A mother and father have been convicted of felony child abuse and child endangerment in Orange County in a horrifying case where they subjected their newborn son to extreme temperatures and withheld vital nourishment from him so they could “heal him.”
The Orange County District Attorney’s Office says the actions of the parents, John Andres Gonzalez and Jacqueline Navarro, nearly killed the infant and resulted in severe brain damage that has left him a quadriplegic and unable to walk, talk or see.
Both Gonzalez and Navarro, residents of the city of Lindsay in Tulare County, are said by OCDA to be followers of naturopathy, which is the belief that the body can heal itself.
“Within weeks of their son’s birth, [the parents] began putting the infant in high-temperature saunas and ice baths and refused to feed the baby formula or breast milk because they believed it was toxic,” the DA’s office said in a press release issued Wednesday morning.
Prosecutors explained that the child’s paternal grandmother began contacting the Tulare County Department of Child Welfare Services in October 2019 regarding her then-1-month old grandson’s condition. Per OCDA, the grandmother called the department 14 times over the next several months to report that the infant was still suffering.
The Tulare County Department of Child Welfare Services was later ordered to pay $32 million in a settlement over the failure to protect the baby from the malnourishment that led to permanent brain damage and seizures, the largest such settlement in state history.
On August 1, 2020, the parents brought their 10-month-old baby to Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach while they were on a trip to Orange County. The baby was said to be “gray in color, emaciated and catatonic,” and emergency room doctors quickly discovered the boy had extremely low blood pressure levels, suffered from hypoxia (low levels of oxygen in body tissues) and was constantly having seizures.
The infant was transferred to the Children’s Hospital of Orange County where the director of the facility’s Suspected Child Abuse and Neglect Team determined that the baby had not been fed properly, which resulted in the low blood sugar levels, hypoxia and seizures; investigators eventually learned that Gonzalez, 38, and Navarro, 45, are “vegan mucus-free fruitarians” who would only feed the baby soy-based formula, fruits and vegetables.
It is also said that Gonzalez objected to many of the life-saving treatments proposed by doctors while the baby was hospitalized throughout the entire month. The DA’s office stated that Gonzalez told medical staff that “starvation would lead to healing.”
Now 5 years old, the boy continues to suffer from the injuries inflicted upon him by his mother and father. He is blind, mute, unable to walk and cannot eat on his own, and he is now in the care of his grandmother.
“Despite the premier medical care of the Suspected Child Abuse and Neglect Team at Children’s Hospital of Orange County, the neurologic damage he suffered as a result of malnutrition is permanent,” the DA’s office said.
Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer said that the boy’s parents made it so that their son “will never get to experience…milestones because his parents starved him nearly to death instead of giving him the nourishment he so desperately needed.”
“This innocent child suffered from almost the first breath he took because of his parents’ beliefs that starvation would cure him,” Spitzer said. “Instead of curing him, they robbed him of his sight, 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.”
Both Gonzalez and Navarro are being held without bail, and their sentencing date is set for July 25. They each face a maximum sentence of 12 years in state prison for their felony convictions of child abuse and endangerment with an enhancement of causing great bodily injury to a child under the age of 5.