Trafford Publishing: Deadly Thirst

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Deadly Thirst

by Donna Goodenough

357 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-0921; ISBN 1-4120-0552-3; US$28.00, C$32.70, EUR23.00, £16.50

This true story reveals the series of blunders that forced 4-year-old Andy Setzer into a one-way slaughter-chute of foster care -- and straight into the "protective custody" of murderers.

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About the Book

Deadly Thirst is the true story of four-year-old foster child Andy Setzer, who was murdered in Perris California August 2, 1999.
Deadly Thirst follows Andy from conception to burial and reveals, in riveting investigative style, the series of deadly blunders that led Riverside County Child Protection officials to herd him into a one-way slaughter chute of foster care and straight into the hands of death. Andy's story is a frightening journey into the grim, dark side of foster care.
The author paints a gripping psychological portrait of Andy's killer, Theresa Barroso and her morass of lies as she strives to place the blame solely upon her withdrawn and mentally challenged husband. Equally compelling is a behind-the-scenes look into the investigation that revealed Barroso's habitual need to vent her anger on a defenseless child. The sensational courtroom drama is undeniably graphic, an absolute page-turner, resulting in a verdict that will shock even the most ardent readers of chilling true-crime. Includes thirteen pages of evidentiary documents and crime scene photos.

About the Author

Author Donna Goodenough was born in Covington Kentucky; raised in Southern California and spent the last twenty-two years of her United States residency in Riverside County.
Although her age of 49 puts her somewhere in between childhood and retirement, she feels perfectly at ease writing at both ends of the spectrum-and everywhere else in between.
Donna began her writing career as a freelance writer for a wide variety of magazines and newspapers; within a year she had her own travel column.
Her journalistic versatility has resulted in feature-length articles in almost every type of publication imaginable, including children, religion, gardening, disabilities, adult fiction, animals, health and fitness and senior magazines. One example, Owl for Children prominently featured one of her articles to coincide with the Discovery Channel's "Wooly Mammoth: Discovery in Siberia" which aired in May of 1999. Later that same year, Owl devoted their cover, plus six pages and the centerfold of their October issue to Donna's up-close encounters with the Mountain Gorillas of Uganda. Her love of independent adventure travel has taken Donna to six continents, including Antarctica. In 1999 she spent three months traveling solo through nine African countries, which resulted in a highly acclaimed article on female circumcision. That much debated article landed her on radio talk shows coast to coast in the United States.
There's no doubt that Donna's a thrill seeker/adrenaline junkie. She's skydived and bungee jumped in California, swam with piranhas in the Amazon, kayaked among killer whales in Canada, been chased by elephant seals in Antarctica, drank blood in Kenya, crawled through bat infested tombs in Egypt, camped (in a tent) along alligator infested rivers in the Peruvian rain forest, mud-wrestled in Hollywood, had her hiking boots stolen by a screaming, fang-baring troop of baboons in Tanzania, was dragged off a bus and threatened by machine-gun-toting-machete-wielding rebels at the Rwanda/Congo border, narrowly escaped being blown to smithereens by a suicide bomber in Jerusalem and nearly got her throat slit in Madagascar! All for the sake of adventure!
When Donna isn't writing (or traveling) she maintains a busy speaking circuit conducting seminars and writing workshops at colleges, school districts and city-sponsored facilities. In 2002 she was a conference speaker at the Southern California Writer's Conference in San Diego.
For more information, please visit Donna Goodenough's web site: www.DonnaGoodenough.com

Sample Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Perris, California, August 2, 1999

The 911 call came in at 3:15 A.M. on Monday August 2nd. "Child down; difficulty breathing. 216 E. 6th Street in Perris." Five minutes later, a fire engine from Perris station 1 arrived on scene amidst a kaleidoscope of flashing red lights. It was a call firefighter/engineer Manuel Reyes would never forget. Reyes was driving the fire engine that night; with him were firefighter/EMT Justin Scribner and Clint Blackmon. The first thing they saw was a heavy-set woman standing at the curb holding the limp and seemingly lifeless body of a child, clad in green shorts and a gray T-shirt. The engine crossed over the oncoming lane and came to a hasty stop at an angle to the curb, its headlights illuminating the woman. The beam of an overhead spotlight was also cast in her direction. Before Reyes could exit the engine, the woman carried the child around to the driver's side door. He jumped down from the cab and took the unconscious child into his arms. Almost simultaneously, American Medical Response [AMR] paramedics pulled up. Within seconds, the woman had the undivided attention of nearly half a dozen firefighters and paramedics.
As the men converged on her, she calmly said, "This has happened to him before." And then, like a robot, she said it again, "this has happened to him before." Firefighters and paramedics would later tell police that the whole situation was weird, right from the start. Reyes had been with the Department of Forestry for several years and had responded to hundreds of emergencies, but none had made him feel as uneasy as this one already had.
In emergency situations, things happen too fast to analyze, but something about the woman's first statements struck a raw cord with the crew of station 1. It seemed a strange way to explain what had happened. Usually, the first words they hear upon arrival are a rapid explanation of the symptoms. In cases like this, where a child isn't breathing, they're often met by hysterical parents screaming for help. But not this time. This call was different, right from the get-go. The woman seemed almost too calm, firefighters recalled, too unemotional. Hauntingly vacant.
A yellow backboard was laid on the sidewalk where the engine's headlights were focused. Next to it one of the AMR guys was busy unzipping a nylon trauma bag. Reyes placed the unconscious child on the backboard; the team immediately assessed he was in full cardiac arrest. His skin was pale, moist and cool.
Reyes asked the woman to clarify exactly what had happened to the child before; what did she mean? While the team worked frantically, the woman stood back and watched, dry-eyed, as CPR was started. It was 3:25. She calmly explained that the child had gotten out of the house at night on several other occasions. She offered no further explanation and didn't ask a single question. Instead, she just stood there, her hands clasped in front of her as if she were on her way down the aisle to receive communion.
Time was crucial and obviously running out fast for the little blonde-haired boy. Scribner watched the child take two breaths; then he stopped breathing again. AMR paramedic, Matthew Brandt, slid an endotracheal tube down the child's airway and attached a green ambu-bag to it. With the steady squeezing of the bag, breathing was assisted. While Brandt kept up his rhythmical bagging, the backboard was lifted by Scribner and Blackmon, placed on a gurney inside the ambulance and strapped down. Immediately, doses of Narcan, Proventil and Epinephrine were administered. Over his shoulder, Scribner hollered to the woman that they'd be heading to Menifee Valley Hospital. With that, the doors slammed shut and they sped off into the heat of the night, leaving the woman standing on the sidewalk, alone and dry-eyed.
With sirens wailing and lights flashing, the driver radioed Menifee with an estimated arrival time of approximately seven minutes. In route, paramedics tried to detect a pulse at the femoral artery, which passes through the groin. To get a better feel, they pulled down the boy's shorts and were shocked speechless by what they saw. The men recoiled as if they could somehow feel the pain this poor little boy had endured for God-only-knows how long. None of them had ever seen a scrotal injury like this. His testicles were grotesquely swollen to grapefruit size and discolored to a purplish black. The bruising spread out over his lower abdomen in a ghastly, dark radius. It was a hideous sight.
The scrotum wasn't the only thing that disturbed the paramedics. The boy was literally covered with bruises and he had a large, older abrasion on the inside of his upper right thigh. Scribner took a penlight and shined it straight down into the child's pupils. The right pupil was "blown," a term paramedics use to describe the effects of hemorrhaging and swelling within the brain. Not a good sign. A blown pupil is the most significant indication of major head trauma. They also noted that the child was coated with dirt. In the distance of just a few blocks, all three men inside the ambulance decided this was no ordinary accident. But they couldn't allow themselves to think about that right now; their efforts at resuscitation were beginning to pay off. Little blips were now appearing on the portable cardiac monitor. It looked like they were getting a pulse back and a bit of blood pressure, but the child still couldn't breath on his own.
As the ambulance turned into the hospital parking lot, the driver switched off the siren and pulled up to the emergency entrance. Crimson lights bounced off the glass ER doors where a swarm of hospital personnel stood waiting. They had already been briefed on the incoming situation and began converging upon the back end of the ambulance even before it came to a complete stop. In a blur, the rear doors were flung open and the stretcher was pulled out almost simultaneously. With it came Brandt, totally focused on keeping the ventilation steady. Within a few minutes, engine 1 pulled up behind the ambulance. Reyes had followed the ambulance to Menifee to retrieve Scribner and Blackmon and take them back to the station. But in the distance of just a few miles, things had developed in an ominously suspicious manner and his men wouldn't be leaving just yet.
Doctor Marlowe Schaffner was in charge of the emergency room during the early morning hours of August 2, 1999. He'd been working emergency rooms and trauma centers for thirty-one years and had seen some of the most horrific injuries imaginable. Sixteen of those years had been spent as a missionary in the dismal operating rooms of central Africa. Still, in spite of more than three decades of blood and guts, the sight of this young child would become something Schaffner would never be able to forget. It was a sight that would remain indelibly etched in his mind for the rest of his life. If there was anything in the child's favor that morning, it was that he had been delivered into the hands of one of the most highly skilled doctors in the entire county. It just so happened that Schaffner's expertise was emergency procedures for critical care neonatal and pediatric patients.
His initial examination quickly revealed that the child was quite literally covered with large bruises in various stages of progression. Some of the bruises were obviously several days old and in such places as the chest, shoulders, back and buttocks. Immediately, he began to suspect child abuse. His revulsion and anger increased with every new discovery. The final bit of doubt about the real events that had brought this little boy into his emergency room was forever shattered when he examined the engorged, purplish testicles. The scrotal skin was taut, stretched to the bursting point and the testicles stood high off the body in a shiny, veiny mass. Within three to five minutes of the arrival of the ambulance at Menifee Valley Hospital, Schaffner gave orders to notify the Sheriff that an apparent case of child abuse had come in. Under his breath, he scoffed at his own inadvertent use of the word "apparent." Schaffner continued to become more outraged as each area of the child's body was examined with closer scrutiny. What he saw infuriated him. This was one of the most heart- wrenching sights he'd ever seen; it was absolutely gruesome.
It would be twenty-five minutes before a deputy arrived. During that time, Schaffner's anger would continue to boil as he shouted out the descriptions of several more injuries on the child's frail little body. A nurse stood nearby with an ER chart, frantically scribbling dictation as fast as her hand would move. She'd never heard Schaffner's voice rise to such a crescendo; indeed, no one who'd worked with the otherwise mild-mannered doctor had ever heard him talk this way. Worried glances darted from one face to another as they frantically labored over the unresponsive child.
Deputies Douglas McGrew and Mike Mejia were each at different locations when they received orders to respond immediately to Menifee Valley Hospital: possible child abuse. They both arrived about the same time and walked together toward the emergency entrance of the hospital. One of them punched in a couple of numbers on the security keypad and, when the sliding double doors opened, they walked together into the emergency room at 4:10 A.M.
McGrew remembers walking in and looking into a smaller, curtained-off area to his left. There he saw a naked, black and blue child lying motionless on a gurney surrounded by a frenzied group of emergency room personnel. Even from a distance of fifteen feet, he saw for himself that the child was covered with bruises. But what stood out the most were the swollen, discolored testicles. McGrew took a step closer and stared in disbelief.
Until that moment, Doctor Schaffner hadn't noticed the arrival of the two deputies, although their uniforms clearly made them stand out from the others who were dressed in pale green surgical scrubs. McGrew was patient; he could see the doctor was extremely busy. He and Mejia used the time to stand in different places in the room and observe what was going on. Being inside the ER room was always troubling; it was such a crucible of human suffering and desperate behavior. Whenever the sea of green scrubs would part, they could catch another glimpse of the poor little boy. The floor was strewn with the discarded wrappers from sterilized medical instruments, needles, IV's and snippets of tubing. Bloody, discarded gauze squares and tissues stuck to the soles of the nurses' shoes.
Finally, after about ten minutes, Schaffner was able to break away from the frenzy. Snapping off his gloves and throwing them into a wastebasket, he took the deputies aside, grabbing the ER chart from the nurse as he passed. Flipping through the pages of medical notes, Schaffner wasn't the least bit reserved about telling both deputies exactly what he thought about the injuries this child had sustained. McGrew and Schaffner stood near the curtains, a scant fifteen feet from the gurney and stared at each other. Schaffner's face expressed the hopelessness of the whole situation, a burden that was being quickly absorbed by both deputies. Neither Mejia nor McGrew could keep from looking toward the gurney.
Schaffner's team was exceptional; they were doing everything possible but still the prognosis was grim. McGrew asked Schaffner if he knew the name of the child and Schaffner said the boy had been identified as four-year-old Andrew Thomas Setzer. McGrew agreed with Schaffner that it might be a case of child abuse. He asked about the parents; where were the parents?
"I think that's them in the waiting area," someone said as they passed by, motioning toward Life support machines emit an eerie sound as they go about the grim task of keeping a victim alive artificially. The room seemed to resonate with the clicking and wheezing of the ventilator as it pumped air into the boy's lungs. Next to the boy's gurney was the EKG monitor; its steady beeping was about the only good sound inside the emergency room that fateful morning. The boy's vital signs were displayed digitally on another monitor that was mounted on the wall over his head.
Getting one more good look at the little boy was difficult; he'd gone into full cardiac arrest once already and the slew of doctors, nurses and machinery just wouldn't allow McGrew to approach much closer. Whenever there was room for him to step next to the gurney for a better look, his eyes would always go back to the swollen genitals. It was unbelievable. When he looked at them, he felt the pain; it took the wind right out of him. The sight literally sickened him and filled him with disgust. He wondered what on earth had happened to this poor little boy.
Just as the nurse had said, a family had arrived at the hospital and was seated in the waiting area. McGrew could see them through a little square window in the door. They were a racial grab bag. The mother was a heavy-set Hispanic woman accompanied by an African- American man and another child-a Caucasian-who appeared to be around ten years old. Mejia decided to accompany McGrew as a second set of ears to hear what the parents had to say. McGrew would take the lead; Mejia would hang back and observe.
With his own groin aching in sympathy, McGrew pushed open the door. He was glad to be leaving the commotion and heartache of the emergency room behind him to talk with the boy's family and ask them what had happened. He was clinging to the hope that his suspicions were wrong.
McGrew had been a Sheriff's deputy several years and had questioned hundreds of distraught people caught in emotional situations that ran a wild gamut from minor family disputes all the way to murder. He knew he was treading on the fragile ground of a potential homicide. Schaffner had already assessed the boy's condition as extremely grave and his chances for survival were next to nothing. McGrew silently rehearsed some key questions to ask and tried to put his repulsion and suspicions aside. It took some effort, but he tried to consciously erase all signs of anger and accusation from his face. He silently coached himself to act like this was simply routine.
McGrew noted that the adults watched his approach in a calm, yet guarded sort of way. The room had a definite aura of apprehension; he noticed it as soon as he walked through the door. Both parents stayed seated and neither extended their hand in an appreciative greeting. Neither thanked him for his concern. He introduced himself in a friendly, sympathetic way and pulled up a chair across from the woman. Mejia stood about six feet away, watching and listening.
The emergency waiting area was decorated in a pleasant, light shade of green. There were six comfortable chairs along the wall and a couch, everything matching in décor. In the corner, a lamp shone brightly over a floral centerpiece. In the middle of the room was an oak coffee table strewn with reading material and off to the side, a box of Kleenex. The covers of Parent's magazine, McCall's, People, Highlights and Ladies Home Journal all featured smiling children and happy parents. Those were the only smiles inside the waiting area during the early morning hours of August 2nd, 1999. Oddly, there were no tears either. To both deputies, the absence of tears was yet another disturbing clue that something was amiss. The woman's demeanor and the chirpy, almost robotic way she asked how the child was doing seemed totally out of place. McGrew noted that she seemed detached and unconcerned with the severity of the situation. He had to remind himself that maybe, just maybe, the woman didn't know how serious the situation was. Her attention strayed periodically to a muted overhead television, which was running a late night movie of some sort. The man beside her was solemn and quiet. The kid looked bewildered and sleepy.
McGrew began questioning the three of them together, but the woman did all the talking. McGrew assumed the man with her was her husband even though he was African-American and she was Hispanic. Mixed couples weren't that rare anymore. For a second, he wondered if these were the parents of both the little blonde-haired boy in there on the gurney fighting for his life, and the kid seated next to them. It was a strange and puzzling mix.
McGrew conducted himself in a gracious sort of way and ascertained rather quickly that the two adults were the foster parents of the little boy on life support. The woman identified herself as twenty-two-year-old Theresa DeJesus Barroso and she introduced the man seated next to her as her husband, Alvin Lee Robinson, twenty-six. The boy with them was identified as eleven year old Jacob Marquist*, also their foster child. In response to McGrew's questions about what had happened, Theresa merely stated that the little boy, whom she called "Andy," had somehow gotten outside in the middle of the night and they'd found him lying in the dirt, not breathing. He'd been fine up until that point. And that's all she said about it. But it was the monotone way she said it that made McGrew's flesh crawl. Something was already too strange about this case. McGrew took particular note of the fact that neither foster parent asked when they could see Andy. He noticed that Theresa was very composed as she spelled out Andy's full name, yet she seemed to be a little nervous about something. McGrew couldn't quite put his finger on it, but something was weird. Alvin Robinson hardly said a word and when he did give answers, they practically had to be extracted from him and were always in total agreement with whatever Theresa had just said. Most of the time he repeated her words exactly, like an echo. He offered no additional information at all and he didn't ask any questions about Andy. Theresa seemed to rule the conversation with an iron fist and Alvin seemed totally submissive to her authority. "Yeah, that's how it happened..." or "Right..." was all Alvin would say. He seemed reluctant to talk, or, McGrew reminded himself, maybe he was just too distraught. In situations like this, a person's emotional state often makes them appear to be shy, aloof, giddy or withdrawn because they're just too traumatized to speak or even to think straight. McGrew was a bit emotional too. His feelings raced every which way: anger, pity, suspicion. Still, as suspicious as the situation was, he had to withhold judgment and give these people the benefit of the doubt. After all, who could act normally under these circumstances? And what was "normal" anyway? How would he react if he were in their situation? He knew that traumatic events could make people react in strange ways sometimes. McGrew didn't want to jump to any conclusions.
Mejia had stayed in the background, leaning against the wall, listening while McGrew questioned the foster parents for about ten minutes. Then McGrew wanted Theresa to go over all of it again, telling everything she could remember. Theresa stated that Andy could unlock the front door of the apartment and had gotten out of the house at night on several other occasions. She said that she had awaken around 3 A.M. to use the bathroom and decided to check on the kids. She noticed Andy was missing and noticed the front door was ajar. She went outside and found him lying in the dirt, not breathing. McGrew asked both foster parents if they had noticed any unusual bruising or swelling on Andy. No, Theresa said in a tiny, high-pitched voice, neither of them had noticed any bruising or swelling. McGrew asked if they'd notice the swollen genitals. No, but Theresa did say Andy had been walking funny and had complained the previous day about "being sore from sitting."
McGrew was very suspicious of the fact that neither foster parent expressed concern or seemed anxious to see Andy, not even after he mentioned that Andy had bruises and swollen genitals. Strange too was the fact that neither of the foster parents launched an indignant barrage of their own questions concerning Andy's swollen genitalia and the ominous presence of two uniformed Sheriff's deputies. Surely, if the foster parents had been unaware of the groin injures, they would have demanded to know what the hell was going on, insisting on some sort of further description of what the doctors had found. Or, at the very least, they would have been indignant that a deputy, not a doctor, was questioning them.
McGrew asked them about the last time they'd given Andy a bath. Were they absolutely sure they hadn't noticed his bruises and swollen genitals? Again, Theresa shook her head. No, they hadn't noticed anything unusual. Besides, Theresa offered, they never actually bathed Andy; they just ran his bathwater for him and let him undress and bath himself. So no, they hadn't seen any swelling or bruising.
To McGrew it seemed impossible that they hadn't noticed Andy's injuries. And what sort of parent would leave a four-year-old completely unsupervised in the tub? He had kids; he knew an injury like that would absolutely be accompanied by a lot of crying which would draw immediate concern from a parent-foster or biological-even a damned babysitter for that matter. And he was a man; he knew the intense pain a groin injury like that must have caused the poor little kid. Just thinking about it made him cringe. There was no way this little boy wouldn't have cried about it. No way. The demeanor of these two adults and the answers they were giving just didn't fit.
Meanwhile, behind the swinging doors of the emergency room, little Andy slipped from bad to worse and went into cardiac arrest again.
By now, Sergeant Joel Lewis* had arrived and was inside the room with Andy. In a few minutes the place would be crawling with cops. Mejia joined Lewis at Andy's bedside and was assigned to stand watch over Andy until further notice. In the ensuing hours, Mejia would be one of many uniformed and plain-clothed law enforcement officials that would be deeply touched by the tragic circumstances of Andy Setzer.
"He was beautiful," Mejia said years later. "I keep remembering his hair. He had blonde, curly hair. He was a really beautiful baby." Watching Andy struggle through his last remaining moments of life was particularly hard for Mejia. He was a father, with a son close to Andy's age. Even hospital personnel were deeply saddened as they watched Andy slip away. "You could see the concern in everybody's face," Mejia said. "I remember some of the nurses were crying. In fact, I even cried a few times. It was pretty upsetting for me to watch this little boy suffering." As a deputy for Riverside County Sheriff's office for three and a half years, Mejia had seen other cases of child abuse. He'd seen kids burned and scalded. He'd seen kids die. He knew that becoming emotionally involved with the victim would be begging for trouble. Still, he couldn't help but look at Andy from a father's point of view. "His vital signs were on the screen right above his head and they stopped several times while I was there. His pulse would go down very low and the nurses would gather around him. Then, it would come back up. It was really hard to watch."
Meanwhile, in the waiting area, McGrew had heard more than enough for him to form a firm opinion about what had really happened to Andy. Closing his notepad, he politely thanked the couple and wished them luck. Then he stepped outside. As soon as he was out of earshot, McGrew notified his supervisor.

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