A therapist who was sent to do an assessment at the Lancaster home of Anthony Avalos less than four years before his death testified Tuesday that she had grave concerns about the way his mother behaved toward her children.
The judge also heard testimony from three social workers from the county's Department of Children and Family Services who responded to a series of calls to the child abuse hotline involving the boy's mother, including the call from the therapist.
The social worker testified that she also informed the woman that it was inappropriate to allow her then-3-year-old son, Rafael, to take an unsupervised bath during her visit to the home. Barron admitted that she was five months pregnant at the time, but refused to provide information about Leiva or the father of one of her other sons, according to Khachatryan.
During his opening statement, Deputy District Attorney Saeed Teymouri told the judge that Barron and Leiva tortured and abused Anthony for two weeks before his death, while an attorney for Leiva countered that his client should be acquitted of murder. The prosecutor said the boy was “already brain dead” and had been lying on the floor in the family's townhouse “for at least a day, possibly more” when Barron called 911 to seek assistance for the boy, and that the two “concocted a story that Anthony Avalos had injured himself.”
Dan Chambers said the two major issues will be “a lack of intent to kill” and the issues of “causation.”
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