Protecting Who?

by Tanya Brannan/Purple Berets for Courtwatch

On April 15, 1996 in the tiny Northern California town of Sonoma, María Teresa Macias, a 36-year old Mexican immigrant woman and mother of three small children, was shot to death by her husband Avelino.  Avelino then shot Teresa‚s mother, Sara Hernandez, before turning the gun on himself. 

In the two years prior to her death, Teresa had contacted the Sonoma County Sheriff‚s Department more than 25 times asking for protection from Avelino‚s stalking, threats to kill and physical and sexual abuse of >Teresa and her three young children.  Despite their own department policy and California law requiring arrest on domestic violelnce and on restraining order violations, Avelino was never arrested or cited.  Only two police reports were written.

On June 18th, two days into the trial, the federal civil rights lawsuit, María Teresa Macias v. Sonoma County Sheriff Mark Ihde, ended with a historic $1 million settlement.  This is the first time in history a police agency has paid for their failure to provide equal protection to a domestic violence homicide victim.

But the Sheriff‚s Department was not the only Sonoma County agency that bears responsibility for Teresa‚s death.  In fact, perhaps the ugliest piece of the Teresa Macias story is the family‚s interaction with Child Protective Services (CPS).

The Criminal Investigation of Child Abuse

In 1995, as Teresa was making her initial escape from Avelino, a contact with a Sonoma health center told her of services available to protect herself and her children.  On March 31, 1995, Georgina Warmouth with the YWCA battered women‚s shelter filed a child abuse report with Child Protective Services.  The report outlined Avelino‚s physical and sexual abuse of all three children, as well as Teresa‚s fear of what Avelino would do to her family if he learned she had reported the abuse.

As is standard policy, when the report of child abuse was filed, a copy was also forwarded to the Sheriff‚s Department for criminal investigation. In his final investigative report, Sheriff‚s Detective Lorenzo DueZas outlined significant evidence that the abuse had occurred, complete with three corroborating witnesses for every charge. Clearly there was enough there for the sheriff to arrest Avelino Macias and file multiple charges of felony child abuse against him. No such arrest ever occurred.

By the time the investigation was completed, Teresa had left the women‚s shelter and returned home after learning that Avelino had gone back to Mexico. Free at last of the violence and abuse, Teresa was preparing to flee with her children and start a new life. Instead she was to be literally held in place with the agonizing separation from her children and continual forced contact with Avelino until the day he tracked her down and shot her to death.

When Det. DueZas called Teresa to discuss the results of his investigation, there was no mention of arresting Avelino; only the threat that if Teresa allowed Avelino back into the home the children would be removed from her custody for her failure to protect them. Not long after that warning, Avelino returned >from Mexico and immediately broke into Teresa‚s house. Knowing of the CPS investigation, he threatened Teresa that if she reported his presence to the sheriff she would lose her kids. Thus extorted, Teresa remained silent.

Within weeks, a CPS worker called DueZas  to report Avelino was back and in June, 1995, the Macias children just didn‚t come home from school one day.  Only after a number of frantic phone calls did Teresa learn that her three children, ages 5, 11 and 12, had been picked up by the sheriff‚s department and taken to the Valley of the Moon Children‚s Center. They were later put into foster care.  The reason: because Teresa could not protect her kids from Avelino‚s violence.

The Insanity of Family Reunification

Thus began Teresa‚s torturous odyssey through the CPS system to which she had turned for help. Over the next nine months she would be driven to distraction by CPS‚s conflicting demands. On the one hand they had taken her kids because she hadn‚t protected them from Avelino. On the other, she was forced into joint counseling sessions with her batterer with the state-mandated goal of re-unifying the family. As she struggled to comply with CPS‚s ever-growing and contradictory demands, Teresa began to despair.

In addition to thwarting Teresa‚s escape from Avelino (as she surely wouldn‚t leave without her kids), the conduct of the plethora of social workers and counselors who then held ultimate power over her family may well have contributed to Teresa‚s murder.

For anyone who‚s ever had the illusion that a counselor‚s pledge of confidentiality is unbreakable, the Macias case provides a rude awakening.  Again and again information Teresa gave to CPS was passed on to Avelino, including the fact that she was filing for divorce. To Avelino, already enraged at losing his stranglehold of control over Teresa, this was like waving a red flag before a charging bull.

But it was Teresa‚s mother, Sara Hernandez, who tells of the deadliest of CPS‚s many interventions in the Macias family‚s lives. Sara and Teresa were driving together to a counseling session in Santa Rosa ˆ one of >those sessions Child Protective Services forced Teresa to attend with Avelino.

„Teresa noticed Avelino following us in his car,‰ Sara relates. Shaking in terror, Teresa drove straight to the Santa Rosa Police station. There she handed police the restraining order she had obtained some months before and asked that they arrest Avelino, who had boldly followed her into the station in direct violation of that order.  As police handcuffed Avelino, Teresa called her CPS worker, Suni Levi to tell her what happened and to ask her to help translate with the police. Levi told Teresa to put the officer on the phone.

According to the SRPD officer, Levi then told him to release Avelino because the couple‚s counseling session was more important than arresting Avelino. Police removed the handcuffs and Avelino left, a free man. Three weeks later, Teresa Macias was dead.

But there was still one more blow that certainly contributed to Avelino‚s complete disintegration not long before the murder. According to family friend Marty Cabello, Avelino received a bill from the County of Sonoma requiring him to pay the children‚s foster care expenses.  With no hope of ever paying the bill, amounting to „thousands of >dollars,‰ according to Cabello, Avelino went even deeper into the dark place he inhabited until that final bloody moment when he ended Teresa‚s life and his own.

(While Avelino‚s bill is not accessible, we do have a copy of a similar bill sent to Teresa two months after her death.  Citing past due and current charges for her share of the foster care expenses for just one of the three children, the bill totals $1,053.50.)

Using Children As Pawns

But even after the double-homicide, CPS maintained a powerful hold over the Macias family. Teresa‚s mother Sara and her sister, Ana Rosa Rubio, logically thought that with the violent death of both parents, Teresa‚s children would be immediately released into the consoling arms of their loving extended family.

Instead, CPS held on to the children for five full months after the murder, and in fact still had no plans to release them at the September 1996 hearing until they saw the family was accompanied by Purple Berets advocate, Tanya Brannan. [Purple Berets is a kick-ass, California-based women‚s rights group.] In a sudden shifting of gears, Judge Arnie Rosenfield signed the order releasing the children to the custody of their grandmother, Sara Hernandez.

Why would CPS not release the children, you might ask? While there is no written documentation of their reasoning, two effects of the embargo are clear. 

First, as long as the children were in CPS custody, Teresa‚s family was extremely hesitant to talk to the press about the daily revelations of the county‚s misconduct in the domestic violence case, fearing the county would retaliate by holding on to the children.

And secondly, whoever controlled the children controlled any possibility of a lawsuit, as technically the County of Sonoma was the children‚s legal guardian.  With a statutory limitation of six months on filing tort claims in California, had the kids not been liberated at that final CPS review, the next scheduled review date would have been at the end of the year ˆ well after the deadline for filing a claim.

The Bad News: It Happens All the Time

Unfortunately, Teresa Macias‚ experience both with the Sheriff‚s Department and Child Protective Services is not an uncommon experience for domestic violence victims.  The very existence of CPS gives law enforcement a place to shuffle off the many crimes against children that arise out of domestic violence in the home.  Since for the most part police everywhere detest doing domestic violence investigations, CPS gives them a convenient way to leave the case to be „social-worked‰ rather than prosecuted.  This has a devastating, sometimes deadly effect on the families involved.

Had CPS been really doing their job, they would have advocated for Teresa with the sheriff, pointing out that filing criminal charges against the abuser is a far more effective way of protecting the children than putting them in foster care.  And if they were too afraid of losing their jobs for doing the right thing, they knew well the few independent advocacy organizations that could have done it for them.  But as usual, CPS went along to get along; they did nothing and said nothing to those who could have helped Teresa Macias and her children, and the result was a dead woman, three motherless children and a wounded, heartbroken grandmother.

CPS also serves another convenient function for police.  I have interviewed scores of women who had called police for protection from their batterer, only to be threatened with being arrested themselves and losing their children to CPS if the women kept on calling police.  When you think about it, it‚s a great way for police to cut down on the number of domestic violence calls, as I can assure you, the women who talked with me about the threats from police will never call them for protection again.  Domestic violence rates go down ˆ no muss, no fuss.