The lies that BIND

Two weeks after Richard's funeral, Kelly Cantu met for the last time with psychologist Theresa Vo. Kelly had stopped taking Prozac, the anti-depressant prescribed earlier that was helping level out her moods. She was living in her second therapeutic foster home after having run away from the first home a few months earlier.

A deeply grieving Kelly, Vo wrote in her notes, "says her mind has gone blank." She says she "has forgotten all about the abuse." She says "all she wants is her mother out of jail," and she feels that "Richard Sanchez will not do it again."

One month later, Kelly ran away from her Grand Prairie foster home. Dallas police made up a bulletin with her picture--a smiling 14-year-old with shiny brown eyes. The district attorney's investigators have scoured the area for her. CPS officials believe Sanchez family members know of her whereabouts, may even be hiding her to prevent her from testifying against her mother, but family members deny it.

And Kelly remains to be found.

Four months after Richard Sanchez was found guilty of sexually abusing Bertha Cantu and jailed for life, his family and CPS squared off in juvenile court. The long-awaited termination and conservatorship trial had been delayed several times already--CPS was struggling to locate Kelly, and a required study of Lilia Sanchez's home, which had languished for months, had to be completed. Alison Farmer, the CPS caseworker who worked for more than a year on the case, had quit the agency early in the year.

Finally, on April 1, the trial began.
Lilia, Patricia, and Raquel Sanchez had retained Mary Everson, a small, bookish family law attorney in solo practice, to press their case as the best custodians for the children. The court appointed Dallas lawyer Ronald Aland, whose specialty is business litigation, to represent Richard Sanchez. DeSoto lawyer Lyle Medlock, a former prosecutor in the county's juvenile division, was assigned to Delia Cantu.

Aland--tall, lean, and wise-cracking--knew from the outset the challenge he faced. Two days into the trial, Sanchez, sitting in leg irons beside Aland at the counsel table, took a legal pad, scrawled CONSPIRACY on it in big, block letters and held it up to the jury. Judge Hal Gaither, who was looking the other way and missed the stunt, was informed of it by the bailiff and reprimanded Sanchez the next day.

"He is, um, kind of difficult," Aland said of his client after trial one day. "But he's frustrated listening to all of this."

Delia Cantu heard the proceedings from a court-appointed interpreter. She sat behind her husband and beside her in-laws. Her relatives often held hands and comforted each other, but they were noticeably frosty toward Delia. The 32-year-old mother wore a pantsuit to court each day because, as she pointed out one day in the women's restroom while showing her electronic ankle monitor, "I don't want them to see this."

When Assistant District Attorney Colleen Doolin called Cantu to testify, she invoked her right against self-incrimination and took the Fifth Amendment out of range of the jury. Medlock, a huge man built like a side-by-side icebox, said during a court recess it was his best option. "She's got these cases still pending against her," he said, his big voice echoing in the hallway. "They would have gone after her."

Missing the chance to question Cantu did not appear to pain Doolin. Strictly business, hair pulled into a bun, her stare piercing, the prosecutor zeroed in on the rest of her witnesses--a well-oiled machine of veteran psychologists, social workers, and foster parents--to prove the children were damaged not only by Sanchez, but by his entire extended family.

Paul Tathia, a psychologist with the Dallas Independent School District and a group therapist for families of sex offenders, testified that Lilia, Patricia, and Raquel Sanchez attended only six of 24 CPS-mandated counseling sessions before dropping out of the program. The family, he said, never accepted the accusations that Kelly had leveled against her stepfather. And CPS had clearly told them that no move to reunify the family could begin until they believed Kelly.

"When a victim makes an outcry of sexual abuse, every member of the family must make a choice of who to believe," Tathia said. "If they side with the adult, they would have to go into denial in order to live with themselves." The Sanchez family, he testified, with its steady characterizations of Kelly as a liar and promiscuous, was exhibiting denial "in its strongest form."

In her turn on the stand, Lilia Sanchez, who had wept silently through much of the earlier testimony, sat stoically, describing Kelly as a girl with behavior problems and Delia Cantu as a person who "easily misinterprets things." She said the family stopped attending group therapy when they learned from caseworker Alison Farmer that CPS had ruled out ever returning the children.

But, of course, she did not accept that decision. "I think the best place for them is in my home," Lilia said. "Nobody can love them more than I do."

And when Doolin looked icily at Lilia and asked her what her plans for Kelly would be, should she be returned to the home, Lilia responded: "I have a little bit of strength to hold her back. Look at these people," she said, pointing toward the CPS team flanking Doolin at the table. "They all have degrees. But look. Where is Kelly now?...You are the ones who lost her. Tell me where she is and I'll go get her."