Jovonie
Mke
By Lisa Sandberg
Express-News Staff Writer
Web Posted : 01/25/2004 12:00 AM
The call to investigate a boy's death roused Detective Alfred Damiani
from sleep before dawn on Christmas morning.
Leaving his house, the sheriff's detective knew only that a 4-year-old had
just died, surrounded by relatives, in a West Bexar County subdivision. The
boy was so emaciated he resembled an alien, an investigator had told Damiani
by phone.
Most investigators dread child death cases. Damiani, a hardened 17-year
veteran, was no exception. He headed to the office with a deep sense of
dismay as he began working a case that would shock him like no other.
For the better part of the morning, a parade of relatives who had lived with
Jovonie Ochoa for the past 21/2 months of his life traipsed in and out of
the detective's stark office, each swearing to Damiani that the boy had been
delivered to them only the evening before.
Not one of them reached for the box of tissues on his desk, Damiani would
recall later.
The detective's hunch, that he was dealing not with grieving relatives but
with people he might have to arrest, would be borne out in the days ahead.
Four of Jovonie's relatives - including his paternal grandmother and his
mother, who was not living at the home - were charged last week with
multiple felony abuse charges that could land them in prison for the rest of
their lives.
The story of Jovonie's short life and tragic death is populated by adults
who failed him and one hard-boiled detective who is determined not to. It's
a story of generational abuse and dead-end families, a tale that has
revealed itself slowly to a horrified city as investigators sort through the
sad evidence of the case.
And it all began before Jovonie was born.
As Damiani sat at his desk questioning Jovonie's relatives Christmas
morning, another detail emerged that tightened the knot in his gut. The
detective had investigated this family before, on a triple murder five years
earlier.
The old murder case came into focus as Maria Palacios, the boy's
grandmother, sat beside Damiani's desk and offered that he might know her
son, Domingo Esqueda, who was involved, she said, in a "little mix-up."
"You mean Mingo?" Damiani asked incredulously. "Did that 'little mix-up'
happen to involve a triple murder?"
Eyes downcast, Palacios, who had spent the interview coughing and spitting
into Damiani's trash can, mumbled a yes. Mingo had been at the wrong place
at the wrong time, she said.
In 1999, Damiani and his colleagues had linked Jovonie's father to the gang
hit of two teen cousins and their friend. The sheriff's office had found
Jovonie's mother hiding in Indiana and summoned her back on a theft charge
in hopes she would help in the case.
The white Toyota pickup used by the four men charged in the case was traced
to Maria Palacios and her husband Juan, though they were not implicated in
the killings.
Damiani had interrogated many of the same people who now sat nervously
before him recounting how a once seemingly healthy 4-year-old had starved
and died at the weight of an average 6-month-old, 16 pounds.
When the last relative had been excused late that morning, Damiani pulled a
black loose-leaf binder from his file cabinet to jog his memory.
On a cold, windy day in late January 1999, a rancher driving his family to a
morning church function spotted the bodies of two teenagers along the gravel
road of his 45-acre ranch.
Jesse Zavala, 14, had been shot once in the head. His cousin Adrian
Contreras, 17, had been bludgeoned with a tire iron and run over by a
pickup.
The double homicide bore the hallmarks of a sloppy gang hit.
Authorities landed their big break within days when gang-unit investigators
stopped the white Toyota outside the funeral home where the cousins'
grieving relatives had gathered.
One investigator noted the heart-shaped pattern on the tires seemed to match
tire prints from the crime scene.
The truck's occupants were taken in for questioning. They were Domingo
Esqueda, a 19-year-old gang member; his pregnant girlfriend Liza Ochoa, 18;
and their friend, Daniel "Pee Wee" Chavez, 19.
The truck, which contained the cousins' blood, was the link that tied
Esqueda, Chavez and 29-year-old twin brothers Alfredo and Armando Ortegon
Jr. to the double slaying and to another murder that same morning of Andrew
Rodriguez, 40.
Esqueda and the twins fled to Mexico; Liza Ochoa, who was not implicated in
the killings, fled to Indiana.
Damiani and other investigators would spend months tracking them down,
leading to Esqueda's guilty plea. The investigation introduced him to
Esqueda and Ochoa, the expectant parents of Jovonie Ochoa.
Born into chaos
When Jovonie was born prematurely at Southwest General on Sept. 1, 1999, his
father was already in custody, and his mother, at 19, was a junior high
school dropout with no job, two daughters ages 1 and 2 and a third child to
feed.
It was an inauspicious introduction to life.
"There were no positive people around this kid," the blunt-spoken Damiani
recalled.
Though he weighed 5 pounds, 6.3 ounces at birth and was hospitalized for the
first few weeks of his life, Jovonie developed into a healthy baby. He would
always remain small for his age but he had a voracious appetite, an
infectious laugh and big black curly eyelashes, relatives and friends
recalled.
"He'd eat everything," said his godmother, Rebecca Delgado-Vasquez, who
often cared for Jovonie in the first years of his life. "Barbecue ribs with
green beans on top, he'd eat every single green bean. We'd call it a happy
plate if he ate everything."
When Jovonie was a baby, his mother moved the family in with the paternal
grandmother, Maria Palacios, who now faces criminal charges in his death.
Liza Ochoa eventually landed public housing and moved her children into a
two-bedroom apartment on North Gen. McMullen Drive. She collected welfare
when she wasn't waiting tables at a local pizzeria. She became romantically
involved with an older woman, JoAnn Vasquez, who moved in with the family
and helped support the kids with a job at a fast-food chicken restaurant.
Neither was an ideal caregiver. By 2002, Ochoa was using heroin, according
to her own court testimony. In January of that year, Child Protective
Services began investigating allegations they were abusing the kids.
Two investigations were closed due to insufficient evidence. A third
investigation was closed because a caseworker was unable to locate Jovonie's
mother despite repeated visits to the home.
Ochoa said she couldn't handle the pressures of motherhood. In mid-October
2003, she sent Jovonie and his two sisters, Ariel, 6, and Felicia, 5, to
live with Palacios in a crowded household occupied by Palacios' husband,
Juan; two of Palacios' children, Geronimo Esqueda, 19, and Delores Esqueda,
25; and Delores' four young children. Juan Palacios is the only adult in the
household not charged in connection with the death.
By all accounts, Jovonie arrived thin but in apparent good health. He
weighed 26 pounds when last seen by a doctor nine months earlier.
Underweight but not excessively so, medical experts have said.
"Systematic torture" is how one official described the cruelty Jovonie
appears to have suffered in the weeks before his death.
At least four relatives have told authorities the boy had been starved and
beaten while tied to his top bunk bed, his hands, mouth and feet duct-taped.
The medical examiner's office indicated last week that the boy may have been
restrained for weeks.
"It's the worst case I've ever seen," a fatigued-looking Damiani said
recently.
It was the worst case for many of the doctors and nurses in the trauma room
of Methodist Children's Hospital, where Jovonie's bruised body was taken on
Christmas morning.
Dr. Marie Berkenkamp, the emergency room doctor that night, could hardly
keep herself composed.
"Everybody had tears in their eyes," she said.
He came in without even a name, unaccompanied by a single relative.
The investigator who called Damiani on Christmas morning was right: Jovonie
did look like an alien. He was a skeleton, covered by skin. He looked like
he might have died in a famine. Sores covered his cheeks, nose and ankles.
He had a bruised forehead and bleeding in the brain. His eyes were wide
open.
How could a boy die of starvation in a home filled with relatives? In a
house with seven children, why did only one show signs of abuse?
No one has been able to provide answers to those questions.
Maria Esqueda, Palacios' 21-year-old daughter, attempted to but faltered.
She said that during her periodic visits to the house, she saw Jovonie grow
increasingly weak. She said she protested each time she saw her mother
duct-taping Jovonie, but to no avail.
Maria Esqueda last saw Jovonie during a festive late-night get-together on
Christmas Eve at the Potter Valley house, where relatives opened presents
and munched on chocolate cupcakes and sugar cookies.
She was told Jovonie was in his bedroom, sick again. She went in to visit
and remembers Jovonie telling her he loved her. She doesn't recall his being
restrained to his bunk that night.
He was so weak he could no longer get out of bed.
He died sometime after midnight, alone in the top bunk.
Failed by the state?
Did Child Protective Services fail Jovonie? The agency's decision to close
its investigation of Liza Ochoa because caseworkers couldn't find her has
drawn sharp criticism.
"They've got to have a better tracking method," said state Sen. Leticia Van
De Putte, D-San Antonio. "The easiest way to get out of being investigated
is to not answer the door or be home."
State Rep. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio, who chairs the panel overseeing the
Texas Department of Human Services, an umbrella group that includes Child
Protective Services, called for immediate changes in the way cases are
closed.
The fact that caregivers couldn't be found "should send up red flares," he
said.
Lawmakers called for legislative action that would sanction caregivers
suspected of abuse who refuse to cooperate with Child Protective Services.
Currently, the law does not compel guardians under investigation to either
answer questions or come to their doors.
The agency received three abuse complaints regarding Liza Ochoa in 2002.
According to interviews with Child Protective Services officials, family
members, family friends and records obtained by the Express-News, the first
complaint, filed in January 2002, accused the mother of physically abusing
the boy and accused both Ochoa and her girlfriend of neglecting all three
children.
An agency caseworker visited the family's home at least once, found no basis
for the complaint and closed the case.
The second complaint was filed in September, alleging physical abuse,
physical neglect and neglectful supervision of all three children.
For the first time, the agency heard allegations that Ochoa was abusing
drugs.
Again, the caseworker found no evidence of abuse. The case was closed.
Three months later, just before Christmas 2002, Delgado-Vasquez filed a
third and final abuse complaint with the agency, alleging physical abuse as
well as medical and physical neglect of all three children. The complaint
noted Jovonie was not growing and had bald patches on his scalp.
A new caseworker, Theresa L. Soriano, was assigned to investigate. She
reportedly had one face-to-face contact with Liza Ochoa that December.
Soriano, who had 12 months on the job, saw no evidence the children were in
imminent harm but was concerned enough that the case was kept open, the
agency has said.
Over four months, Soriano made between eight and 10 visits to the family's
North Gen. McMullen home but got no response when she knocked on the door.
She made at least 11 other attempts to contact relatives, neighbors and
schools where one or more of the children might be enrolled. At least once,
police were contacted to ask for their assistance in helping to locate the
mother, the agency said.
Nothing led the caseworker to Liza Ochoa, even though she and the family
continued to live in the same house.
By April, with no new abuse allegations reported, Soriano, along with a
seven-year veteran supervisor, Stacey Adams, decided there was no more they
could do. The case was officially closed two months later, the abuse
allegations classified as "unable to determine."
The agency has defended both employees, saying they followed its guidelines.
The caseworker in particular has been commended for going "above and beyond"
her duty by making repeated visits to the house.
Officials say there is no fixed number or formula for determining when a
case should be closed.
'An abomination'
Damiani never met Jovonie. He only recalls Liza Ochoa being pregnant with
him.
He has a vague recollection of his last contact then with Ochoa. She and her
girls were living with Mary and Juan Palacios in a "house in shambles"
overrun with activity on the Southwest Side.
He wouldn't have brought up his own two kids in an environment like that,
but the place seemed no different from a thousand other impoverished homes
he had visited in his 17 years on the job.
After Domingo Esqueda's arrest in June 1999, the detective, who then had a
year in homicide, had no reason to keep up with a down-on-her-luck single
mom. Fresh slayings claimed his attention.
He moved on.
As horrific as Jovonie's death was, Damiani isn't kicking himself for what
he might have done differently.
He's a homicide detective. He's accustomed not to preventing tragedies but
to sorting them out.
Still, he never forgets the details of a child death case. And this is the
most horrific of his career.
Even a seasoned investigator can become a little emotional talking about a
boy who died in a house crowded with relatives celebrating the holidays.
"All this boy had to look forward to was his death by starvation," Damiani
said. "It's an abomination that anyone would allow a child to get like
that."
http://news.mysanantonio.com/story.cfm?xla=saen&xlb=310&xlc=1118896
tinydancer
"Mke" <Noa...@homail.com> wrote in message
news:40157e90$0$7335$61fe...@news.rcn.com...
> Who cared for Jovonie?
What a horribly sad, depressing, ugly article. Seems like we read these
things regularly here, week after week, and nothing ever changes.
td
Karen Burns
this morning was sad....and it is...but this.....
I can't even put into words the absolute horror and grief I am experiencing
right now for this poor child. This is probably the worst story I've heard
of in ten years.
Awful.
Karen