Father Held on Suspicion of Shaking Baby to Death

SANTA ANA —  A 19-year-old restaurant cook was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of shaking his 2-month-old daughter to death, reportedly because he was frustrated by her incessant crying. But the baby’s mother insisted that he didn’t do it.

“He loved her. I could see it in his eyes when he looked at her,” Norma Gonzales, 15, the baby’s mother, said Wednesday night.

Rafael Rodriguez, Gonzalez’s boyfriend, was arrested Wednesday morning as their daughter, Erika, lay at Children’s Hospital of Orange County on life support. She died at 2:20 p.m., after relatives authorized doctors to disconnect the life-sustaining machines, hospital spokeswoman Andrea Pronk said.

Rodriguez was held at Orange County Jail in lieu of $250,000 bail, and police planned to ask the district attorney to file charges of homicide, child endangerment and corporal punishment, Police Lt. Robert Helton said.

The police were drawn into the case at about 11:25 Tuesday night, when officials at Children’s Hospital notified them of a case of apparent child abuse, Lt. Earl Porter said. Investigators concluded that Erika had sustained severe head and neck injuries consistent with being violently shaken.

“The motive at this time appears to be anger at the child’s crying,” Porter said.

Erika stopped breathing about 3 p.m. Tuesday in the apartment Rodriguez and Gonzalez shared with her relatives in the 2600 block of South Rosewood Avenue in Santa Ana.

Adolfo Gonzalez Jr., 14, Norma Gonzalez’s brother, said that he was sitting on a sofa in the living room when Rodriguez went into the bedroom to check on Erika. Several minutes earlier, the infant had been crying softly “as if she wanted to be picked up,” but she had stopped, he said.

Rodriguez “picked her up in his arms and started shouting to her and then to us,” the teen-ager said.

Gonzalez and her mother, Norma Lourdes, were sitting outside on a stairwell talking when Rodriguez went to check on Erika, the grandmother said Wednesday. He discovered the baby’s fingernails and the skin around her mouth were purplish and there was a purple “band” mark around her neck, she said.

“There were no wounds or bruises on her head. Nothing,” Norma Lourdes said, adding that she thought that the baby died of a lack of oxygen.

Rodriguez grabbed his car keys, and with the two women drove the infant to Coastal Communities Hospital, about three blocks from the apartment.

Hospital spokesman Barry Zander said Erika was brought in at 4:33 p.m., looking blue and not breathing. Doctors administered oxygen. Showing some improvement but still in critical condition, she was transferred by ambulance to Children’s Hospital about 7:45 p.m., he said.

But Erika never regained consciousness, family members said.

Norma’s father, Adolfo Gonzalez, 40, said he believes in Rodriguez’s innocence. He said doctors became unduly suspicious after seeing the purple marks on Erika’s neck.

“I don’t believe he did this,” Gonzalez said. “He loved her a lot.”

Erika’s grandmother said doctors at Children’s Hospital kept pressing her about whether Rodriguez could have harmed his child.

“I told the doctors, who kept asking, ‘Did (Rafael) do this?’ Did I believe that Rafael could do this? And I said, ‘No!’ They kept asking me, and I kept telling them, ‘No!’ ” she said.

Norma Gonzales, who is on a course of independent study at Saddleback High School in Santa Ana, said she and Rodriguez planned to marry someday. She wept as she recalled how an earlier pregnancy by Rodriguez ended in miscarriage.

“This is my second baby I’ve lost,” she said. “After my miscarriage, we kept trying to have another. And now this.”

Rodriguez, who has been working as a cook in a Mexican restaurant in Tustin, shared an apartment with his brothers across the street from the Gonzales family, but when Norma got pregnant with Erika, he moved in with them.