Finally, in mid-April, according to sources, the court ruled that it would bypass the possibility for family reunification. What this means, in the short term, is that Silvia and Guojun\u2019s twenty-plus kids will remain in foster care until they are placed into guardianships or adopted, probably by their foster families. Although the parents are challenging the rulings, it seems unlikely that Arcadia\u2019s most infamous family will be brought back together.<\/p>\n
The court\u2019s decision has ramifications far beyond California, for reasons that are as confounding as they are unprecedented. Since Silvia and Guojun\u2019s arrest, last May, they have had at least six more children, also through surrogates, bringing their tally to twenty-seven. These surrogates live in California, Georgia, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, and the newborns have been assigned to foster-care placements in their respective counties. Silvia and Guojun have pushed for these babies to be sent to L.A., but the courts and child-welfare agencies in other states have been cautiously watching the case before deciding the infants\u2019 fates. This week, the eldest of these children will turn one.<\/p>\n
Despite the stakes of commercial surrogacy\u2014and its incursion into the most delicate realm of private life\u2014it remains largely unregulated in the U.S. For years, the multibillion-dollar industry has been troubled by its share of baroque and tragic scandals. There are many ways for things to go wrong, given the number of parties involved, from surrogates and intended parents to fertility clinics, attorneys, and escrow agencies. What has set the Arcadia case apart is not just its staggering scale\u2014and the ethical questions it raises about a new, assembly-line era of family-making\u2014but the involvement of the child-welfare system in adjudicating parental rights. The termination of those rights is a profound decision, one the courts don\u2019t take lightly.<\/p>\n
To those closely following the case, however, the latest ruling in L.A. was hardly surprising. The evidence police and social workers collected was graphic, according to the files I reviewed; moreover, it had been captured by the parents\u2019 own cameras. In one of the home\u2019s surveillance tapes, a nanny admits to Silvia and Guojun that she\u2019d hit Walter\u2019s head with an open hand. In others, Silvia acknowledges that \u201csomething is wrong\u201d with Walter, that her son isn\u2019t eating, that his breathing is abnormal, and that his cry is \u201cdeep and low.\u201d Despite these observations, Walter was not seen by a doctor until two days after his injuries occurred.<\/p>\n
Also documented on tape were the goings on inside the home\u2019s classrooms. The same day that the nanny allegedly beat Walter, other caregivers slapped and flogged his siblings, including with shoes and wooden sticks. According to notes taken by a social worker, one child, stuck in a high chair, tries to protect itself with its arms and hands as a nanny \u201crelentlessly continues thumping the baby in the face (approximately 7\u201310 thumps).\u201d In another tape, also viewed by social workers, Guojun enters a classroom shortly after a teacher has kicked and pummelled his four-year-old son to the ground. Guojun then commands the child to continue to hold a punitive squat position, instructing him to \u201clisten to the teacher!\u201d<\/p>\n
One question that remains unanswered is whether law enforcement plans to act on this evidence. The police have been in possession of the same videos as the social workers, yet no charges have been brought against the parents in criminal court. Curiously, this is not for lack of trying. The Arcadia Police Department already submitted their case to the district attorney\u2019s office last May, but the D.A. asked for further investigation. When I pressed the D.A.\u2019s office on what that might entail, it declined to comment. The police told me that they had not conducted additional interviews with witnesses or caregivers, nor seized additional devices from the parents since the arrest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Finally, in mid-April, according to sources, the court ruled that it would bypass the possibility for family reunification.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":310126,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[14048,5095,7,8110,48,52,51,47,50,49,30980,130149],"class_list":["post-310125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-abuse","tag-arcadia","tag-california","tag-families","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-scandal","tag-surrogate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}