Gabriel Fernandez: How a Child Asked for Help 60 Times and Was Ignored

The Night Paramedics Found Gabriel Fernandez

A Call for Help in Palmdale

On the night of May 22, 2013, paramedics in Palmdale, California, were dispatched to what they were initially told was a medical emergency involving an eight-year-old boy who had suffered a head injury while playing with his older brother. But when they arrived, it was immediately clear—this was no accident.

Gabriel Fernandez lay unresponsive inside the apartment, his small body battered and broken. He wasn’t breathing. He had no pulse. Blood covered him. The paramedics worked quickly, loading him into the ambulance and performing CPR. Against the odds, they got his heart beating again. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for the ER doctors to try and save him.

Then, just minutes later, his heart stopped again.

Injuries That Told a Darker Story

Doctors and nurses at the hospital fought to stabilize Gabriel, and as they did, a horrifying reality unfolded. His injuries weren’t just severe—they didn’t match the story they’d been given. A simple head injury from playing too rough shouldn’t come with cigarette burns, missing teeth, or deep bruising across his entire body.

Gabriel had black eyes, ligature marks around his ankles, and scrapes on his legs that looked like he’d been dragged. BB gun pellets were embedded in his skin. His ribs were broken. His skull was fractured.

There was no version of events where this was anything other than prolonged, deliberate torture.

As Gabriel lay in a hospital bed, barely clinging to life, the people around him began piecing together a story that should have never been possible.

Unraveling the Truth: Who Was Pearl Fernandez?

A Mother with a Troubled Past

As Gabriel Fernandez lay in a hospital bed, barely clinging to life, investigators started looking for answers. They didn’t have to look far.

The first person they turned to was his mother, Pearl Fernandez—a woman whose past was as troubled as they come. She had spent much of her childhood in and out of jail, racking up a criminal record while blaming her behavior on the beatings she endured at home.

By the time she was nine, Pearl had already turned to alcohol and meth. By eleven, she had dropped out of school and run away. She bounced from place to place, often staying wherever she could find shelter. According to Pearl, that meant spending time in some truly dangerous situations. She later claimed she had been raped by an uncle, then kidnapped and held hostage by a group of men who assaulted her for days.

If her accounts are to be believed, Pearl’s life had been a series of traumas, one after the other. She was later diagnosed with multiple mental illnesses, including a developmental disability that reportedly put her verbal comprehension skills at the level of a second grader, PTSD, and a possible personality disorder. Her own family described her as someone constantly battling the “demons” inside her.

The Man She Chose: Isauro Aguirre

Pearl’s relationships followed the same pattern—unstable, violent, and abusive. When Gabriel was hospitalized, she was living with her long-term boyfriend, Isauro Aguirre.

By most accounts, Isauro didn’t seem like a threat. People who knew him described him as mild-mannered, quiet, even helpful. His biggest academic achievement was repeating two grades before dropping out of high school, but after that, he worked a steady job at the Woodland Park Retirement Hotel, where his former boss called him “down to earth.”

But whatever version of Isauro those people knew wasn’t the one Gabriel met. The man in that apartment—the one in charge of an eight-year-old boy—was someone else entirely.

And Pearl? She wasn’t the same mother to Gabriel that she was to her other children. Not even close.

A Childhood in Limbo: The Custody Battles Over Gabriel Fernandez

Unwanted at Birth

By the time Gabriel Fernandez entered the world, his mother had already decided she wanted nothing to do with him. He was the fourth child born to Pearl Fernandez and her then-boyfriend Arnold Contreras, but unlike her other children, Pearl didn’t even pretend to want to keep him.

Shortly after giving birth, she made a call to her great-uncle, Michael Lemos Carranza, and, with all the warmth of a customer returning a defective toaster, told him: “Come get his kid because he’s getting on my nerves.”

Michael and his long-term boyfriend, David Martinez, were overjoyed. They took Gabriel in immediately and raised him in a home filled with love and stability. Pearl, on the other hand, didn’t even wait to make sure the transfer went smoothly—she abandoned Gabriel at the hospital three days after giving birth.

A Happy Home Destroyed by Prejudice

For the next several years, Gabriel lived with Michael and David, thriving in a home where he was wanted. But by 2009, an outside force disrupted that happiness—his grandfather, Robert Fernandez.

Robert took issue with his grandson being raised by two men, convinced that their influence was turning him gay. His evidence? Gabriel openly told Michael and David how much he loved them. According to Robert, that wasn’t affection—it was indoctrination.

Pearl stayed out of the argument, likely because engaging would have required effort. In the end, Robert won. Gabriel was taken from the only real parents he had ever known and placed in his grandparents’ home.

Pearl Suddenly Wants to Be a Mother

Gabriel hadn’t even settled into his new home before yet another custody battle began. This time, Pearl wanted him back.

No one in the family believed this was about maternal instinct. Michael, David, and Gabriel’s grandparents fought to keep him away from her, but in the end, biology beat logic. Pearl had the legal right to take him, and in 2012, she did exactly that.

She and Isauro Aguirre picked Gabriel up under the pretense of taking him to a family barbecue. By the time his grandparents realized they had been deceived, it was too late. Gabriel was gone.

He was now living in Palmdale, in an apartment where “home” meant something very different from what he had known before.

Eight Months in Hell: The Torture and Murder of Gabriel Fernandez

In just eight months, Gabriel Fernandez went from a happy, thriving child to a battered, broken body fighting for life in a hospital bed. His new home with Pearl Fernandez and Isauro Aguirre wasn’t a home at all—it was a torture chamber.

Gabriel wasn’t just abused; he was systematically destroyed. His bones were broken. He was forced to eat cat litter, feces, his own vomit, and expired food. They shot him repeatedly with a BB gun, aiming at his face and groin. They pepper-sprayed him, forced him into freezing cold showers to keep the bruises from being too visible, and knocked out his teeth with a baseball bat. They strangled him. They tied him up. They gagged him.

And as if the physical abuse wasn’t enough, they wanted to break him in other ways too. They forced him to wear women’s clothing, convinced that being raised by his great-uncle Michael and his partner David had “turned him gay.”

At night, Gabriel didn’t get a bed. He got the box.

It was a small cupboard in Pearl and Isauro’s bedroom. He was handcuffed to the metal handles on the outside and locked inside for hours. He wasn’t let out—not to eat, not to use the bathroom. His older siblings would sneak him food when they could, but most nights, if he had to relieve himself, he had to do it inside the box, then clean it up later.

Even when social services came knocking, Gabriel wasn’t safe. Pearl and Isauro had a system. They would stuff a sock in his mouth or tie a bandana around his face, ensuring that no matter how badly he wanted to beg for help, he couldn’t make a sound.

Gabriel’s suffering wasn’t a secret. More than sixty complaints were filed against Pearl and Isauro—by family, by neighbors, by teachers. And yet, nothing happened. The open investigation into suspected abuse only made things worse. It blocked his family from stepping in. His grandfather, Robert, desperately wanted to take Gabriel back but was legally forbidden from doing so while the case was active. If he had taken Gabriel, he could have gone to jail—and Gabriel would have been sent straight back to Pearl.

From a legal standpoint, Gabriel was forced to stay in the home that would kill him.

After two days in the hospital, Gabriel succumbed to his injuries.

Pearl and Isauro were arrested and charged with child abuse and first-degree murder. When asked why they had tortured and eventually killed him, Pearl said she had beaten Gabriel as punishment for not picking up his toys. Isauro’s reasoning was even simpler—Gabriel was gay.

Pearl pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. In 2021, she filed a petition to have her sentence reduced. It was denied almost immediately.

Isauro went to trial, where a jury found him guilty of first-degree murder and torture. He was sentenced to death. But California’s moratorium on capital punishment means that while Gabriel never got to see his ninth birthday, the man who took his life will likely spend the rest of his own behind bars, waiting for an execution date that may never come.