Blue Ribbon Commission

This summer, a 4-year-old boy named Noah Cuatro was allegedly tortured and killed by his parents in Palmdale, a high desert exurb of Los Angeles County. The tragedy is still sending shockwaves through the county’s $2.9 billion child welfare agency and local government.

The first recorded sign of trouble in the brief life of Noah Cuatro came before he was even born. In August 2014, when his mother was nine months pregnant with Noah, she allegedly threw her baby sister, fracturing the 10-month-old’s skull in two places.

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.

Less than two weeks after the suspicious death of 4-year-old Palmdale boy Noah Cuatro, Los Angeles County’s child welfare agency changed a key policy at the heart of the mounting controversy.

Moving swiftly in the wake of the third high-profile child death to strike Los Angeles’ high desert in the past six years, L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger intends to boost the area’s beleaguered child welfare workforce. 

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.

On Wednesday, prominent Los Angeles County officials will revisit a trying time in the county’s child protection history. In May of 2013, the violent death of an 8-year-old Antelope Valley boy rocked the county.

Today, Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors will vote on a motion that would bring a rarely heard from, but critically important, group of investigative attorneys under the Office of Child Protection’s control.

It is a county within a county. Los Angeles County’s fifth is the largest of the five supervisorial districts, where the suburban sprawl of Pasadena gives way to the exurban expanse of the Antelope Valley.