Diana Moskovitz: After all the torment and torture, Nubia Barahona could still flash a smile. It was radiant and confident, set off by blond bangs and big hazel eyes. She smiled like a girl with her whole life ahead of her.
It showed no trace of her personal hell.
She was born to a drug-abusing former prostitute, removed from the home after her father was accused of improperly touching another child, then sent by the state’s child protection agency to live with a couple who, police say, bound and tortured both her and her twin brother, Victor.
The abuse was habitual and savage, Victor later said. And yet, so many of the family photos of Nubia show a girl with a sunny disposition, wrapping her arms around siblings, blowing out candles on her birthday cake, sporting a cake-frosting goatee. She splashes in an above-ground pool in the backyard. She grins at animals she can see through the car window at Lion Country Safari. On Halloween, she goes trick-or-treating in a pink princess costume, topped with a frothy pink headband and with a pink fan in her hand.
How it all ends has been reported at length. On Valentine’s Day one year ago, Nubia’s decomposing body was found stuffed inside a black trash bag in the back of her adoptive father’s pest-control truck along Interstate 95 in West Palm Beach. She was beaten to death and soaked, police said, in a stew of Pine-Sol, gasoline, liquid chlorine, chlorine tablets and Drano. She was 10.
Jorge and Carmen Barahona are awaiting trial. Both are charged with murder. The Department of Children & Families, which received numerous calls about Nubia to its child abuse hot line but did not protect her, has been flagellated for failure to do its job. That is the story of Nubia Barahona’s death.
This — from voluminous court records, audio recordings, hundreds of family photos released by prosecutors, interviews and DCF documents — is the story of her life.
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