`Super excited' over pregnancy
Emily De La Cerda, 39, was newly pregnant last year when she passed Nancy Wetherington on the path lining the complex's communal lawn.
“She was super excited,” Wetherington said, and looked healthy, not “super skinny” as she had been in recent years. Her color was good and she wasn't “all spaced out” as she sometimes appeared.
But despite appearances, there were problems with the pregnancy. Phoenix was exposed to methamphetamine and fentanyl in the womb, according to her autopsy. On Feb. 12, her delivery was complicated by “neonatal opioid withdrawal symptoms.”
Shortly after the birth, Castro, 38, told another neighbor, Sandra Mack, about the problems when he came to bum cigarettes. Authorities sent De La Cerda into rehab, Mack said, and the baby home with the father.
“I was over there almost every night,” Mack said, changing diapers, giving Phoenix a bottle of formula, providing emotional support for Castro who often slept on the couch next to the baby.
“She never cried, never cried,” Mack said. “She was beautiful.”
The mother, for all her problems, was kind, Mack said, and had “the softest soul.”
Castro, who stayed home
with the baby, was attentive and doing the best he could, she said. He had battled cancer that resulted in some of his toes being amputated, she said, and he was nearly blind in one eye.
To try to get his 3- and 4-year-old children back, he told neighbors he was taking parenting classes. He built little electric cars they could ride.
After Phoenix was born, Mack said, De La Cerda was allowed to come home on weekends as long as she returned to the drug program overnight.
But at home, Castro — who court records show had a decadelong history of drug arrests — was still using drugs, according to messages and video obtained by investigators after Phoenix's death. Mack encouraged him to stop for the sake of the baby.
“You can't do this with a kid,” she said she told him. “He was open with me about it. He let me know he was addicted to fentanyl and he's been doing it for a long time.”
She didn't understand how social services allowed the baby to be in his care.
“That doesn't make any sense to me. If you can't take care of one child properly, how can you take care of any properly?” she asked. “I just thought that was absurd.”
The day the baby died, Mack said, De La Cerda and her mother Rita, had a preplanned visit — the day before Mother's Day.
Mack was sleeping at the
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