Noah Cuatro: Parents abused and tortured 4-year-old son to death because he was 'unwanted,' allege prosecutors
PALMDALE, CALIFORNIA: Transcripts from the grand jury proceedings against two California parents who have been accused of sexually and physically abusing their young son before killing him have detailed the last day of his fledgling but tortured life.
MEA WorldWide (MEAWW) previously reported how Jose Maria Cuatro Jr., 28, and Ursula Elaine Juarez, 26, had been charged with murder and torture in the death of their four-year-old son Noah Cuatro after reporting to the police that they had found him motionless in their apartment complex swimming pool on July 5, 2019.
Cuatro Jr. had been additionally charged with assault on a child causing death and sexual penetration with a child under the age of 10 on account that he sodomized and sexually assaulted Noah. Juarez, on the other hand, was also charged with child abuse under circumstances likely to cause death. Court documents obtained by Eyewitness News have now described in detail what transpired on Noah's last day alive, as well as a possible motive for why the parents subjected him to such horrific abuse.
The investigation into Noah's death began last summer after a frantic 911 call Cuatro Jr. and Juarez made telling dispatchers their son had drowned in the pool. In audio and transcripts from that 911 call, the father could be heard saying he had pulled their son from the swimming pool and were administering CPR in a bid to save him.
But the story that he drowned did not hold up to scrutiny. Doctors at the Palmdale Regional Medical Center he was taken for treatment found injuries that were inconsistent with drowning. "No signs of drowning at all, no water in the lungs," Deputy Jordan Hegge told a Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) hotline social worker in a call after he learned about the findings. "But there are signs of physical and sexual abuse."
A subsequent autopsy determined Noah had died of asphyxiation and blunt force trauma, with the coroner also finding healing rib fractures, sexual assault trauma consistent with sodomization, among other injuries.
Prosecutors believe that Cuatro Jr. and Juarez, who also have three other young children, targeted Noah because he was an unwanted child. They said Cuatro Jr. thought the four-year-old was not his biological son, though a DNA test conducted through the autopsy found evidence that suggested otherwise. In their evidence, they also included a chilling text message that Juarez had sent that read, "Almost killed him so many times I had to do CPR for him to wake up and stay alive right."
The red flags had been there. When Juarez was pregnant with Noah, his 10-month-old baby sister who was under her care suffered a skull fracture. In November 2014, the month he was born, he and his siblings were placed into foster care but were ultimately returned to her and Cuatro Jr.'s care. His grandmother, Eva Hernandez, who cared for the boy for two years until November 2018, said he begged not to be sent back to his parents.
In May 2019, a judge in Dependency Court reportedly ordered Noah's removal from his family home but a supervisor at the Los Angeles County DCFS let him stay with the parents anyway. Testimony from the grand jury transcripts showed that the DCFS was called out for overriding the court order and its failure to take action.
Both Cuatro Jr. and Juarez have pleaded not guilty to their charges. Their next hearing is set for September 24 for arraignment and trial setting.