SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Seven-year-old Charlenni Ferreira was like many of the children in Buen Consejo, a worn hillside barrio of boxy concrete homes by the city's edge.
Money was tight for her mother - a maid raising a son and daughter alone - but the family, while poor, was not destitute. The three shared a two-bedroom apartment, watched satellite TV, and had plenty of food on the table.
Support came, in part, from Charlenni's father. Domingo Ferreira had moved from San Juan to Philadelphia and was sending them a portion of his earnings as a limousine driver.
Charlenni spoke lovingly of him, though he had left when she was a toddler.
She also talked wistfully of someday living in the United States. Most of the kids in Buen Consejo did.
"The dream of going to America is so strong," said Neyda Fuster, the social worker at Charlenni's elementary school. "They all want to go."
Charlenni got her wish after visiting her father in the summer of 2006. He called her mother, Rosalinda Almeida Dominguez, and asked to keep his daughter, then 7, in Philadelphia.
"She loved her father so much," Rosalinda recalled last week. "So I let her go."
The dream would be the death of Charlenni.
Within a few months, a nurse at her new school in the Feltonville section made the first of two complaints to the city's Department of Human Services that the child bore the marks of abuse.
In three years, at age 10, Charlenni was dead in what Philadelphia police called one of the worst cases of child abuse they had seen.
On Oct. 23, Domingo and his live-in girlfriend, Margarita Garabito, were charged with murder. Two days later, he hanged himself in his jail cell.
He once told caseworkers that he had taken in his child because her mother could not care for her. Charlenni herself, in explaining signs of abuse to a doctor in 2007, cast blame on her mother.
In numerous interviews last week in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, however, relatives, friends, and teachers said Charlenni had been happy on the island, and safe.
"She was a normal kid. She was always out playing," said Brenda Ires Rivera, who lived down the street in Buen Consejo.
"The only problem was in that house in Philadelphia. . . . When she left, we never thought anything like this would happen."
Charlenni Ferreira was buried last Sunday, two days after her 11th birthday, in her mother's hometown of Las Galeras, a seaside village in the Dominican Republic.
In the cemetery at the threshold to the jungle, cracked pieces of stone littered the ground. The names of the deceased, painted by hand, were faded from years in the Caribbean sun.
Early last week, fresh cement and a single bouquet marked Charlenni's resting place. But her name had yet to be added to the family tomb.
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