another mother

[Lady Cop]

MiamiHerald.com
The arrest form was shocking, but so was the home on West Flagler Street.

Used needles littered a dirty windowsill beside a bilingual Bible. Piles of brightly colored toys and soiled, smelly clothes covered the floor where cockroaches scurried through kitty litter between two stained mattresses. The smell was overwhelming; a blend of human filth, animal excrement and the stench from an empty, mildewed refrigerator.

As for the adult occupants, Gabriel de Jesus Orellana and Renee Marie Garcia, they were in jail Friday, charged with child neglect and possession of drug paraphernalia. The arrest form by Miami police said they may have been offering their four children — two boys and two girls between the ages of 7 and 13 — for prostitution.

This week’s investigation began with a 911 call to report that Orellana was on a nearby street, hitting his daughter and allegedly soliciting men to have sex with her. When an undercover officer approached on Thursday and inquired, Orellana proffered the phone number of Garcia, the child’s mother.

Garcia answered the phone call from the undercover cop and agreed to have sex with him in exchange for money — if he took her to buy drugs first. He took her to the Overtown area, watching her buy what looked like marijuana. When they got back to the apartment at 971 W. Flagler, the officer arrested both Garcia and Orellana.

The kids were taken temporarily by the Department of Children & Families.

The allegations of child prostitution remain under investigation, police said.

Neighbors interviewed by The Herald said they knew that something was wrong in the corner apartment where the door was always closed and the children were dirty and hungry. David Basterrechea, the building repairman who lives right across the hall, said the family had been in the complex for five months, but everyone was worried about the barefoot children who would roam at all hours of the night.

Basterrechea said he knew that the family was pressed for cash. Recently, he started seeing the children selling boxes of candy near the Walgreens down the street. A few weeks ago, Garcia, the mother, bragged to him that a stranger had offered her money to take the girls to the park and let him watch them play.

“I was thinking, where’s this guy — I wanted to wring his neck for being such a sicko,” Basterrechea said. “But she was like, ‘no, we’re going to wait until Gabe [Orellana] gets home and then we’re going to rob him.’”

Although that plan never unfolded to his knowledge, Basterrechea suspected that the parents were having their children sell more than candy. He said when the Miami police officer who was part of the undercover operation asked Orellana if he could have sex with one of the girls, the father named a price “for either one” of his young daughters — ages 11 and 8.

The police report said that Garcia was the only one who offered to have sex with the undercover officer.

Neighbors said they saw strangers, only men, come and go all the time.

DCF had investigated the Orellana family before, and the children were not supposed to have any contact with their mother, according to agency spokeswoman Lissette Valdes-Valle. They were apparently aware of this restriction and were taught to lie about their relationship to their mother, neighbors said. They told their friends that their mother had died in a car crash when she drove off a bridge many years ago, and the woman living in the apartment was their stepmother.

Teresa Betancourt, the manager of the building and next-door neighbor, often had the four children in her apartment while they played with her 8-year-old granddaughter. She said she was always giving the children food and recently threw a birthday party for the oldest girl. Sometimes the oldest son, 13, who is diabetic, said he couldn’t eat the food she offered him because he didn’t have any clean needles to inject himself with insulin. Basterrechea said the father used his son’s needles for his heroin.

“He [Orellana] was always so high he wouldn’t look at you in the eye,” he said. “But [Garcia], she would have a conversation with you for hours. She would say stuff like, ‘man I took a couple Xanaxes and was out of the house for two days ’til I woke up and found myself sleeping in the bushes.’
As Basterrechea spoke, he looked around the now-vacant apartment, pointing out a broken crack pipe in the corner and an old passport on a table littered with cigarette butts and broken toys.

Most of the material had been pulled out of the trash on the street, Basterrechea said, because Orellana was always combing through other people’s garbage, a habit he passed on to his children.

The children were present at a dependency hearing on Friday afternoon, cleaned up but clearly concerned about what was going to happen to them. The judge allowed them to stay for now with their maternal grandmother.

Evelyn, the young neighbor who used to play with the Orellana children, picked through the piles of toys they left behind, sharing the names of all the dolls and promising to take care of her friends’ cat until they got back. The two daughters were her best friends, she said, and wanted to send them a message while they were gone:

“Tell them I love them.”