Once seated, I began by expressing my suspicion. “The medical evidence, in my opinion, does not comport with a blow to the head from a bike accident,” I said. “The incidents of detached retinas in children this young are rare.”
“But it does happen?” Montoya asked.
“In rare incidents, but the emergency room injuries also do not substantiate that Daniela fell from her bike.”
“Which were what?” Montoya asked.
LeBaron passed out her emergency room report. “Minor scratches. Some healed. I would have expected far more than a scrape on the knee if Daniela sustained a blow to the head of sufficient force to cause this type of injury.”
“But you can’t say definitively that he hit her,” Montoya said.
“No,” LeBaron and I said in unison.
Montoya’s brow furrowed.
Trina, who had largely kept her gaze on the conference room table, raised her eyes. “Daniela can,” she said.
This caught everyone’s attention.
A tear trickled from the corner of Trina’s eye, and I again became concerned she might back out, but the floodgates opened, and the words came in a rush. “She says her daddy hits her.”
After a moment for Trina to compose herself, Montoya said, “But you’ve never reported any prior incidents of abuse—is that correct?”
“Would you have?” Mickie asked.
Montoya raised a hand. “I’m not judging. I’m just saying—”
“I know what you’re saying and what you’re not saying,” Mickie said. “Everyone in the room knows it. Her husband’s a psychopath, and he’s a cop. Who was she going to report it to?”
“He’ll deny it,” Montoya said.
“Don’t they all?” Mickie asked.
“It makes a more difficult case, and these cases can be difficult enough as it is. Without corroborating, contemporaneous evidence, it’s her word against his,” Montoya said, and I began to understand why child abuse cases were so difficult to prosecute.
“I kept a journal,” Trina said.
Montoya sat up. “What type of journal?”
“A calendar. I wrote the days Daniela visited her father and the injuries she came home with. There was also an incident in which she broke her arm. He said she fell from a swing at the playground, but Daniela said he never took her to the playground. I took her to the hospital.”
“There’s a report,” LeBaron said. “I saw it in the file.”
“Where’s this calendar?” Montoya asked.
Trina pulled two black day planners from a bag at the side of her chair. The pages appeared to be well worn.
“How far do these date back?” Montoya asked, flipping through the pages.
“Fourteen months,” Trina said, crying again. “Since I divorced him. He started becoming more unstable. He’d always been volatile, but he got worse. He started drinking, and things deteriorated from there.”
Montoya lifted her head from reading one of the entries. “Why didn’t you say anything earlier?”
Trina dabbed at her eyes with Kleenex. “It’s like Dr. Kennedy said. Who was I going to tell? David constantly threatened us, and Daniela wouldn’t talk about what happened when she stayed with him. I don’t know what he said to her, but whatever he’d said frightened her. I brought it up with him once when Daniela came home with a bruise on her arm. David said he’d already filed a report that Daniela came to his house with the injury, and that if I opened my mouth he’d take her from me. He said who did I think the police would believe? I was afraid for my daughter, afraid to make him angry.”