A Guatemalan man charged in Massachusetts with cocaine trafficking and assault with a dangerous weapon was deemed “fit” by Massachusetts juvenile courts and the Department of Children and Families to parent his 8‑year‑old daughter overseas, despite never having raised her.
However, after months of intense legal fights led by the foster parents who had raised her and hoped to adopt her, the Lynn Juvenile Court on Thursday reversed course. It vacated its earlier ruling that would have sent the child to Guatemala to live with her biological father.
The 8‑year‑old was born in the U.S. Her mother, a U.S. citizen, became pregnant at 15. According to court documents and a GoFundMe created for the child, the mother was unable to care for her.
The child’s biological father, who was 29 at the time and living in the U.S. illegally, was deported to Guatemala shortly after the 15-year-old became pregnant.
“He has never lived with (the 8-year-old), never had custody of her, and did not contribute to her care,” the GoFundMe reads.
Prior to Thursday’s court ruling, DCF was preparing to send the 8‑year‑old to live with her father on Feb. 5. It was a move advocates warned could occur with little to no oversight once she is abroad and could cause “irreparable harm.”
The scrutiny by advocates and lawyers came only a month after the Office of the Child Advocate released a report criticizing DCF for ignoring its own risk assessment tools, undercutting specialists and failing to adjust plans as risk escalated for a different child in DCF’s care. The report noted repeated failures and similar patterns in previous cases, including those involving Harmony Montgomery and David Almond. All three cases involved situations that crossed state lines.
The Office of the Child Advocate also called for accountability.
“It is necessary for Mr. Cabrera’s fitness as a parent to be particularly scrutinized,” court documents filed in September read.
Criminal history
While he was not charged in connection with the sexual encounter with the 15-year-old — below Massachusetts’ age of legal consent — the biological father, Esvin Otero Gregorio Cabrera, has faced multiple charges in the U.S. from 2013 to 2018, including several currently active cases.
Although the charges from 2013 were dropped, Cabrera was known to the Dorchester Drug Control Unit, according to police reports. But he had various names, including Nemorio Noriega.
On March 20, 2017, officials were in the area of Waldeck Street and Geneva because it was a known high drug crime area, when they saw a man driving a car. He started yelling and gesturing toward the police officers.
The driver, later identified as Cabrera, blocked the officer’s car. When an officer walked around the car, Cabrera began to reverse, police said. Officials were able to remove Cabrera from the car prior to any officers being hurt, but he was charged with assault by means of a dangerous weapon.
Officials also found multiple bags of cocaine in the car and in Cabrera’s pockets.
Almost exactly a year later, officials spotted Cabrera driving and pulled him over as he did not have a driver’s license. When police searched his car, they found six bags of cocaine, which were packaged to distribute, the police report stated.
As of Thursday, both cases remain pending, and a default warrant has been issued because he did not appear at a hearing in March 2025, after his deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Other charges involve misdemeanors related to driving without a license. He was also found with drugs in 2016, but the charges were later dismissed.
More recently, on Oct. 19, 2024, he was arrested on multiple warrants in connection with trafficking cocaine.
Reexamining ‘fitness’
Court documents detail the work Cabrera and DCF did in hopes of uniting the 8-year-old with her biological father, including taking classes and having unsupervised visits.
However, for months, the foster parents’ lawyer has been detailing the issues arising from those visits and concerns about the overall process.
When Cabrera returned to the U.S. illegally in 2023, he began working with DCF to gain parental rights to the child, identified in court documents as S.R.C. The Essex County Juvenile Court entered orders that deemed Cabrera an unfit parent. The biological mother’s rights were permanently terminated in January 2024.
However, biological parents are allowed to ask DCF and the courts to reexamine “fitness.” And on May 24, 2024, DCF changed S.R.C.’s permanency goal from adoption to reunification with her father.
On June 28, 2024, Cabrera had his first unsupervised visit with the child. These continued twice a month for a total of eight visits.
But they didn’t go well, according to court documents.
“Following the first unsupervised evening visit, the Child reported that Mr. Cabrera did not feed her dinner,” court documents state. “After another unsupervised visit, the Child reported that Mr. Cabrera had a ‘machete’ in his car.”
During the only overnight visit with the child, Cabrera failed to give the 8-year-old her medication, court documents read.
DCF was aware of these issues, according to the documents.
Cabrera last saw the child in person in October 2024. In November 2024, he was deported again by ICE.
After that, the two met via Zoom calls with an interpreter. But those calls also “have all gone extremely poorly,” court documents read.
“The Child was reported to not have any interest in attending the Zoom calls and sometimes refused to do so. Moreover, with Mr. Cabrera speaking in Spanish and the Child speaking in English. There was zero dialogue between them,” according to court documents.
As part of an action plan, DCF said Cabrera had to meet certain requirements. One of those requirements was to take language classes to learn English.
“While he has taken the classes, DCF has chosen to ignore the fact that Mr. Cabrera does not speak English, and cannot effectively communicate with the Child in English,” court documents state.
Still, DCF stated that Cabrera had met all action plan tasks, according to court documents, including attending the child’s medical appointments, taking a parenting class and a home study.
DCF did not respond to MassLive’s request for comment regarding the criminal charges. It is unclear if they were aware of the charges prior to Wednesday’s court filings by the foster parents’ lawyer that detailed his charges.
The “exhaustive international home study” of the biological father’s home in Guatemala “concluded that S.R.C. would be safe and well cared for there,” according to court documents. It was completed in person by a third-party agency.
Overall, DCF and the juvenile court found the father to be fit. And on Sept. 8, 2025, the Lynn Juvenile Court granted permanent custody of S.R.C. to Cabrera.
“Again, not only did DCF not have clear and convincing evidence of unfitness, but in fact, had concluded that the father was fit, and so asked the judge to order that custody be transferred from DCF to the biological father,” Timothy Casey, chief of Constitutional & Administrative Law Division at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, said during a motion hearing on Sept. 25, 2025.
Court documents do not make clear what the 8-year-old wanted.
State officials claim the child wants to be united with her biological father and brother, while the foster parents’ lawyer also cites extreme behavior issues, deregulation and difficulty sleeping associated with his visits.
She refers to her foster parents as “mommy and daddy,” the foster parents’ lawyer, Kirsten Zwicker, said. The lawyer fears the child believed the meeting in Guatemala would be similar to a vacation, not a permanent move away from the people she considers her parents.
No guardian ad litem — an objective and independent professional, usually a lawyer, appointed by the court to participate in court proceedings on behalf of a minor party — was appointed in the child’s juvenile court case.
“A guardian ad litem not being appointed, I would suggest, is not typical,” Zwicker said during the hearing in September.
“So one was asked, and one was never appointed,” the judge asked.
“Correct,” Zwicker responded.
But Casey felt the child’s wishes were made aware through various other forms.
“It played out in the way it was supposed to play out,” he said.
Casey called this a “happy story compared to many of the frankly very sad stories that come out of DCF cases.”
“It is very rare for a biological parent who has been deemed unfit to make the efforts that this biological father has to demonstrate his fitness, and to take — you know, even coming back to this country, doing all the things that were asked of him by DCF to demonstrate that he could be a fit parent,” Casey said.
In August 2025, a DCF social worker emailed the child’s foster parents to “recommend that the Child not be enrolled in the 2025-2026 school year in Massachusetts,” according to court documents.
However, the child, who is on an IEP, was enrolled in a private school by her foster parents.
A flight was booked for the child from Massachusetts to Guatemala on Sept. 25, 2025.
“Had the Child’s foster parents followed DCF’s guidance, the Child would have missed out on a whole month of schooling,” court documents read.
Additional schooling could have been missed as the foster parents began fighting to keep the child in the U.S., further delaying the flight.
But the foster parents were worried the child would be affected far beyond her education if she went to live with her biological father.
“This is a child that has dealt with significant trauma since she was born. She has a plethora of mental health issues, is on medication and needs constant care and attention. Mr. Cabrera has demonstrated that he is not equipped to take care of the Child. He has forgotten to give her medication on their only overnight visit, he has not learned English to understand and communicate with the Child, and it is unknown whether or not he has even found the medical, educational and mental health services even remotely comparable to those the Child receives here in the U.S., in Guatemala,” court documents read.
‘Expelling U.S. Citizens’
On Sept. 19, 2025, a complaint was filed on behalf of S.R.C. in federal court claiming that DCF’s international transportation of the girl violated her rights under the Citizenship and Equal Protection Clauses, and her procedural and substantive due process rights.
The complaint was filed by the girl’s foster father and Jennifer Lee Laurenza, a friend of the foster family and licensed therapist, according to court documents. The foster family had once hoped to adopt the child. However, DCF has since removed her from the family’s home, where she had lived for years.
Zwicker said the family was devastated when she was removed from their care.
“This was a wonderful relationship. They saw her as their daughter. She would refer to them as mommy and daddy,” she said.
In December, the child’s biological father filed a motion stating the foster family did not have legal standing. And on Jan. 9, United States District Judge Angel Kelley ruled to dismiss the foster family’s motion.
Zwicker continued fighting to keep the girl in the U.S.
With the Lynn Juvenile Court vacating its previous judgment on Jan. 29, the 8-year-old will not be sent to live with her biological father. But her future, including if and when she gets adopted, is still uncertain. As of Thursday, the 8-year-old was still in permanent custody of DCF.
In the court documents, it was presented as a “state-initiated custody proceeding.” However, Zwicker disagrees.
“To be clear, this is not a custody case,” she previously told MassLive. “Our issue has been and continues to be with the action of a state agency effectively expelling U.S. Citizens to another country without any federal oversight. And we’re challenging the constitutionality of that.”
This practice isn’t uncommon, Zwicker said.
“In looking at this occurrence, I had thought to myself perhaps this was a one-off, a unique circumstance with perhaps an impassioned DCF worker. But I am told that this does happen routinely,” Zwicker said.
Properly assessing risk
Ten years after 2-year-old Bella Bond’s death exposed flaws in child welfare oversight, Massachusetts still struggles to properly assess both the risk to children and their biological family members’ ability to parent.
The Office of the Child Advocate’s most recent publicly released report criticized DCF for ignoring its own tools, undercutting specialists, and failing to adjust plans as risk escalated. It also called for accountability.
As of January, DCF is still working on implementing tools identified after the death of Bella, and again after the deaths of David Almond and Harmony Montgomery.
The idea of a risk assessment tool was first raised in a 2015 report after Bella‘s death. DCF did not properly assess Bella’s risk or her mother, Rachelle Bond’s, ability to parent, and closed the cases early, a report stated.
The idea of a Structured Decision-Making (SDM) tool was further identified as a need in 2021 after the death of 14-year-old David Almond, who died on Oct. 21, 2020. He and his brothers were under the supervision of the New York Office of Children and Families (OCFS) from 2013 to 2016 until the state returned them to John Almond’s custody in 2016.
On Oct. 21, 2020, police found David Almond bruised, emaciated and living in abhorrent conditions, authorities said. He was rushed to Charlton Memorial Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.
Although Harmony Montgomery’s story unfolded before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were similarities to David’s. Harmony died in 2019 after being reunited with her father in New Hampshire.
A report after her death stated that Harmony’s needs, well-being and safety were “not prioritized” in considering her custody placement.
One way to address this going forward is to create a Structured Decision-Making (SDM) tool to support assessments.
The system, created by Evident Change, works by identifying the key points in a child welfare case and uses “structured assessments to improve the consistency and validity of each decision.”
It was identified as a need in 2021 following David Almond’s death, and the design was expected to be completed in September 2022. Training was expected to then take place and be completed by June 2023.
The deadline was postponed to make the tool more impactful, according to DCF.
Training on the Structured Decision Making (SDM) Danger and Safety Assessment tool, a component of the SDM Reunification Assessment, finally began in May — about three years after the need was identified. The training is expected to take multiple months to ensure it is sustainable for staff.
That part of the training was expected to be completed by December 2024.
The next training for the full SDM Reunification Assessment was targeted to begin in May 2025. That was then expected to be fully implemented in late 2025.
- Read more: Child’s death highlights shortcomings of Mass.’ child welfare tools after years of promised reforms
As of December, 3,500 DCF staff have been trained on the SDM Danger and Safety Assessment tool. It is expected to be formally incorporated into practice in January. At that point, staff will be required to use it during all investigations.
DCF did not respond to MassLive’s request for comment on whether the tool was used in the 8-year-old’s case.
But the implementation of the full Reunification Assessment SDM tool is still underway, and additional training is needed.
The full implementation is expected in Fall 2026 — more than a decade after a “Baby Doe”— a child found in a trash bag and later identified as Bella — was killed and months after S.R.C. was almost sent to live with her biological father in Guatemala.
