Why Did No One Save Gabriel?

At the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, administrators had a well-worn routine they followed anytime a child died, or came close to dying, at the hands of a parent or guardian—something that typically happened at least a couple of times a month.

As soon as a call came in from a hospital, caseworkers would be dispatched to interview any surviving siblings and remove them from the home. Then administrators would go to work producing a confidential report and a set of reforms—measures that would allow them to claim they had taken steps to ensure that such a tragedy would never happen again. Until, of course, another one did.

On May 23, 2013, this grim assembly line paused at Greg Merritt’s cubicle in the Palmdale branch office. Merritt, who is 62, had worked in the department for more than two decades. He’d met his wife, Bonnie, there, and was considered one of the agency’s best supervisors. Some of Merritt’s colleagues were so ashamed of the department’s reputation that they avoided telling people what they did for a living. But Merritt was proud of his work, especially his efforts to keep together families that might otherwise be separated. He was a devout Christian, and to him this wasn’t just a job. It was a calling.

When Barbara Dallis, one of the department’s assistant regional administrators, showed up at Merritt’s desk that morning asking for the Gabriel Fernandez case file, he didn’t immediately understand that something terrible had happened. But as they rummaged through a pile of recently closed cases, Dallis explained that Gabriel, who was 8, had been severely abused and might die.

After they found the file and Dallis left, Merritt said a silent prayer for the boy. Then he turned back to his computer—“because,” he says, “life goes on, and I had work to do.” He’d concluded long ago that some of the children who depended on the department would inevitably be injured, if not killed. No one could protect them all—and he felt frustrated that both administrators and the public expected him to do the impossible.

Merritt couldn’t remember much about Gabriel, one of about 180 children whose cases he had been overseeing. All he knew was that Gabriel was old enough to be in school, which meant he had teachers who were required by law to report signs of abuse. As a general rule, caseworkers worry most about children who aren’t seen by people outside the home. The majority of children killed by their guardians are 3 or younger.

Merritt started going back through the notes on his computer, and saw that Gabriel’s first-grade teacher had, in fact, regularly called one of Merritt’s colleagues—a young caseworker named Stefanie Rodriguez—with disturbing reports. As he read on, Merritt learned that Gabriel had written suicide notes. But this didn’t strike Merritt as particularly unusual or alarming—he remembered a child even younger who had made actual suicide attempts.

He saw that a caseworker had used a computer program to score Gabriel’s likelihood of being abused. The program said Gabriel was at very high risk. But many of the children in his caseload had that designation. Despite the software’s assessment, Merritt had recently signed off on a request to close the case, satisfied that Gabriel was safe. He was supposed to read the entire file first, but he hadn’t gotten to it.

If Merritt and his colleagues had dug deeper, or simply paid closer attention to what they already knew, they might have uncovered the family’s secret: that Gabriel spent days and nights with a sock in his mouth, shoelaces knotted around his hands, a bandanna shrouding his face, handcuffs locking his ankles, trapped inside a cabinet in his mother’s bedroom. The family called it “the cubby.”

The fact that Gabriel’s suffering went unaddressed by the people charged with protecting him was a staggering failure of the Department of Children and Family Services. During the seven months when caseworkers were ostensibly watching over Gabriel, evidence of his abuse steadily accumulated. Yet time and again, they failed to intervene.

In a series of conversations over the past year, Merritt told me that for months he was so crippled by guilt and shame over his role in Gabriel’s case that he rarely left the house. But five years on, he believes he has the distance to see that he performed as well as anyone could have, under the circumstances. “I don’t think there’s anything else I could have done,” he told me, with the soft voice and slumped shoulders of a man whose fate is now in the hands of others.

This fall, Merritt and three of his colleagues will stand trial for criminal charges of falsifying records and child abuse, which carry up to 11 years in prison. Experts believe that if found guilty, they will be the first caseworkers from a child-welfare agency to go to prison for their lapses on the job.

At the