Ex-deputy: Murder suspect said she didn’t hit children
LOS ANGELES — A woman whose 10-year-old son’s lifeless body was found on the living room floor of their Lancaster home told responding sheriff’s deputies that she didn’t hit her children, and asked if she was going to be taken to jail and if her children were going to be removed from her custody, a former deputy testified, Tuesday.
Ex-Deputy Adan Ordaz told Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta — who is hearing the non-jury trial of Heather Maxine
Barron and her boyfriend, Kareem Ernesto Leiva — that Anthony Avalos appeared not to be conscious or breathing and that he immediately “realized something was wrong” because the boy had “multiple injuries” that “didn’t seem right for a 10-year-old boy.”
The boy’s mother “didn’t seem really distressed” and wasn’t crying or hysterical, the former deputy said. Ordaz told the judge that Barron claimed the boy had thrown himself back and hit his head during a tantrum, a day earlier, but the ex-deputy said it didn’t seem to be a reasonable explanation for the boy’s injuries.
“She was saying that she doesn’t hit her kids. She was asking us if we were going to take her to jail … if we were going to take her kids from her,” Ordaz said.
Barron’s daughter, Destiny, who was upstairs that day, told Ordaz that “my mom doesn’t hit me, nobody hits us,” the former deputy said, noting that another of the woman’s sons, Rafael, gave “pretty much exactly the same” statement. He said it seemed suspicious.
“To me, it seems like maybe they were told to say those things,” the ex-deputy said.
Barron and Leiva are charged with one count each of murder and torture involving Anthony’s June 2018 death, along with two counts of child abuse involving two of the boy’s half-siblings.
The murder count includes the special circumstance allegation of murder involving the infliction of torture. Over the objection of Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Hatami, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office dropped its bid for the death penalty against the two after the election of District Attorney George Gascón, who issued a directive that “a sentence of death is never an appropriate resolution in any case.”
Barron, 33, and Leiva, 37, now face a maximum of life in prison without the possibility of parole if they are convicted as charged.
Sheriff’s Deputy David Pine, who was the first to arrive at the family’s Lancaster apartment following a 911 call, on June 20, 2018, said the boy appeared to be dead. He said he began chest compressions in an effort to revive the boy, whose legs were covered with bruises and marks.
He said he noticed that Anthony’s mother wasn’t crying or hysterical and that he considered her demeanor to be abnormal.
“I heard her say … ‘Why are you questioning my kids? I didn’t do anything,’” Pine testified. “She just kept saying that she didn’t do this.”
Another deputy, Brandon Vanarsdale, testified that emergency personnel who were treating the boy appeared to be more upset than his mother was.
The deputy said the boy’s two half-siblings, questioned upstairs in the home, told him that Anthony behaves badly, with Vanarsdale saying that the use of the words “temper tantrums” by the boy’s younger half-brother and discipline by the boy’s younger half-sister raised his suspicions.
He said he subsequently arranged for intersections to be blocked off to allow an ambulance to whisk the boy to the hospital after being told it would take too long for a helicopter to arrive to airlift the boy.
Jon Ferguson, a Los Angeles County Fire Department captain, said the boy wasn’t breathing, didn’t have a pulse and was “very lifeless.” He said the boy’s sunken eyes and bruising were not consistent with a child his age, leading to the conclusion that “things weren’t right.”
He described the boy’s mother as “almost emotionless” and said it struck him as “odd.”
“None of it seemed to fit. … It didn’t fit what she was telling us what happened.”
Los Angeles County sheriff’s Sgt. Robert Wilkinson, then a detective in the Special Victims Bureau, said he responded to Antelope Valley Hospital that day and found the boy “lifeless” and bruised with many tubes and monitors attached to him. The boy’s mother “didn’t appear very concerned with what was happening to her son in the next room,” he testified.
When asked by Deputy District Attorney Saeed Teymouri about Barron appearing to be “hysterical” and “stuttering” at times during audiotaped interviews with detectives, Wilkinson said, “It appeared that she was trying, in my opinion, to fake an emotion. I never saw any tears.”
Just before her first lengthy interview with sheriff’s detectives, Barron was notified while at Antelope Valley Hospital that Anthony was being transferred to UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital and that he was not expected to recover.
“Oh my God, oh my God. Don’t say that, don’t say that, don’t say that,” she can be heard saying in the audio recording, which was played in the downtown Los Angeles courtroom. “Don’t tell me that, don’t tell me that. That’s my baby, my first-born. … I promise I didn’t do nothing.”
She pleaded that she couldn’t live without her son.
“Please, please, please, don’t tell me he’s going to die, please, please,” the mother of seven implored.