Child Abuse Los Angeles

A North Hollywood woman, freed from prison in the beating death of a 2-year-old boy, pleaded no contest to felony charges in the same crime Friday, over the objections of her lawyer that prosecutors coerced her into a bad decision. Eve Wingfield, who served two years before being released by a judge who said new evidence indicated she may be innocent, pleaded no contest to one count of felony child abuse, a lesser charge than she accepted in her previous plea.

A North Hollywood woman freed from a prison term in the beating death of a 2-year-old boy is reluctant to accept a deal from prosecutors in which they insist she again plead guilty to a felony, her lawyer said Friday.

Marisela Barajas was 9 days old when authorities took her and five siblings from her parents while investigating complaints of abuse in the home. Then, after almost 1 1/2 years of intervention, a social worker recommended that the girl and her 5-year-old brother be returned to her parents on a trial basis, a step on the path to family reunification, court records show. The decision proved fatal.

The father and aunt of a 5-year-old boy beaten to death and buried in a shallow grave earlier this month pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges of murder and accessory to murder, authorities said. Marco Esquivel Barrera, 34, and Maria Ricardo Esquivel, 28, covered their faces as they entered San Fernando Municipal Court.

Plans for a proper funeral and burial were announced Thursday by a city councilman for a 5-year-old boy allegedly beaten to death by his father who then buried the child in a shallow roadside grave. The details of the proceedings had not been finalized because the body of Ernesto Barrera has yet to be released by the Los Angeles County coroner's office, Councilman Richard Alarcon said.

Five-year-old Ernesto Barrera was buried as he lived, out of public view and nearly forgotten. As sheriff's investigators struggled to untangle the unusual home life of the boy buried by his older twin brothers in a shallow grave at the edge of Angeles National Forest, they accused his father, Marco Barragon, 34, of beating his son to death. Barragon, an immigrant, fathered at least 10 children by two sisters.

A 25-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of felony child abuse Sunday after Los Angeles police found her three young children alone in their bug-infested, garbage-strewn apartment. A neighbor called police about 2 a.m. to report that the children, ages 2, 4 and 5, had been left unattended at their apartment in the 15100 block of Parthenia Street, said Officer Curtis Faulkner, an LAPD spokesman.

A 25-year-old woman was arrested Sunday on suspicion of felony child abuse after Los Angeles police found her three young children alone in their bug-infested, garbage-strewn North Hills apartment. A neighbor called police about 2 a.m. to report that the children, ages 2, 4, and 5, had been left unattended at their Parthenia Street apartment, said Officer Curtis Faulkner, an LAPD spokesman.

Borrowing a key tactic from defense attorneys in the British nanny trial, lawyers representing an Illinois woman charged in the shaking death of her infant grandson tried to argue that the boy died from a previous head injury. But a Van Nuys jury rejected the defense argument, convicting Shirley Ree Smith on Monday of child endangerment. Smith, 37, showed no reaction as the clerk read the verdicts by the seven-woman, five-man jury.

She was a professional woman, cruising along in mid-career. She was making a living, raising a teenage daughter in Los Angeles, alone, and doing just fine. Wanting to do more with her life, she decided to teach children to read, to become a volunteer. But for the woman now known in public only as Jane Coe, that goal foundered three years ago. Instead, she would be caught in the shadow of an obscure but silently ubiquitous state-run computer system. She would never teach a single reading class.