Fighting the Hand That Bleeds You
TURNING A BLIND EYE: Judy Taege isn’t talking to me. If I were Judy Taege, I wouldn’t talk to me either. Or anybody else in Santa Barbara, for that matter. And she’s not. At least not without a lawyer from the State’s Attorney General’s office glued to her elbow. Taege-who lives in Fresno-is of local interest because of her work with the California Adoption Agency , where for many years she’s struggled to find decent homes for some of the most abused, traumatized, and hardest-to-place kids on the planet. She testified in Santa Barbara a couple months ago during the trial of Sylvia Jovanna Vasquez , the popular Santa Barbara childcare provider who pleaded guilty to four felony counts of child endangerment for, among other things, locking up three of her four adopted children, two in cages. It was Taege who gave Vasquez the green light to adopt these children in the first place.
Throughout Vasquez’s five-week trial-not regarding her guilt, but as to whether the charges should be reduced from felonies to misdemeanors-Taege was much on my mind. Sitting in Judge Frank Ochoa ‘s courtroom, I kept wondering how someone like Vasquez managed to adopt not just one child, but four. Vasquez’s attorney, Bob Sanger , sought to portray his client as a tragically misguided soul, heroically struggling to impose loving boundaries on damaged kids determined to act out in the most fecally and sexually disturbing ways possible. Ochoa conceded that Vasquez did some good, but he definitely wasn’t buying Sanger’s pitch.
Insisting the felony charges stand, Ochoa ordered Vasquez hauled off to county jail-as part of a 10-year suspended sentence-on the Friday before Mother’s Day . Ochoa was moved by the tearful testimony of the two child welfare workers who described the conditions uncovered in the Vasquez home as “cruelty” and “torture.” There were the locked cages, the white plastic buckets two of the kids had to poop in, the cold rooms, the cold outside showers, substandard meals, and harsh punishments. For all but the favored child-a gifted violin prodigy-Ochoa found basic childhood needs, like exercise, could be secured only by writing long homework essays “filled with contrition, apology, self loathing, self blame, and self hate.” And while Vasquez’s favorite enjoyed the run of the house, she was also injected with a drug to block the onset of puberty . She was also the subject of nearly 100 nude and semi-nude photos. Even with the best of intentions, this was some weird stuff.
