The horrific death of Anthony Avalos and the many missed chances to save him

Anthony Avalos was the fastest runner in his fourth-grade class at El Dorado Elementary School in Lancaster. But internal reviews showed that caseworkers placed children, including Anthony, into the program even after the department’s risk-scoring tool evaluated them as being at “high” risk of abuse. Wendy Wright, another counselor at the Children’s Center who spent significant time with Anthony and his mother, called the child abuse hotline that October to report that Barron grabbed one of Anthony’s siblings violently and dragged him across the room, consistently talked about her children in derogatory terms and displayed “nothing but anger toward those children.” Wright told the hotline operator that Millman was slow to respond to her phone calls and did not seem to take action when she finally reached him. Then in November 2014, another therapist at the Children’s Center, Crystal Gee, called the child abuse hotline to report that one of the children told her, “Mommy whoops our asses.” Millman followed up with her in a brief conversation, Gee said. When asked how long this had been happening, the children could be heard in the background responding, “A thousand weeks.” David told the hotline worker that Anthony’s mother “is cutting herself and saying that she hates life.… I have pictures of her slitting her wrists and saying that she wants to die.” He also told the hotline worker that Leiva was a member of the MS-13 gang and that he was afraid of what he would do next.