But prior abuse allegations are difficult to nail down in a "child protective system" that historically closes ranks after a foster child dies. Representatives of the district attorney's office said they were not aware of previous criminal child abuse allegations being filed against Armando and Frances Abundis. While DCFS spokesman Stuart Riskin acknowledged that his department is conducting an internal investigation into Sarah's death, he declined further comment because of confidentiality restrictions. "We are working very hard to keep children at home with their families," Riskin said of his department. "The goal is to keep families intact."

Keeping families intact was a theme repeatedly expressed by those working within the child protective system, a system where each year children continue to die. DCFS statistics indicate that 70 children have died from January through Sept. 30, not including Sarah's death or any other deaths that may have occurred since then. Eleven of these deaths, Riskin said, were ruled homicides.

Keeping families intact sounds like a good thing, but returning children to an unsafe home is criminal, said Planck and Hardy-Garcia. They charge that neither Ackman, nor any representatives of her law firm, made contact with them while the toddler lived in their home from January until late April. They questioned how, in good conscience, the attorney could have recommended Sarah be returned to a home where she felt unsafe and where she had allegedly been previously abused.

"I just don't understand how the attorney could do that," Planck said. "How could she override the recommendation of the DCFS social worker when she had never even visited our home? She had never even talked to us about Sarah."

Attempts to contact Ackman for comment were unsuccessful. Some children's attorneys, who asked to remain unidentified, praised her as a passionate advocate for children -- and records obtained from the State Bar of California indicated that Ackman, who was admitted to the bar in 1997, has no public record of disciplinary actions filed against her.

Ackman's employer, The Children's Law Center of Los Angeles -- a non-profit, public interest law firm, with nearly 200 employees -- is taxpayer funded through the Los Angeles Superior Court. The law firm represents 80 percent of L.A. County's 30,000 dependent children and is the largest representative of foster children in California, if not the nation, according to recent testimony before Congress by the firm's Executive Director Mariam Aroni Krinsky. She told the House Ways and Means Committee that her firm serves as "the voice" for foster children and is "uniquely positioned to help propel innovation and change on a local, state, and national level."

Krinsky refused to comment on Sarah's death. Sharon Appel, a spokeswoman for the firm, said it is the firm's policy to never comment on specific cases. She also declined to confirm that Ackman is employed by the firm and curiously, when asked for general policy guidelines regarding court-appointed attorney-client meetings and visits to foster children by the firm's investigators and social workers, she again said she could not comment "due to legal restraints."

Other attorneys said lawyers must have contact with their clients. Linda Wallace Pate, a children's attorney now in private practice, said that lawyers have a legal and moral obligation to represent the best interests of their child clients. "The most important voice in the courtroom is the child's attorney," Pate said. "The child is totally dependent on the attorney to protect them. If the attorney doesn't protect them, there is no reason to have an attorney at all. The only way an attorney can serve the best interests of the child is to go see that child -- or, at the very least, send someone who is professionally trained to observe the child."

Another veteran attorney, formerly with the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles, said on condition of anonymity that dependency attorneys have a legal responsibility to meet with clients. In Sarah's case, he speculated, the child's court-appointed attorney may have felt overwhelmed by a large caseload and relied too heavily on reports generated by DCFS' social workers. "And who knows what was really in those reports until you see the information?" he asked.

Information regarding children in the dependency system is notoriously hard to obtain. IN Los Angeles magazine filed a legal petition Oct. 24 with Juvenile Court Presiding Judge Michael Nash requesting access to the child's dependency court records and DCFS reports. It remains pending until a hearing is scheduled and a judicial ruling is issued.

The system itself is shielded from public scrutiny by a maze of confidentiality laws that were originally designed to protect vulnerable children. But what about the child who dies while being protected and, as in the case with Sarah, has no siblings who need to be shielded from the public's view?

Terry Francke, a prominent Sacramento open government attorney, said he was appalled. "The habit of the surviving implicated adults to refer to the 'privacy' rights of a youngster killed or injured while subject to the child welfare system as a reason for suppressing information that would tend to explain the death or injury is nothing less than Dickensian in its pious shamelessness," Francke said. "If the dead have privacy rights (by definition subject to being invoked only by their survivors), how convenient for those who killed them or let them die of neglect."

Christina Riehl, a staff attorney with the Children's Advocacy Institute in San Diego, a non-profit state-wide organization that lobbies to protect the rights of vulnerable kids, agreed. "Once the child is deceased, the need for protection has vanished," she said. "When there is a child who has passed we need to quickly look at what happened. We need to make sure it doesn't happen again."

Planck and Hardy-Garcia, who have been partners for five years, say they have been left devastated by Sarah's death and feel compelled to seek justice for a child whose voice has been silenced. They say they are also troubled by erroneous news accounts that have reported Sarah was in a foster home where she was allegedly killed by her "foster parents."

"We know there is a risk in speaking out now," Planck, deputy executive director of the Family Pride Coalition, said. "We didn't go into this blindly. We understood when we became foster parents that Sarah could be taken from us."

"This is the worst nightmare you can imagine," said Hardy-Garcia, a marketing executive who previously served as executive director of the Lesbian/Gay Rights Lobby of Texas. "But we don't want people not to become foster parents. This was Sarah's birth-family that did this to her. There are amazing foster parents out there and they're getting a bad rap."

In the end, what the foster mothers say they want most is for others to understand what made Sarah Angelina Chavez, a pig-tailed kid with big brown eyes and a great smile, special.

"The day I picked her up she was so cute. She went right into my arms. She had chocolate all over her face and we washed it off. My dog instantly fell in love with this kid and slept with her every night," Hardy-Garcia recalled. "She wanted to go everywhere. She liked to walk and look at birds. She was so funny."

"Sarah was joyfully curious and liked little snails and flowers," Planck said. "She was engaging, charming, outgoing, and magnetic. Being with her was like a different kind of happy."

"She was like a kid that hadn't been given much. When she got something, some little toy, she cherished it," Hardy-Garcia added. "The last month she was with us she had this amazing growth spurt and language spurt. In one week, she began speaking in sentences -- and then she was gone."

Journalist Cheryl Romo previously covered foster care issues for the Los Angeles Daily Journal.