Noah Cuatro died of suffocation in July 2019 at his home in Palmdale, California, just before his fifth birthday, his body riddled with broken bones. As a recent joint investigation by the Los Angeles Times and the University of California, Berkeley, shows, Noah could have been saved.

From the time he was put into foster care briefly as a newborn because his mother had fractured the skull of his sister to the accounts from extended family members of abuse, from a doctor’s report that he weighed only 17 pounds at the age of 2, with muscles so weak he could not walk, to the bruises on his neck and arm that a caseworker found on an unannounced visit, there were many opportunities to rescue Noah from his abusive parents. But his social worker was accused of racial bias in the case by her co-workers — she is black and the Cuatros are Hispanic, but no evidence of prejudice was cited — so a court order that she had finally obtained to remove Noah was ignored.