Just two days before Mothers Day, Judge Frank Ochoa ordered Sylvia Vasquez placed immediately behind bars for abusing her four adopted children, keeping three locked up for extended periods - one in his room, two in makeshift cages.
Although Ochoa sentenced Vasquez - who for years ran a successful and popular daycare facility out of her home on Foothill Road - to 10 years in prison, she will be required only to serve one year behind lock and key at the Santa Barbara County Jail. Ochoa struck a deal with Vasquez before the beginning of what turned into a drawn-out and contentious five-week sentencing hearing, allowing her to serve just one year if she agreed to plead guilty or no contest to four felony charges....
The key legal issue throughout the hearing was a motion made Vasquez's defense attorney, Robert Sanger, to have the four felony charges reduced to misdemeanors. On Friday, Ochoa rejected Sanger's motion out of hand, citing the severe neglect and psychological damage inflicted by Vasquez on the children. Ochoa was moved by the tears shed on the witness stand by two child welfare workers, who described the circumstances they witnessed as "the worst" of their professional careers. One worker, Ochoa recalled, used the word "torture" to describe the care Vasquez bestowed upon her charges. The other worker dubbed the conditions as "cruelty."...
Throughout the trial Sanger portrayed Vasquez as a heroic, if criminally misguided, adoptive parent, struggling to stand by her four emotionally damaged adopted children even as they acted out in more violent and upsetting ways. Yes, the cages were wrong, she acknowledged, but given the allegedly weird and sexually aggressive behavior of two children, they were needed..
Prosecutor Joyce Dudley insisted that these horrific incidents never actually happened, and charged Vasquez made them up. Vasquez's motive, according to Dudley, was to make herself a martyr in the cause of motherhood...
udley hammered home the point that Vasquez never obtained for her children the therapeutic help that all the experts she consulted said they needed. She also noted that for all the money Vasquez was paid as an adoptive mother - $173,637 over eight years - the second oldest girl lacked a single pair of shoes that fit.