Parents of fatally starved girl get long prison terms

The parents of a disabled 3-year-old girl who was starved to death while living in a garbage-filled, vermin-infested West Oak Lane house each were sentenced Friday to 30 to 60 years in prison.

Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Sandy L.V. Byrd told Carlos Rivera and Carmen Ramirez that he could not let passion influence his sentence, and credited both for pleading guilty in the face of what would have effectively been life sentences.

But the veteran homicide judge could not filter the passion and outrage from his voice when addressing the condition in which the dead girl and her four siblings lived.

"It's extremely difficult for me to appreciate the enormity of the indignities you visited upon these children," Byrd said.

"This is the richest country in the world, and to say that a child starved to death because of a lack of money?"

The judge noted that Rivera, 32, and Ramirez, 29, had benefited from social services in Chester and Delaware Counties and Philadelphia.

"All you had to do was ask, and food would have been provided," Byrd said.

Both mumbled apologies before sentencing.

"I just wish none of this ever happened," Ramirez said.

"I just want to apologize to everybody, apologize to Carmen, for everything that happened," Rivera said. "It just happened."

In June, Rivera and Ramirez pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and conspiracy in the Sept. 9, 2013, death of daughter Nathalyz, and charges including conspiracy and child endangerment involving the care of the girl's four siblings, then ages 3 to 9.

Child services and police said the scene at 7311 Sommers Rd. was the worst they had ever seen.

Police Officer Christine Hilbert said garbage and trash covered every inch of the floor and rose to knee level.

Hilbert said the refrigerator and stove did not work, the sink was rusted, and there was no electricity. The only food or drink in the house was a half-empty milk carton and a dirty baby bottle with no nipple. Nathalyz and her brothers and sisters slept together on a bedbug-infested mattress.

Assistant District Attorneys Gwenn Cujdik and Richard Sax showed autopsy pictures of Nathalyz's 11-pound body: eyes sunken; body covered in bedsores and bug bites; bones poking through her skin; her hair in patches.

The girl had a genetic disorder that left her partly blind and unable to talk, walk, or roll over. She could not hold a bottle.

Lawyers for the pair detailed childhood histories of sexual abuse and mental and emotional problems that combined to create a dysfunctional family.

About 15 of Ramirez's relatives attended the hearing and several testified, calling her a good mother and describing Rivera as well-liked by the family.

Questioned by Sax, however, none could explain why no one in the family intervened to help the children.

Ramirez's relatives described Rivera as a passive man who deferred to her because she received $2,100 a month in Social Security disability payments for the children.

When Rivera lost his job with a heating and cooling contractor in 2013, he left the children during the day to do odd jobs, returning at night with pizza and milk for the children's single meal of the day.

Witnesses said the couple had an "open relationship," and in early summer 2013 Ramirez left, moved in with a boyfriend, and began spending the children's insurance to party and gamble. Rivera took the children and moved to Sommers Road.

Ramirez's lawyer, David W. Cornish, and Rivera's lawyer, Bobby Hoof, each blamed the other's client for what happened.

Cornish cited abuse by Rivera that only worsened Ramirez's problems with bipolar illness and continuing trauma from childhood sexual abuse.

"What he did was provide food as well as he could under the circumstances," Hoof argued. "He was there, he didn't abandon his children. She left, she abandoned the children."

Cujdik argued for sentences of 60 to 120 years for each, telling the judge, "It just doesn't seem like enough for what they [the children] suffered and what they all continue to suffer through."

Angela Coker, a social worker with the city's Department of Human Services, testified that she saw all four surviving children Thursday. She said they are being cared for in two foster homes, a brother and sister in each.

Though improved since their sister's death uncovered the squalor in which they lived, the children have profound and lasting problems, Coker said.

"They are like children taken out and left in the wild and then put back in civilization and expected to be civil," Coker told the judge.