LOS ANGELES—Less than three years before his death in 2018, a 10-year-old boy told a school vice principal he had been abused by his mother, prompting a report to a child abuse hotline, the then-vice principal testified Feb. 8 in the murder trial of the boy’s mother and her boyfriend.
Gia Greaux, who was a vice principal at the time at Lincoln Elementary School in Lancaster, told Superior Court Judge Sam Ohta that she called the hotline on Sept. 18, 2015, after Anthony Avalos told her that he was being abused at home.
Her testimony came during the non-jury trial of the boy’s mother, Heather Maxine Barron, and her live-in boyfriend, Kareem Ernesto Leiva, who are charged with one count each of murder and torture involving Anthony’s June 2018 death, along with two counts of child abuse involving the boy’s half-siblings, identified in court only as “Destiny O.” and “Rafael O.”
The murder count includes the special circumstance allegation of murder involving the infliction of torture. Over the objection of Deputy District Attorney Jonathan Hatami, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office dropped its bid for the death penalty against the two after the election of District Attorney George Gascón, who issued a directive that “a sentence of death is never an appropriate resolution in any case.”
The Hotline Call
In an audio-recorded call to the child abuse hotline, Greaux said Anthony told her that his mother had been hitting him and his half-siblings and locking them in their rooms for long hours and that he had moved to his aunt’s house.Greaux, now a principal in the Palmdale school district, testified that the boy reported being struck by his mother with a ping-pong paddle.
She said the boy told her that his father was in Mexico and that his aunt and uncle were going to be his mom and dad from then on.
“So, only the mom was doing this to him as far as we know?” the hotline operator asked.
“Yes,” Greaux responded.
The boy’s aunt, Maria Barron, testified last month that Anthony came to live with her and her husband on two occasions—first in 2014 and again in 2015—and that she had offered to keep him and three of his half-siblings.
“She told me no. She needed her benefits,” the defendant’s sister-in-law said, noting later that “every time she had a baby it was going up.”
Other Testimonies
In emotional testimony Wednesday, Anthony’s fourth-grade teacher broke down in tears when she discussed the boy’s last day in school.Harmony Bell, a teacher at El Dorado Elementary School in Lancaster, described the boy as a “joy to be around” and said he was “everyone’s best friend.” She noted that the boy penned a heartfelt letter to her in which he wrote, “I just want to stay with you forever, but I can’t,” and said she still has a photo of him hanging in her classroom.
“I feel my life was really enriched from knowing him,” the teacher testified, noting that she never saw any injuries on the boy, whom she said often wore a sweater.
One of Anthony’s friends, identified in court only as “Sofia P.,” said he opted not to take his sweater off “even if it was really hot” and that he described enjoying school so much that he never wanted to leave.
The teenager said the boy told his classmates that he needed to play with a rainbow-colored football at school because he couldn’t play with it at his own house. She said the boy frequently asked other students for leftover food and requested extra snacks when they were handed out in class.
“He would save enough not only for him but his siblings,” the 14-year-old girl testified. “He always thought about them, too.”
Another prosecution witness, Mildred Blue, testified that she called the child abuse hotline in April 2016 after seeing a bruise on the face of one of Anthony’s half-siblings, Rafael. She told an operator on the child abuse hotline that she was told that a man named Kareem—the father of their half-siblings—“made them fight each other” while their mother wasn’t home and that Barron told her, “They’re lying. They’re always fighting.”
She said she subsequently received a letter indicating that the case had been closed.
Anthony’s half-brother, Rafael, and half-sister Destiny testified last week that they had been forced to undergo punishment, including kneeling on uncooked rice, wrestling each other, and watching each other be disciplined in their Lancaster home, and that they saw Leiva repeatedly dropping Anthony on a bedroom floor shortly before his death.
Leiva subsequently acknowledged that he had the boy kneel on uncooked rice and admitted that he had rendered him unconscious for about five minutes just days earlier, according to the prosecutor.
However, Leiva’s attorney, Dan Chambers countered that the evidence would demonstrate that there is “reasonable doubt” involving the murder charge against his client.
He said the two major issues will be “a lack of intent to kill” and he questioned the accounts of the boy’s half-siblings, whose testimony he said has changed over time.
Chambers told the judge that many of the statements by the children are inconsistent, saying that their initial statements “showed a lack of any actions on behalf of Mr. Leiva with respect to the treatment of Anthony” and that “Mr. Leiva’s conduct allegedly grew worse” as the children underwent further questioning.
“Those inconsistencies in the evidence will be apparent and once we demonstrate that it will show that what the children claim they say Mr. Leiva doing is inconsistent with the medical evidence,” the defense attorney said.
“This case is a case of severe abuse, but as to Mr. Leiva, it is not a murder,” the defense lawyer told the judge.
Barron’s attorneys reserved their right to make an opening statement when the defense begins its portion of the case.
Barron and Leiva were charged in June 2018 with the boy’s killing and were subsequently indicted by a Los Angeles County grand jury in October 2018. They remain jailed without bail.
