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This story is part of When Home is the Danger, a multi-part series on how Texas is leaving children in dangerous homes and families without ongoing support or monitoring.
Ronni Salazar’s mother was desperate.
Homeless and pregnant, she had recently stormed out of a hospital after testing positive for methamphetamines. That’s when she was approached by a woman she didn’t know in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant on San Antonio’s South Side.
The woman said she wanted to help. The young mother abided. Within weeks of their meeting in early 2022, two of her children lived with the stranger.
Within the year, three-year-old Ronni was dead and the stranger arrested.
According to an autopsy, Ronni was covered in bruises and missing fingernails. Doctors had to remove much of her scalp to relieve the pressure brought on by the blunt force trauma they say killed her.
The State of Texas had many chances to save Ronni, failing to intervene despite multiple reports to the child welfare system about her mother’s ongoing drug use and the impact on her and her siblings’ safety, according to a comprehensive review TPR performed of Ronni’s case.
When workers from the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) did finally respond, a law passed by state lawmakers, eager to cut down on the number of children unfairly taken from their families, made the process more difficult. And the district attorney declined to remove her from a home with strangers the state doesn’t appear to have fully vetted.
Ronni Salazar is far from the only child to suffer such a fate. TPR’s multi-part investigative series “When Home is the Danger” revealed a system intent on reducing contact with troubled families, leaving children with violent, unstable, drug-abusing parents.
Ronni was one of more than 1,200 children who died between 2018 and 2023 — all from abuse and neglect. One in four of those children died despite an investigation into their families within a year of their deaths, according to a TPR analysis.
In the six-year period analyzed — 148 children died from abuse and neglect despite open investigations or while department services were being provided.
Ronni was in this group. She died even though her and her siblings’ well-being were the subjects of a DFPS investigation that had been underway for months. She was also one of an unknown number of deaths that occurred after a department or district attorney denied to remove a child despite an investigator's request.
The woman convicted of killing Ronni even believed the state fell down on the job.
“We were nobodies,” Evonne Perez, 51, told TPR from the state prison where she was sentenced to spend the next 17 years of her life. “I didn't understand why Child Protective Services didn't get more involved with us.”
Ronni’s story
Ronni Esther Lynn Salazar was born Dec. 21, 2018.
Her mother, Kassandra Danielle Lopez, had six other children. At least four had been removed by Child Protective Services (CPS). She was described as an itinerant drug user who tested positive for methamphetamines during and after one pregnancy in agency documents TPR obtained through public records requests.
Ronni stayed with various family members throughout her short life. But in March 2022, she was with Lopez, and they were homeless, according to police records.
That’s when Lopez — standing outside Reyna’s Taqueria on South Hackberry with her infant son, Ronni’s brother — met Evonne Perez. Perez and her girlfriend, Edith Gonzales, saw Lopez sitting outside the restaurant, when they were picking up their dog from the groomer next door, and wanted to help, Perez later told police.
The two had never met, but Perez invited Lopez and her son to come home with her for the night. The next day, Perez made arrangements for Ronni’s brother to stay with her.
“She didn’t have no place to go,” Perez recalled years later.
Gonzales didn’t respond to TPR’s request for comment. She was not implicated in the child’s death.
Perez bought Lopez a phone, she explained later, so Lopez could call and check on the children. Before long, Ronni was dropped off at Perez’s home, too. Lopez told police that Perez started giving her $100 in exchange for $200 in food stamps.
Despite not being asked, Perez disputed the idea that she bought the children.
“A lot of things I was doing — to somebody else would look like ‘Oh, she’s buying a baby,” she said in an interview at the Lane Murray Unit, a women’s prison in Gatesville. “But it wasn’t like that.”
She denied the money was for anything but feeding the children.
Perez said Lopez never came back to check on her kids. At trial, Lopez said the woman was restricting her access to Ronni.
DFPS investigators came to Ronni’s great aunt Antonia Estrada’s home that spring looking for Lopez. Ronni and her brother had stayed with Estrada several times, and one of their siblings lived there at the time. Investigators told Estrada that Ronni and her brother were considered missing, and that they needed to find Lopez who was pregnant again and had tested positive for methamphetamines.
Concerned at hearing the children were missing, Estrada told TPR that she tracked them to Perez. But when she called, the stranger would not let her see them.
“She starts to get aggressive,” Estrada said. “I told her, ‘I'll meet them somewheres you want.’ And she goes, ‘No.’”
The conversation devolved into cussing, she said, and things got ugly, all while a DFPS investigator looked on.
Perez told TPR that an investigator came to her home just once. They talked for a couple of hours, the investigator looked around and then left. They never returned, Perez said.
Eventually someone at DFPS did request the child be removed from the situation, according to a source with direct knowledge of the case. The source did not want to be named because they were not authorized to speak about the case.
According to this source, investigators presented their reasons for removing Lopez’s children to the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office in the summer of 2022. The investigator said the children should be removed because Lopez continued abusing methamphetamines and remained homeless.
But the Bexar District Attorney’s Office, which represents DFPS in Bexar County child welfare cases, disagreed, the source said, denying the request to ask a judge to formally remove the children.
Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales’ office declined TPR’s request for comment on why the removal was denied and cited confidentiality exemptions.
Lawyers in the district attorney’s office told child protection workers all the children were safe, except the one still physically with Lopez, according to the source.
After the request to remove Ronni was denied, the source said no one from the department checked on the children for nearly three months, despite the open investigation.
Shifting stories of a tragic death
On Sept. 30, 2022, less than six months after she took Ronni in, police records show Evonne Perez showed up at Mission Hills Baptist Hospital at Brooks City Base. Ronni, her body covered in bruises, wasn’t responsive.
Perez’s story about what happened to the girl changed repeatedly. She told doctors Ronni fell off a chicken coop. She told her partner the girl had fallen while walking and hit her head. She told police the girl had been climbing on the back of stairs at an apartment complex like a jungle gym and fell.
Police determined the stairs have a metal backing that would have made it impossible to climb.
Perez’s story changed even when TPR interviewed her in prison. Initially she said that she didn’t witness the fall. A few minutes later she reversed herself.
“I see her fall when she got up and she looked scared,” Perez said.
Estrada, Salazar’s great aunt, said the doctors told her Ronni’s injuries looked like she was slammed into a brick wall.
“[It was like someone] grabbed her head and rammed it into the wall so hard that it passed through the sheetrock and hit the brick,” she told TPR.
The doctors tried to keep Ronni alive. She died four weeks later.
No one was ever directly convicted of killing Ronni. Perez pleaded guilty to injury to a child by omission for not taking her to the hospital and is serving 18 years. DFPS also found there was reason to believe she abused Ronni physically and neglected the girl. An autopsy found she also had genital trauma.
Lopez did not respond to TPR’s multiple attempts to reach her on social media, didn’t return messages or calls to numbers associated with her and or notes left at homes TPR visited. Estrada and other family members are now caring for Lopez’s other children.
An unusual child welfare case
It was highly unusual for Ronni Salazar to have been left with strangers, former child welfare workers and attorneys told TPR.
“They don't know who these people are,” said Lindsey Dionne, a former DFPS attorney who now represents families in cases against the state. “Even the story mom tells them should give any child welfare professionals pause that these children are being somehow trafficked.”
Dionne, who said the exchange of money was a red flag, said in her experience the state has intervened for less.
“We don't get to sell and buy children in this country. It's against the law, and DFPS needs to see some kind of custody agreement,” she said.
It isn’t clear how — or if — the state was aware of the money exchanging hands. It’s also unclear whether Perez was vetted. Foster families are run through criminal background checks, as well as a multi-step process of home studies and assessments.
If investigators had conducted a thorough evaluation, they would have learned that Perez wasn’t a licensed vocational or a registered nurse as she had claimed. Police determined later she was unemployed and had for a brief time held a temporary license.
Had they interviewed familial relations, her son Leethanial Davila may have told child welfare workers — as he did police — that he considered his mother a “habitual liar.” Davila’s grandmother told police that Perez abandoned her son with her when he was a baby and then showed up when he was four years old with a man who pointed a gun at her, demanding the child’s return.
According to court documents obtained by TPR, a special investigator assigned to the case after the girl was critically injured acknowledged the case was unusual. Marcia Collier wrote in her emergency removal request that Ronni was “dumped" with strangers, that her mother was avoiding CPS and that Ronni showed signs of serious physical neglect and abuse.
Ronni’s case was one of more than 9,000 DFPS investigations that year that had been backlogged — unfinished within a 60-day window. The situation was described as a crisis by one former director.
TPR’s analysis of years of department records and case files from this time period found that the backlog made face-to-face meetings between agency investigators and caregivers very difficult. The frequency of these visits to assess child safety dropped for months.
The agency declined to offer an explanation for its inaction in Ronni’s case, citing confidentiality.
But it does appear to have been affected by a Texas law passed just the year before. House Bill 567, authored by Rep. James Frank, made it illegal to remove a child unless they are in immediate danger.
Frank, R-Wichita Falls, did not respond to multiple requests to be interviewed for the series “When Home is the Danger.”
Supporters of the law change say narrowing the definition of neglect, which the law does, has made it easier for the system to focus on the kids who are in immediate danger and cut down on the number of times the state removed a child from homes mistakenly.
In this way, the bill has worked. Since it became law in 2021, child removals have dropped by 55%.
But advocates have said the law leaves kids in dangerous homes longer, and a TPR analysis of state data found more children who died from abuse and neglect after the law passed, did so while their care was being investigated by the state. In 2024, that rate went up two points to 13%. This was despite the total number of children who the state confirmed died due to maltreatment going down.
The state defines the four types of maltreatment as neglect, physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
Judges, family law attorneys and former DFPS officials have expressed concerns that the law gives too much power to department attorneys and district attorneys. Dionne, who started her career with DFPS as an attorney, was critical of how the attorney on Ronni’s case dismissed their workers' opinion.
“People who never met with these people were ignoring what even the worker was saying,” she said.
Each year, the state of Texas puts out a report on children who die or nearly die from maltreatment. In that report is a list of kids who died from abuse and neglect while the child welfare system was actively involved with the family. From 2018 to 2023, the state counted 147 child deaths.
Ronni was not included in the list.
A DFPS spokesperson told TPR that is because Ronni died four weeks after her catastrophic injury. In those four weeks she was removed from Perez’s care, so the investigation was closed, and she was in the state’s custody — no longer considered to be among those who died during an investigation or receiving state services.
An agency spokesperson said they did not know how many more children like Ronni Salazar may not have been included on the list.
Even in death, it seems, the true measure of the state’s failure in her case has gone unrecognized.
This story was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship.
