On Tuesday, October 18th, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved unanimously $32 million settlement on behalf of the siblings and father of the late Anthony Avalos, a ten-year-old boy who died from horrific abuse and torture inflicted on him by his mother and her boyfriend. The settlement amount was initially agreed upon by the lawyers of Anthony’s family and Los Angeles county in May and had been pending for the Board’s approval.

The Last Days of Anthony Avalos

Anthony lived with his mother Heather Barron and her boyfriend Kareem Leiva, both of whom regularly abused and inflicted torturing punishments on Anthony and his siblings– pouring hot sauce on their children’s faces, kicking the children in the stomach, and beating them with a belt, a paddle, and a rubber hose, forcing to kneel on uncooked rice and stones for hours and were locked in their rooms without access to a bathroom. Over a dozen calls had been made on his behalf from teachers, family, and other community members to the county’s child abuse hotline.

From 2013 to 2017, Anthony had been under the supervision of DCFS, which failed to conduct thorough investigations per their own rules, ignored their regulations requiring interviews of the children alone, and continued to ignore the children’s specific complaints about the beatings.

On June 18, 2018, ten-year-old Anthony confided to his mom that he liked boys. Prior to this, Barron and Leiva had engaged in homophobic dialogue and behavior, as reported by family members. Leiva reportedly overheard this exchange between Anthony and his mother, and the following night proceeded to repeatedly drop the boy on his head, along with a number of the aforementioned abuses. A 911 call was made on June 20th, and Anthony died the following day.