Baby Phoenix Castro wasn’t breathing when a San Jose Fire dispatcher’s voice crackled over their radio system at 10:11 a.m. on May 13.
The message was brisk: “CPR is in progress. The three-month-old female is unconscious….”
By the time neighbor Nancy Wetherington saw what was happening, the baby was lying on a white ambulance stretcher. Her tiny hands and feet were already gray.
“You could tell from the color – you could tell that the baby was gone,” Wetherington said this past week, her voice cracking.
Outside the collection of triplexes off Blossom Hill Road in south San Jose, the baby’s father was sitting on the ground, neighbors said, crying so hard his eyes were puffy and nearly shut.
The mother was pacing and repeating, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
In the weeks that followed, the father told neighbors that his child died from sudden infant death syndrome. But for neighbors who had witnessed repeated interventions from police and visits from child protective service workers who had taken away the couple’s 3- and 4-year-old children a year earlier, there were strong suspicions that something else killed baby Phoenix.
Still, they were shocked when they learned what the coroner had found: the infant with chubby cheeks and sage green eyes, the baby too young to eat solid food, had overdosed on fentanyl and methamphetamines. She was wearing a pink-flowered onesie when she died.
On the kitchen counter, police said they found her baby bottle alongside broken glass pipes, aluminum foil and the powerful opioid that last year killed more than 6,000 Californians.
“There’s no reason why this baby had to die,” said Wetherington, one of the neighbors who said she called police to emphasize her concerns shortly after officers had visited the house when the baby was less than a month old. “CPS or police or someone should have stepped in and taken this baby. How did this baby skate through, a beautiful baby girl?
“The baby should be alive.”
Instead, five months later, the father, David Castro, is in jail on felony child endangerment charges. And, in a stunning reminder of the stranglehold that fentanyl has on its users, the mother, Emily De La Cerda, died the same way her infant daughter did. She overdosed on fentanyl.
Risking safety of vulnerable children
Now, in the aftermath of the twin tragedies, questions are being raised about how Santa Clara County’s Department of Family and Children’s Services could have missed warning signs that the baby was in danger, and whether an emphasis on keeping families together is risking the safety of vulnerable children.
What decisions social workers made in the weeks leading up to Phoenix’s death are still unclear. After inquiries from the Bay Area News Group last week, the county said it would investigate what went wrong and called on the state to do so as well. Officials acknowledged the agency had “significant involvement” with the family, but they have yet to release closely guarded records that could provide answers. San Jose Police said they couldn’t discuss the case because the investigation is ongoing.
“For every child that’s dead, how many children are left in very dangerous, or high risk situations?” asked Steve Baron, a member of the Santa Clara County Child Abuse Prevention Council.
Keeping families together is an ‘idealistic goal,” he said, but social service agencies are “rolling the dice on the safety of the child.”
‘Super excited’ over pregnancy
Emily De La Cerda, 39, was newly pregnant last year when she passed Nancy Wetherington on the path lining the complex’s communal lawn.
“She was super excited,” Wetherington said, and looked healthy, not “super skinny” as she had been in recent years. Her color was good and she wasn’t “all spaced out” as she sometimes appeared.
But despite appearances, there were problems with the pregnancy. Phoenix was exposed to methamphetamine and fentanyl in the womb, according to her autopsy. On Feb. 12, her delivery was complicated by “neonatal opioid withdrawal symptoms.”
Shortly after the birth, Castro, 38, told another neighbor, Sandra Mack, about the problems when he came to bum cigarettes. Authorities sent De La Cerda into rehab, Mack said, and the baby home with the father.
“I was over there almost every night,” Mack said, changing diapers, giving Phoenix a bottle of formula, providing emotional support for Castro who often slept on the couch next to the baby.
“She never cried, never cried,” Mack said. “She was beautiful.”
The mother, for all her problems, was kind, Mack said, and had “the softest soul.”
Castro, who stayed home with the baby, was attentive and doing the best he could, she said. He had battled cancer that resulted in some of his toes being amputated, she said, and he was nearly blind in one eye.
To try to get his 3- and 4-year-old children back, he told neighbors he was taking parenting classes. He built little electric cars they could ride.
After Phoenix was born, Mack said, De La Cerda was allowed to come home on weekends as long as she returned to the drug program overnight.
But at home, Castro – who court records show had a decade-long history of drug arrests – was still using drugs, according to messages and video obtained by investigators after Phoenix’s death. Mack encouraged him to stop for the sake of the baby.
“You can’t do this with a kid,” she said she told him. “He was open with me about it. He let me know he was addicted to fentanyl and he’s been doing it for a long time.”
She didn’t understand how social services allowed the baby to be in his care.
“That doesn’t make any sense to me. If you can’t take care of one child properly, how can you take care of any properly?” she asked. “I just thought that was absurd.”
The day the baby died, Mack said, De La Cerda and her mother Rita, had a pre-planned visit – the day before Mother’s Day.
Mack was sleeping at the time, but awoke to a “blood-curdling scream.”
A second tragedy
Baby deaths from fentanyl are exceedingly rare. Over the last two decades, just over 100 infants younger than 1 have died. It’s unclear exactly how Phoenix ingested the drugs, but fentanyl comes in powder, liquid or pill form and can be smoked. The mother wasn’t nursing, prosecutors and relatives say.
In the days after the baby’s death, neighbors say the couple — who first met at an addiction meeting — was back at the apartment together. They’d spot Castro leaning against a lamp post smoking. De La Cerda looked “numb.”
Four months later, on Sept. 16, dispatchers received another call from the same address on Spinnaker Walkway. This time it was for a 39-year-old female who was “not awake, not breathing, overdosed on fentanyl.”
Paramedics tried to revive De La Cerda with CPR and the overdose-reversing medication Narcan.
But she was pronounced dead at 3:44 p.m.
In a comment to the Bay Area News Group, De La Cerda’s mother Rita tried to sum up the family’s loss.
“My daughter was a beautiful person and she was devastated over the death of her precious baby girl Phoenix. A mother should never have to bury their own child.”
‘Don’t know how to help him’
One month later, one last time, San Jose police returned to apartment No. 3.
This time, neighbors say, they were armed with rifles and busted through the front door. They handcuffed Castro and arrested him for the death of his infant daughter.
There, in the same apartment where mother and child both died of fentanyl overdoses, police said they found yet more drugs.
Castro tried to cut back on fentanyl, his neighbor Mack said. But “he could not control it. He could not stop it,” she said. “Now he doesn’t care anymore. And I don’t know how to help him.”
On Friday, in courtroom 43 of Santa Clara County’s Hall of Justice, Castro appeared in a wheelchair to face felony and misdemeanor charges.
De La Cerda’s mother and several other relatives attended. Her uncle, Edward Morillo, said the compounded family tragedy has been a nightmare, and he questioned how county social workers didn’t do more to protect baby Phoenix. That might have saved her mother too.
“She could still be alive,” he said. “They could both be alive.”
How to get help
To get help with substance use, call 211 — the United Way Bay Area substance treatment hotline — or go to www.211bayarea.org/santaclara/substance-abuse/
