$32 million settlement over injured baby
Tulare County will pay $32 million to settle a lawsuit over its failure to protect a newborn child who suffered severe brain damage, and nearly died, after his parents exposed him to extreme heat and cold and allegedly withheld vital nourishment. The parents were charged with felony child endangerment and await a retrial after the jury in their first trial deadlocked.
Lawyers for the child’s grandmother said the settlement, announced Monday, is believed to the largest ever in California against a child-welfare agency in the case of a child who survived parental abuse.
According to the lawsuit, the boy, identified as J.G., was born in September 2019 in the town of Lindsay to parents John Gonzalez and Jacqueline Navarro, who considered themselves followers of naturopathy, the belief that the body can heal itself. Within a week of his birth, the suit said, they started putting him in high-temperature saunas and sun baths, followed by ice baths, while feeding him entirely on fruit and withholding baby formula or breast milk, which they considered toxic.
Contacted in October 2019 by Patrizia Sanchez, the child’s paternal grandmother, the county’s Department of Child Welfare Services sent a social worker and a nurse to the home, where they saw J.G. was malnourished and offered counseling and training to the mother. But the baby’s health soon deteriorated, and, according to the lawsuit, the department did nothing when Sanchez repeatedly called in early March 2020, saying the infant was suffering.
By July, the suit said, his body was covered in a rash, he was not gaining any weight and his extremities were swelling. A sibling later told police that on July 31, while the family was on a trip to Orange County, J.G. was fed only a single fig.
The next day, the suit said, his parents were unable to awaken J.G., and doctors believed he was dying and took him off life support. He survived, but suffered brain damage, seizure disorder and other serious and lasting injuries. Orange County took custody of the boy and, after court proceedings, made Sanchez his guardian. She has now filed papers to adopt him.
“He’ll never walk, talk or enjoy life,” Wyatt Vespermann, a lawyer for the child and his grandmother, said Tuesday. “He had everything taken away from him.”
But he said J.G. may be able to gain mobility, and communicate, with the aid of technical devices. And Vespermann said the child has been nicknamed “Mr. Cheese” because “he smiles more than anyone I know.”
Orange County prosecutors filed child-endangerment charges against Gonzalez and Navarro after the county took custody of J.G. The case went to trial last February but the jury was unable to reach a verdict. Prosecutors have decided to retry the couple, with pretrial proceedings scheduled in October.
Vespermann, who attended the trial, said the parents acted as their own lawyers and told jurors they were simply following a vegan lifestyle for themselves and J.G.
In response to the announced settlement, Carrie Monteiro, spokesperson for the Tulare County Health & Human Services
Agency, said the agency reached a mediated agreement with Sanchez for $32 million “for J.G.’s necessary lifelong health and wellness care . ... It is a senseless tragedy that will affect J.G. for the remainder of his life and he will remain in our thoughts.” She said the county had acted “in the best interests of everyone involved,” and the settlement declares that the county is not admitting any wrongdoing.
But Vespermann said Child Welfare Services, part of the agency, was established “to protect the smallest and most vulnerable members of our society. When it came to protecting J.G., Child Welfare Services failed miserably.”