Antelope Valley

A California appeals court has denied a request by the Los Angeles County District Attorney to reconsider dismissing charges against the social workers overseeing the case of Gabriel Fernandez, an 8-year-old Antelope Valley boy who was tortured and killed by his mother and her boyfriend in 2013. 

Los Angeles County’s Antelope Valley — the remote area that has seen several of the county’s worst child welfare tragedies over the past six years — is at the center of a new philanthropic effort to prevent child maltreatment and help support vulnerable children and families.

On Sept. 11, I visited the wood-paneled offices of Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger for a wide-ranging discussion about the state of child welfare in the county and her district.

In 2013, Vicky Bibby was working as a social worker for a home visitation program in Los Angeles County’s Antelope Valley, checking in on pregnant women and young mothers to make sure they were learning healthy habits and how to bond with their children.

The family of Noah Cuatro, the 4-year-old Palmdale boy who died under suspicious circumstances in July, has taken the first step in suing Los Angeles County for more than $10 million.

On July 9, Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva stepped to the lectern during a press conference focused on the suspicious death of 4-year-old Noah Cuatro. Four days earlier, on July 5, Noah’s parents called 911 claiming that their son had drowned in their high desert apartment complex pool.

It’s 3:30 on a Friday afternoon at the Alfred J. McCourtney Juvenile Justice Center in Lancaster, California, when the last case of the day begins. This is the dependency courtroom that serves the Antelope Valley, a remote high-desert community that has been marked by a string of child fatalities in recent years, including 4-year Noah Cuatro last month.

Since the news of 4-year-old Noah Cuatro’s death broke earlier this month, Los Angeles County officials and local media have latched onto a similar theme: that the sparsely populated Antelope Valley region is particularly dangerous for children.

When 8-year-old Gabriel Fernandez from Palmdale, Calif., died in May 2013 at the hands of his mother and her boyfriend — after years of abuse allegations called into the local child protection agency — it triggered a reckoning across Los Angeles County over why the system failed him so badly.