Outcry alive in case that shamed foster care system
Destiny Herrera said her foster father first offered her money for sex when she was 15 years old. She thought he was kidding.
It was a spring afternoon in 2013, and she was watching the 53year-old tinker with a motorcycle in the garage.
He offered $200, she said.
The advances began soon after she moved into Miguel Briseno’s ranch-style home in rural Medina County, she said, where he and his wife were licensed to care for up to a dozen foster children at once.
At first, Briseno offered her a kiss, only to laugh and hold up a bag of Hershey’s chocolate kisses, she said. When he brushed the side of her breast in the doorway, he called it an accident, she remembered.
All of it made Destiny uncomfortable. But this time in the garage, as Briseno reached for his wallet, she said her heart began to race with fear.
“He was serious,” she said. “That scared me. It freaked me out.”
So she did what many foster children do not — she went to the police, a move that ultimately ended Briseno’s decade-long stint as a foster parent.
After facing allegations for years, Briseno was scheduled for
trial Friday in San Antonio but was postponed. The proceeding is expected to shed light on how allegations by foster youth are treated by state officials charged with keeping the children safe.
Briseno’s attorney, Loraine Efron, declined to comment on the case specifics, but said it involves “extremely sensitive, serious and very important issues.”
“The rush to judgment of an accused is a dangerous thing and can result in tragic consequences,” Efron said. “The presumption of innocence is a precious thing.”
At the time of her outcry to police, Destiny had no way of knowing that years later several more women would come forward at the height of the #MeToo movement alleging Briseno had sexually abused them when they lived in his home as teenagers in the 2000s.
Or that years earlier, two girls had reported Briseno for making advances, only to have their claims dismissed by state regulators.
In the past decade, Texas has received over 3,600 allegations of sexual abuse in foster homes licensed by private agencies, records show. State investigators with the Department of Family and Protective Services have validated fewer than 170 of those claims — roughly 5 percent of the total.
Child welfare experts said the small number of confirmed sexual-abuse allegations in foster care is the result of myriad factors.
Foster children are supposed to be regularly checked on by caseworkers from the state, the court and private foster care agencies, who may err on the side of caution by reporting any possible sign of trouble. Children may lodge false allegations in the hopes of being returned home or moved to a new place. Some may recant out of fear, shame or a sense of loyalty to the foster parent.
Most of all, claims of sexual abuse are difficult to investigate. There’s rarely physical evidence or any witnesses, so the investigation can rest largely on the child’s word.
“For all sorts of reasons, people decide children’s disclosures aren’t credible,” said Sarah Font, an assistant professor of sociology at Pennsylvania State University who focuses on the child welfare system. “Part of that is about training and part of that is perpetrators target kids who are vulnerable.“And those vulnerabilities make it less likely people will believe them.”
At the start, Destiny believed her complaint was taken seriously. But that feeling quickly faded.
‘Passed around’
A feisty teenager with thick brown hair and deep dimples, Destiny was used to fending for herself.
She grew up with a single mother who would disappear for weeks at a time, leaving Destiny and her siblings behind in a home that went dark or lost running water as unpaid bills piled up. Then, her older sister Faith would fill up five gallon jugs with water at a convenience store so they could bathe.
When Destiny was taken into foster care around age 13, she was separated from Faith, who she wasn’t even allowed to call at first.
Destiny could have gone to her caseworker at the first sign of trouble with Briseno, but there were risks. She hardly knew the woman, her second caseworker in less than two years.
Plus, speaking up might mean being moved to another foster home that could be worse or further away from Faith, who lived 40 minutes from the Brisenos. Destiny learned such moves could come at a moment’s notice. When Destiny emerged from the shower at her previous foster home, she found her caseworker downstairs next to boxes filled with her clothes and shoe collection. Within the hour, the caseworker was driving Destiny down a dirt road toward Briseno’s house.
“I felt like an object, like being passed around without being asked anything,” she said. “I didn’t feel like a person.”
There was also the distinct possibility that no one would believe her. That’s more or less what happened to the girls who spoke up before Destiny.
Initial complaints tossed
Miguel Briseno, a stocky 5 feet, 7 inches tall with curly black hair, and his wife, Debra, became licensed as foster parents around 2002. While the girls living in their home knew Debra as the enforcer who handed out medication and drove them to appointments in a big van, Miguel was the joker who gave the girls nicknames. Many came to call the couple mom and dad.
“I never had a dad, and he filled that void with love and understanding and acceptance. He is not the man that they are making it look,” Selena De La Cruz told the Express-News in 2017. She lived with the Brisenos from 2009 to 2010, before Destiny arrived.
Not everyone was happy.
In 2009, an 18-year-old reported she had been alone with Briseno in the kitchen seeking dating advice, when he noted that she liked to go out with older boys. “Would you reject me?” he asked her, according to the girl’s report.
Two years later, in 2011, an 18-year-old called a crisis hotline saying she had nowhere to go and did not want to return to her former foster home. Miguel Briseno, she said, had asked how much she would charge for sex.
State inspectors looked into the allegations. They interviewed Miguel Briseno, who denied making inappropriate comments and said he is never alone with a child in care. The other foster girls didn’t know anything about the allegations, but generally said they liked living there.
The two investigators, however, gathered little evidence from outside the family’s home. They did not talk to any of the girls’ friends, their teachers or even former residents. There’s no record the state inspector interviewed the 18-year-old who made the second report.
Both claims were dismissed.
Over the years, law enforcement officials would later say, about 180 girls passed through the Briseno home.
Who would believe her?
Destiny didn’t own a cell phone. She borrowed a friend’s at school in April 2013 and typed out a text message to Faith.
“I told her that he said that he would pay me money to have sex with me,” Destiny said. “That was the main thing that bothered me, that drew the line, basically in my eyes, when I was younger.”
Faith was posing with her boyfriend in a photo booth at the mall when she received the message. As she read it, she began to cry. “We have to pick her up,” she remembers telling her boyfriend.
They drove to Devine High School, pulled Destiny out of class and took her to the sheriff ’s office.
Inside, Destiny sat down at a table across from a sheriff ’s deputy and felt comfortable for the first time in weeks.
The Medina County Sheriff ’s Office took Destiny’s allegations seriously and soon began interviewing the nine other girls who lived at the Briseno home. One of them said Briseno paid her $5 to let him kiss her and use his tongue. She also said that Briseno had put his hands under her blouse and touched her breast. The 17-year-old explained she never said anything before because “she thought no one would believe her,” a sheriff’s report says.
Texas Child Protective Services struggled with what to do. The day Destiny reported Briseno, she went home with Faith, who was 19 years old at the time. Her caseworker was the one who considered Briseno a threat.
The other caseworkers refused to remove the remaining girls from the Briseno home, sheriff ’s records show. Officials from the Department of Family and Protective Services eventually decided it would be too hard on the girls, who ranged in age from 12 to 18 years old, to move them out in May, so close to the end of the school year. Instead, the state asked Briseno to leave.
It’s not clear how long the girls continued to live there. DFPS declined to say.
By October 2013, Briseno had been indicted on a felony charge of solicitation to commit sexual assault of a child. Two months later, state investigators concluded Briseno had sexually abused the foster children in his care. The foster home was shut down.
Missed, but not missing
As the criminal case against Briseno dragged on for the next two years, Destiny looked forward to confronting him in court.
During that time, Destiny kept moving. She ran away from her sister’s house. She moved into another foster home outside San Antonio and briefly lived in the Dallas area with her mother.
By the time Briseno was scheduled to go to trial in September 2015, Medina County prosecutors didn’t know where Destiny was. The last they heard, the teenager had run away, former district attorney Daniel Kindred said.
But Destiny wasn’t missing. She was in state custody. Two weeks earlier, a judge had committed Destiny to a juvenile detention center 200 miles north of Medina County, according to confidential state records she shared with Hearst Newspapers.
Destiny knew Briseno’s trial was approaching. She asked her caseworker if she could testify, she said. “OK,” she thought to herself, “I can do this.”
Maybe it would help her move on. Destiny wrestled with guilt over reporting Briseno to the police, instead of telling him to stop. She felt responsible for breaking up a home that was loved by many of her foster sisters. Some of them accused her of lying.
Still, she lived with fear. A memory from her time at the Briseno’s jolted her awake at night, her pillow often wet with tears. While living there, Destiny took an anti-anxiety medication after dinner that made her drowsy. She remembered lying in bed, fighting to stay awake and seeing Briseno’s feet shuffle, then stop, outside her bedroom door.
It’s not clear why her location — inside the Ron Jackson State Juvenile Correctional Complex in Brownwood — was not made known to Kindred and his team before the trial.
Destiny said she was told transportation was the problem, but she blamed herself.
“I felt like it was my fault for being locked in juvenile,” she said. “I tried to get in contact with everybody and nobody wanted to take me.”
Without her testimony, prosecutors faced a dilemma: delay and try to find her or make a deal.
Briseno, who was facing a felony, pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of attempted assault, a misdemeanor. He was sentenced to six months of probation, records show.
Spokesmen for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services and the Texas Juvenile Justice Department said the agencies usually work together to make sure children in their care can testify. Neither would comment on the specifics of her case.
Destiny simply thought people had stopped taking her seriously.
“I was so eager to say what happened,” she said. “But as the months passed, then the years passed, I thought ‘Oh, they don’t believe me. That’s why they aren’t talking to me.’”
Then came new allegations that could not be ignored.
‘Mi hija, is that him?’
Medina County Sheriff Randy Brown announced an arrest in October 2017 that made statewide news. Briseno was charged with sexually assaulting three of his former foster daughters — both in Bexar County, where the couple lived when they first began taking children into their home, and in Medina.
One of the women alleged Briseno started hitting on her six months after she arrived in 2005. Then, she claimed Briseno forced himself on her in a garage behind the house, where she used to watch him work on cars. The alleged sexual abuse continued for three years, she told police, until she turned 18 years old and moved out, according to a sheriff ’s report.
Another woman claimed Briseno began touching and kissing her in the Super S market in Somerset at the beginning of her stay, from 2006 to 2009. This was her first foster home, the woman told police, and she was afraid if she complained she would be removed and sent somewhere else.
“Those girls were taken from some environment and then you have some jackass like him abusing these girls that already have troubles,” Brown told the Express-News at the time. “If you’ve stayed at that house, if you were a foster child (in Briseno’s care), please contact us,” Brown said.
Destiny’s cellphone lit up with calls. “Mi hija, is that him?” her aunt asked.
Destiny called the police and said she left a voicemail. When she didn’t hear back, she left another. After months passed without any contact, she gave up.
“It seemed kind of helpless,” she said in spring 2018, her eyes welling with tears. “I felt ignored, honestly.”
If Destiny couldn’t testify, she thought, she would sit through the trial.
By summer 2018 Briseno was indicted in Bexar County on 12 counts that include sexual assault of a child, indecency with a child and compelling prostitution, for allegedly offering one teenager cigarettes in exchange for sexual contact.
As the case against him grew, Destiny was getting her life in order. She had enrolled in college classes in San Antonio with hopes of becoming a psychologist. She lived with her boyfriend’s family outside the city and bought her first car — a used Chrysler sedan — she drove to class. One day, she hoped to drive it to the courthouse to face Briseno.
Destiny will never have the chance. She was driving home from a friend’s house early in the morning in January 2019 when she lost control of her car and crashed into a building.
Awaiting trial
Her blood alcohol level was .26 percent, more than three times the limit at which a driver is considered too intoxicated to drive, a toxicology report said. Destiny died shortly after emergency responders pulled her from the wreck.
It’s been a year since her death, but Faith still struggles to understand what happened. A teenager herself when she took Destiny in, Faith tried to her best to care for her little sister, who at that time in her life rarely listened to rules and sometimes ran away. In recent years, Faith saw Destiny mature. She turned down nights out to do homework and had Faith help her apply for state services available to former foster youth.
Faith is planning to attend Briseno’s trial, although a new date hasn’t been set. She knows it is what Destiny would have wanted.