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Lupe Torres Morin’s family told her not to go to the trial.
They warned her that the images and the videos of her great, great granddaughter’s abuse could rob her of other, happier memories of the little girl.
More than a year later, they weren’t wrong.
“I can hear Mercedes tell him, ‘stop, I'll be good. I'll be good. Stop. Please stop,’ ” Torres Morin said with a shaking voice. “She would pass out, and he would throw the water at her and strike her.”
Mercedes Losoya was tortured for months by her mother’s boyfriend, Jose Angel Ruiz — a man described by police as a wannabe gangster and minor drug dealer; a man who documented much of the abuse with his phone and a series of webcams.
When Mercedes died, weeks from her sixth birthday, police said she was covered “from head to toe in bruises.” Patches of hair had been pulled out, she had a fractured skull and dozens of pin-sized holes on her feet.
She died of rhabdomyolysis, a condition common with intense exercise, or in the girl’s case, severe beatings. The medical examiner said her kidneys became overwhelmed by the volume of the toxins released by bruised and damaged tissue and shut down, causing her death.
Mercedes was one of 1,200 Texas children who died from abuse and neglect in Texas between 2018-2023. Texas Public Radio’s series When Home is the Danger reviewed these deaths, revealing a child welfare system so intent on reducing its contact with troubled families that it frequently left children in dangerous households. At the same time, it sharply reduced the family services and monitoring that might have kept these children safe.
The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) did not challenge TPR’s findings in its investigation, but declined to answer questions around what went wrong in these cases.
“At DFPS, the safety and well-being of the children we serve is our top priority,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.
The spokesperson defended the system’s work, pointing to drops in “maltreatment” fatalities. TPR reported that the numbers were misleading, however, because the state changed what counts as a neglect death and when it investigated a child’s fatality for abuse and neglect.
The agency declined to comment on why Mercedes remained in an abusive and neglectful home despite repeated reports from family, friends and neighbors.
While the trial over her death ended months ago, the torture inflicted still ripples through people who witnessed her suffering. The photographs, videos and descriptions of the child’s abuse haunt her family, the prosecutors, defense attorneys, police and jurors.
The abuse that led to Mercedes’ death was a horrific and avoidable tragedy. Her story is not unlike that of the hundreds of other Texas children who died under the state’s watch. It's a story that starts with the trauma of a small child and cascades outward, leaving a community scarred.
Healing isn’t fast or easy. For some, it never comes.
The family
Lupe Torres Morin, 76, is now the sole provider for Mercedes’ sister. Her name won’t be used because she is a child survivor of abuse and neglect.
Mercedes, a little louder and a little prouder than her sister, bore the brunt of the abuse from their mother and Ruiz. Just a year older, her sister witnessed it all, leaving her fearful to this day. Whether taking a shower or going to school or going to sleep, she thinks Ruiz is there, on the other side of the door, peering through a window, waiting to take her.
The simple act of eating a meal was laden with the stresses and danger of the man’s anger. Torres Morin remembers not long after the girl came to stay with her, watching the girl choke down her food.
“She was afraid of eating and not finishing,” Torres Morin told TPR in a series of interviews about the girl’s life and death. “She would be gagging her food … but she would tell me, ‘Grandma, I’ll finish it. I promise.’”
When Torres Morin explained she didn’t have to, the girl looked on in disbelief.
The girl thinks of her sister often, said Torres Morin. When she watches Frozen, she sings, like she used to do with her sister. But before long, tears will stream down the girl's cheeks.
Mercedes’ sister has gone through several rounds and types of therapy. Torres Morin pays for it with help from her church and nonprofits like Texas Grandparents Raising Grandchildren.
The best help was an equine therapy program at Small Acres Ranch.
On the first day they took her to a small herd and let her pick the horse she would care for. She picked a malnourished one named Lucy that had been beaten and burned by its previous owners.
“She said, ‘poor baby…I'm sorry that happened to you,’” Torres Morin recalled the little girl saying. “One time she said, ‘Oh, they beat you, just like they did my Sissy.’”
More than a year after coming to live with her, Torres Morin said Mercedes’ sister is finally adjusting. She is catching up in school — her mother didn’t let the two girls attend regularly — and now has friends and is regularly invited to birthday and swimming parties.
Seeing her great, great granddaughter thrive is a comfort to Torres Morin, but also a reminder of the feeling that she failed Mercedes. Guilt and shame, often misplaced, over abuse and neglect deaths run deeply through all the families who spoke to TPR for this series.
Child abuse and neglect are often secret crimes, taking place between the voiceless and caregivers taking place behind closed doors, walled off from the larger community and family.
Despite that, the shame that accompanies a death — through media coverage or the prosecution of a family member — leaves deep lesions of regret. Many of Mercedes’ family members feel they did the “right thing” by reporting what they saw to the correct authorities. But, still, they are left feeling they had not done enough.
“Being a person of faith, a person who believes in the word of God,” Torres Morin said. “I know that I should not feel guilty. But I do, at times, feel that guilt.”
The short life of Mercedes Losoya
Katrina Mendoza gave birth to her second child, Mercedes Losoya, on March 3, 2016. She was 16.
Within two months, the young mother would be in Bexar County Juvenile Detention for assaulting Mercedes’ paternal grandmother. It wasn’t the last time she would be accused of a crime.
It was also not the last time Mendoza’s care for the girls was investigated by the state.
The family was one of nearly 100 that TPR reviewed between 2018 and 2023 that had been investigated six or more times prior to a child’s death from abuse or neglect. At the time of her arrest in Mercedes’ death, there were thousands of pages of investigation documents about her in the files of the Department of Family and Protective Services, according to attorneys.
Mercedes was born premature, and she failed to gain weight for months. Ultimately the state removed the girl from her parents because, they said, the parents physically neglected her.
Mercedes' father, Alfred Losoya, suffers from mental health issues and had been hospitalized for them in the past, according to the child’s fatality report. His relationship with Mendoza was volatile and at times violent.
After the girls were removed, the state compelled their mother to go to parent training, counseling, drug testing, domestic violence education. Their father declined to complete his mandated services. He eventually stopped visiting regularly.
The family was concerned for Mercedes’ safety years before Ruiz came into the picture. The state agreed to make a safety plan that said the children stay with Mendoza’s father, who would split custody with the young mother. But Mendoza was regularly violating that plan, keeping the kids away for days then weeks.
Before long, Mendoza was keeping her children full time, bouncing from the homes of relatives’ homes to boyfriends ’ homes and back.
It isn’t clear when or if DFPS approved of Mendoza having the kids.
According to both DFPS and crime data, Bexar County has a reputation for domestic violence, child abuse and neglect, and — child and family safety advocates said — a disturbing blindness to both.
Last year, there were 4,800 confirmed child victims of abuse and neglect in the county or about 8.45 children per 1,000, according to DFPS. That’s an additional victim than the national average and nearly double Harris County’s 4.24. Bexar is nearly tied for worst abuse and neglect numbers for large counties in the state, being edged out slightly by Tarrant County.
When the abuse of Mercedes was first reported, it was just one of thousands that year throughout the community.
According to state reports, a family friend found large hand-shaped bruises on Mercedes when she was two years old. The state said Mendoza neglectfully supervised the child but couldn’t say if she was the one who abused her.
Family members voiced concern to the state about excessive discipline, who said it was her younger daughter who was often the target of her mother’s moods.
“[Mercedes] is afraid of mother,” said a state report detailing past allegations of abuse and neglect. “Sibling will sometimes take the blame for things as sibling knows that mother will not discipline the same (sic).”
Mendoza denied she treated the girls differently.
Other family members agreed that Mendoza disliked Mercedes. Her sister was the good child, coddled, they said the mother thought, and Mercedes was bad.
“She would say stupid things like, ‘oh, I don't want her’, or like, ’she's annoying, like she's getting on my nerves,’” Emily Losoya, Mercedes' great aunt, recalled.
The girls, despite being of age, rarely went to school. Mendoza would later testify she just “liked having them around.”
When she turned 21, Mendoza started dancing at various strip clubs across San Antonio. That’s how she met Jose Angel Ruiz, dancing at Diamonds Showclub.
Within a year, Mercedes would be dead.
The prosecutor and the detective
Brittany Mitchell worked family violence and child abuse cases for seven years with the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office. Mercedes Losoya’s violent death was her last.
“That was a monster of a case,” she told TPR.
Sitting in a conference room on the seventh floor of the Paul Elizondo Tower in downtown San Antonio, Mitchell pulled out a bulky manilla envelope. From it came a pin given to her by the family with Mercedes’ face on it and a drawing in crayon given to her by Mercedes' sister.
She keeps a framed picture of Mercedes on her desk.
“It’s important to keep little reminders,” Mitchell said. “It's important for me to remember a case like this, a case where we got it right. We were able to put them away.”
Despite agreeing to take a job in a different part of the DA’s office, she asked to keep Mercedes' case. Mitchell didn’t do so because she wanted to look at autopsy photographs of the girl’s undernourished frame or videos in which the girl is forced to hold up heavy weights for long periods of time, or images of her harrowing abuse. She kept the case so others wouldn’t have to see those things.
It took six months for Mitchell to prepare for the trial. “I didn't want to burden somebody else with having to go through the images and look at everything that I had looked at,” she said. “You can't just pass this on to somebody.”
More than a year since the trial ended, it’s common for Mitchell to be driving when an image from one of her many child abuse death cases flashes in her mind.
“There's a couple images that I'll never forget in that case,” she said.
Mitchell can’t forget the footage from the night vision camera inside the closet, where Mercedes was kept in the dark, standing on thumbtacks. Until she saw that footage, she had always thought the girl was sitting or lying down when punished.
“It was horrific,” she said.
Learning to compartmentalize was key in cases like Mercedes’, Mitchell explained; thinking about what was done to the girl rather than what the small child went through was vital to avoid being overwhelmed.
“You just have to keep going,” she said. It wasn't uncommon to cry in cases like these, in private, not in front of juries or witnesses. “The tightness in your chest. The gravity of everything.”
Former detective Lawrence Saiz worked for the San Antonio Police Department for 31 years, including 12 with the homicide unit. He only worked on a handful of child death cases. Mercedes was “by far the worst.”
He, like Mitchell, tried to shield his colleagues from the brunt of the case. His partner at the time had a newborn. Other than Mitchell and her co-counsel Marissa Giovenco, he didn’t speak to others about the case until much later. Giovenco also came back to the district attorney’s office from private practice temporarily to prosecute the case.
All three — the prosecutors and the detective — worked to spare those around them from the worst of the grim abuse details. Ultimately, it meant they bore the burden for others, a burden that has stuck with them ever since.
Each day, when Saiz returned home from investigating this crime, he’d sit quietly by himself to process the day.
“You just got to kind of regroup and move on because number one, people are counting on you to do your job,” he said.
The defense attorney
On the other side of the aisle, Theresa Connolly was tasked with defending Jose Ruiz — a man many in the community called a ‘monster.’ She had never defended someone of killing a child in her 30-plus year career.
Connolly thought the case should have been adjudicated as a capital murder case, which she would not have been asked to defend. But Ruiz had been charged with a lesser crime: serious bodily injury to a child.
The case exposed just how broken the child welfare system is, she said.
In her cross examination of Mercedes’ mother, which Mendoza gave as part of a plea deal for a reduced prison sentence, Connolly pointed to the stack of child abuse investigations on the young mother. In the four months leading to her death, family members, neighbors and friends repeatedly called the Department of Family and Protective Services or police reporting abuse and neglect.
“Mother verbalized not wanting child [Mercedes] that she was willing to give to a friend in exchange for a car and apartment,” read a report made two weeks before the child’s death.
Mendoza did give the girl to someone: her boyfriend, Ruiz. He promised to discipline her. For months, abuse had been ramping up in the home, reports showed, reaching a fever pitch in her final weeks.
Then in January 2022, a neighbor called the police saying he could hear a child screaming from what sounded like a beating in the apartment below.
“She just keeps saying, ‘Ow ow ow,'” Mo Hosana said in the 911 recording, played in court.
San Antonio police officers responded but did not enter the apartment or see the child. They were assuaged by Ruiz and Mendoza, who described a disobedient child who wailed despite modest punishment.
“I think we failed Mercedes a few times,” said Saiz, the detective, who was prompted to advocate for better police training on child welfare cases because of Mercedes death.
Connolly conceded that Ruiz hurt Mercedes. But she still believed that Mercedes’ mother — not her boyfriend — killed the girl. This is the argument she made at trial.
The jury deliberated for less than an hour. Ruiz was still found guilty. He received a life sentence. Mendoza was later sentenced to more than 40 years.
In all her years, Connolly said, she had never been happier to be done with a case: months of grueling research, graphic images, she says clearly showed how the state failed Mercedes. It took a toll. After the trial, Connolly said she fell into a deep malaise that permeated her whole life.
“All I know is when I was finished, I never in my life [before] sat down and thought, ‘Thank Almighty God. I don't have to say another word, not another word,’” she said. “The case was so rotten.”
Connolly said the state got off easy.
The child abuse investigator on the case was assigned additional training and weekly coaching. The investigator’s entire caseload was reviewed, according to a DFPS spokesperson. The state also revised several policies afterward, but the spokesperson did not “draw a direct line” from those fixes to Mercedes’ death.
“There’s no accountability to anybody. None. Nothing anywhere,” Connolly said.
The juror
The trial lasted more than a week. In addition to disturbing testimony from medical professionals, the damning photos and videos found on Ruiz’s cell phone convinced the jury to convict the man.
Juror number 2, Kelsey Malone, was worried the Ruiz trial might hinge on implications and slim evidence. His concerns turned out to be unwarranted once he saw the photos and videos.
When the autopsy images were shown and Mercedes’ small body covered in bruises was projected onto the screen, jurors had sudden audible and physical reactions. Once engaged and collegial, the graphic evidence left the jury despondent.
“I'd see people either in the courtroom or out of the courtroom from the jury panel that had tears in their eyes. They brought tissues. It was a very difficult time,” Malone said.
The case made the 31-year-old reconsider aspects of his own childhood.
Malone wasn’t sure they would let him on the jury. During the selection process they asked if anyone had dealt with child abuse their own lives. His was the lone hand raised.
He was quick to dismiss any comparison to what Mercedes went through, but his family did deal with Child Protective Services (CPS) in their home over several months due to allegations of abuse. He always thought that CPS was overreaching, that the incidents were overblown and his family had been victimized by the system.
Child welfare workers are rarely credited with saving a child, and the system writ large has been attacked for years as an overbearing one that breaks up families.
But prosecutor Brittany Mitchell thinks most people have no idea how often serious abuse and neglect actually happens.
“I think the larger community is greatly blind to what happens to children. I would say it doesn't affect the larger community enough, I think there's, I think people would be shocked at how common this stuff is,” she said.
After this trial, Malone doesn’t think about his family’s experience the same way anymore.
“I'm glad that they investigated as much as they did," he said. “There could have been a lot more going on than what was visible on the surface, and nobody would have ever known.”
This series was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship.
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