A mother and father were convicted of child abuse this week for exposing their newborn son to extreme heat and cold and failing to give the child vital nourishment, nearly killing the infant.
An Orange County Superior Court jury on Monday found John Andres Gonzalez, 38, and Jacqueline Navarro, 45, guilty of a felony count of child abuse with an enhancement for causing great bodily injury to a child under the age of 5.
The conviction came nearly five years after the couple brought their unresponsive 10-month-old son to the Hoag Hospital Emergency Room in Newport Beach. The couple, who are residents of the city of Lindsay in Tulare County, were on a trip to Orange County at the time.
Emergency room doctors learned that the baby — who was gray, emaciated and catatonic — had extremely low blood sugar levels and was suffering from hypoxia and constant seizures, according to prosecutors. A specialist at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County later determined that the baby had not been fed properly.
According to prosecutors, Gonzalez and Navarro are vegan, mucus-free fruitarians who would only feed the baby soy-based baby formula, fruits and vegetables. The couple considered themselves followers of “naturopathy,” prosecutors said, believing that the body can heal itself and that baby formula and breast milk was toxic. They also, within weeks of the baby’s birth, began putting him in high-temperature saunas and ice baths, prosecutors allege.
While the baby was hospitalized, Gonzalez objected to “life-saving treatments,” prosecutors added, telling medical staff that he believed that starving the child would lead to healing.
Despite the medical treatment he received, the boy suffered permanent neurologic damage as a result of the severe malnutrition. He is a quadriplegic, blind and unable to walk, talk or eat on his own.
For nearly a year leading up to the couple’s arrest, their child’s paternal grandmother had been contacting the Tulare County Department of Health reporting concerns about the baby’s welfare.
Beginning when the child was only a month old, the grandmother called the county department more than a dozen times.
Tulare County paid a $32 million settlement over the child welfare department’s failure to protect the infant.
The grandmother has since been awarded custody of the child.
Gonzalez and Navarro are scheduled to be sentenced on July 25. They face up to 12 years in state prison.
“This innocent child suffered from almost the first breath he took because of his parents’ beliefs that starvation would cure him,” Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said in a statement. “Instead of curing him, they robbed him of his sight, his ability to take his first steps, to say his first words, and his chance to see the world through the eyes of a child who is seeing everything for the first time.
“Tragically, he will never get to experience any of those milestones because his parents starved him nearly to death instead of giving him the nourishment he so desperately needed,” The DA added.