When Santa Clara County social workers placed a 2-year-old in the care of a relative, they did so despite a glaring red flag: the woman had a past conviction of felony child endangerment — a record officials said should have disqualified her.
After just weeks in the woman’s San Jose home, the toddler named Jaxon Rey Juarez died and the woman’s teenage son is charged with six counts of sexual assault of a child. The toddler’s cause of death is still pending with the medical examiner, but Wendy Kinnear-Rausch, the head of the Department of Family and Children’s Services that supervised Jaxon’s case, told staff in an email this week he died “due to abuse and neglect.”
The felony charge from 2014 involved drunk driving with her baby daughter in the back seat.
County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, who has worked in child welfare and has crusaded for reforms at the county’s child welfare agency, said such a conviction would deem a potential foster caregiver ineligible. Steve Baron, a member of the county’s Child Abuse Prevention Council, called the felony conviction — easily found in court records — an “automatic disqualifier” for the woman.
File photo of Santa Clara County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas during a 2024 Board of Supervisors meeting about the child welfare agency in another case involving child safety. (Dai Sugano/ Bay Area News Group)
“A felony conviction for something like that anywhere would tend to be a real red flag,” said Baron, who said he was speaking for himself, not the council. “If a reporter can get the information, why can’t the person who’s responsible for the safety of the child who’s making that decision get that information before that placement is made?”
Child welfare experts also say that the agency should have had its own record of the drunk driving arrest, since the child in the back seat had been taken to the Santa Clara Police Department that night, which normally triggers an emergency response from the child welfare agency.
The county declined to answer numerous questions about why Jaxon was ultimately placed with this San Jose cousin and whether social workers were aware of the woman’s criminal history. They also didn’t confirm whether the agency had been involved in the past with this family.
Instead, in a statement, the county said the case is “deeply concerning” and, as Baron and Supervisor Arenas had also done, called on the California Department of Social Services to investigate.
“The County is committed to swiftly investigating every aspect of this horrific tragedy and publicly sharing the results of these investigations when available and to the extent allowable by law,” the county said.
The Mercury News is not naming the woman to protect the identity of her son, a juvenile who is facing the sexual assault charges. Prosecutors are considering whether to request that the teen, whom relatives said turned 18 days after Jaxon died, be tried as an adult.
The Department of Family and Children’s Services had been involved with the family, including Jaxon’s father and grandmother with whom he lived, since Jaxon was born nearly 8 weeks prematurely with signs of fetal alcohol syndrome, relatives told the Mercury News this week. Jaxon’s mother was dying of liver and kidney failure last July and the father was battling numerous health problems of his own when social workers arranged a Zoom call with relatives to discuss custody of Jaxon.
Jaxon Rey Juarez, 2, in a recent photo while living with his grandfather, died April 9 after moving last month to live with other relatives. A cousin is charged with sexual abuse of a child. (Photo courtesy of family)
In it, relatives from Arizona appealed to have Jaxon placed with them, they said, but were denied because they lived too far away and visits with the father would be impossible. The 40-year-old cousin in San Jose with whom Jaxon was ultimately placed shortly before he died also was on the call, they said, and was discussed as a placement option because she was close to the father’s family. They were unaware of her felony conviction and didn’t know why she wasn’t selected. Instead, Jackson was placed with a foster family unrelated to him for several weeks, then transferred to his grandfather’s custody in Roseville.
After caring for Jaxon for six months, the grandfather said he could no longer care for the toddler with special needs. That’s when, in late February, Jaxon was placed with the San Jose woman with the felony conviction. Jaxon died six-and-a-half weeks later.
The child’s death comes as the county is nearing the end of an 18-month oversight by the California Department of Social Services, which found in a 2023 investigation that the county was more focused on keeping families together than keeping children safe. The county, also spurred by a Mercury News investigation over the 2023 fentanyl overdose death of baby Phoenix Castro, embarked on extensive reforms, including reversing a trend that had dramatically reduced the number of abused or neglected children being removed from their homes.
The state Department of Social Services didn’t immediately respond to an email inquiring whether it had begun an investigation and whether Jaxon’s death would prolong their “corrective action plan” imposed on the county, which was set to expire in June. Just days before the child’s death, Supervisor Arenas had castigated agency officials for concealing a November status report from the state that listed unresolved concerns. In a recent statement to this news organization, the state said that it had seen “continued improvements within DFCS.”
According to court records reviewed by this news organization, the woman, a 40-year-old cousin of Jaxon, had pleaded no contest in April 2014 to the felony endangerment charge, along with misdemeanor drunk driving. She had been driving with a suspended license and was on probation for a previous DUI in 2011 when she ran out of gas on the side of San Thomas Expressway in Santa Clara with her 1-year-old daughter in the back seat, court records show.
Santa Clara Police said they stopped when they spotted her on the busy roadway at 9 p.m. flagging down passing motorists. Her hazard lights were not engaged.
“Their location combined with the poor illumination level posed a great risk of a high speed collision,” the report said. The woman told police she was “very worried” about her daughter’s safety and “she had vomited on herself because she was so worried.”
After they pushed her car into a nearby parking lot and performed sobriety tests, she told police “I’m so intoxicated” and “I’m really drunk.” She was crying and disheveled, the report said, and told police she had had four drinks at her mother’s house before getting behind the wheel. She also said she was on medication for bipolar disorder.
At the Santa Clara Police station, the woman’s brother arrived to take the 1-year-old. The child welfare agency would usually be involved in the case then, welfare experts say.
The woman pleaded no contest to the felony child endangerment charge as well as the misdemeanor drunk driving and driving with a suspended license. Probation records indicate she participated in parenting classes. Prosecutors moved to revoke her probation three months later — in July 2014 — after she falsified an alcohol test “by having her juvenile son take her alcohol test,” the records show.
Those records also indicate that in 2020, Santa Clara County courts were notified that the woman had been arrested on a drunken driving charge in Stanislaus County.
Baron, from the Child Abuse Prevention Council, said the county should have been well aware of all that information — and erased her from the list of potential foster parents.
“How could you not know that?” Baron said. “That is extremely serious, non professional behavior to not know that information and not obtain that information. If it’s in the record and they did not know that, then I don’t even have words to describe that.”