Amanda Gallegos died in pain at 19 months.
She hemorrhaged from an internal injury, an autopsy found, possibly caused by squeezing or repeatedly striking her chest and back. She had four broken ribs that had been healing for weeks – and that had been broken again.
Eight times, her grandmother Brenda Hudak and others had called Adams County’s child abuse line to warn that Amanda or her baby sister were in danger. The last time, Hudak says, a caseworker dismissed Amanda’s bruises with a comment that he saw nothing that made him sick to his stomach.
In the three years since her granddaughter died, Hudak has regularly visited the children’s section of a Thornton cemetery and knelt in grief before a tiny heart-shaped headstone.
Amanda A’laina Gallegos, it reads.
May 26, 1999. Jan. 20, 2001.
“Toward the end, all she did was cry a lot,” Hudak recalled. “I could always see the fear in her eyes.”
At the cemetery, she stood, touched a hand to her lips and patted Amanda’s headstone goodbye. “Somebody,” she muttered, “needs to pay for what they’ve done to her.”
To date, nobody has.
The county agency that took the child abuse calls about Amanda was accused by a veteran supervisor of altering the dead girl’s file to cover up its failure to help her. It dismissed her accusations.
The state agency responsible for investigating preventable child abuse deaths never reported anything about Amanda’s case and claimed to be unaware of the coverup allegations.
The sheriff’s office responsible for determining whether Amanda was beaten to death still lists the case as open.
A treasured granddaughter
Amanda lived with her baby sister, father Damian Gallegos and teenage mother Dawn Hudak in the basement of an Adams County home. Her grandmother lived on the main floor.
Four months before Amanda died there, her sister nearly did. A sheriff’s report says Trinity was found “bluish-gray and unresponsive” before a deputy opened her airway. The infant’s father “said he was walking up the stairs with the baby when he fell down, landing on the child,” the deputy wrote.
According to Brenda Hudak, the injury temporarily paralyzed the right side of Trinity’s newborn body, but she is recovering in the care of adoptive parents.
Hudak was especially fond of Amanda, a toddler with a brown ponytail and a bright smile. She took her to the Family Dollar Store in Thornton to buy things she had been unable to afford for her own children.
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She gave Amanda the biggest panda bear she could find, overalls with flowers, “anything her little heart wanted,” she said.
But Hudak, her son Michael, and her ex- husband, also Michael Hudak, said Amanda was an abused little girl.
They said Adams County was called repeatedly during the last months of her life to check bruises on her body and changes in her behavior, but caseworkers doubted allegations that Damian Gallegos was hurting his daughter.
In an interview, Gallegos denied abusing Amanda or causing her death.
Rachel Fleischaker, who worked with Brenda Hudak at Quest Diagnostics, said she and two co-workers also called the county’s child abuse line without results. Fleischaker said she once reported seeing that “Amanda had been spanked to the point where she was black and blue all over her thighs.”
On his last visit, Hudak said, the caseworker took pictures of Amanda.
She had bruises “all up and down her spine,” Hudak said, but the caseworker “didn’t see anything that made him sick to his stomach.”
He also suggested to Amanda’s parents “that they move out with their children because we were putting our noses where they didn’t belong,” Hudak said. “He said it right in front of me.”
The caseworker would not discuss his involvement or the allegations that someone altered Amanda’s file. “I can’t comment on that,” he said.
In January 2001, the Adams County sheriff was called to investigate a report of a child not breathing. Deputies found Amanda on the basement floor.
Dawn Hudak, a juvenile when Amanda died, appeared to take responsibility in the police report. She told a deputy “she somehow slipped and fell on” Amanda “with her knees hitting” the girl’s chest.
But the autopsy report noted that Amanda’s death had been followed by “vague, variable and changing/contradicting stories related by the parents.” The report said Amanda had four broken ribs that had been healing for weeks, and “acute re-fractures” of material forming over her broken bones. Her other wounds ranged from internal bleeding near her kidneys to a healing chest bruise and a bruise on the front of her head.
“There are blunt traumatic injuries and are suspicious for abuse/foul play,” pathologist Dr. Patrick Allen wrote. He classified Amanda’s death as a homicide or accident, probably caused by “a suffocation episode (perhaps by squeezing or compression of the chest), vs. a sudden, sharp blow or blows to the thorax and back.”
Dawn Hudak declined to comment. Damian Gallegos said Brenda Hudak falsely accused him of abusing his daughter, and detectives wrongly suspected him of killing her.
Brenda Hudak “used to call social services all the time,” he said. “There was never any marks, never any bruises, never any scratches.”
Asked how Amanda died, he said, “We were getting up to go eat … It’s kind of a memory I’m pushing out. I’m drawing a blank. I’ve gone through a whole lot of depression, I don’t know if I want to dig it back up. I feel like that’s ruining my life right now.”
The Colorado Department of Human Services sent employees to check Adams County’s prior involvement with Amanda’s family, but then decided no fatality report was needed.
Allegations of a county coverup
Meanwhile, Adams County social services faced an internal coverup accusation. An agency supervisor, whose duties included reviewing files with multiple child abuse reports, charged that:
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Damian Gallegos, Amanda’s father, said he did not abuse his daughter. “There was never any marks, never any bruises, never any scratches,” he said. |
Photos of Amanda were removed before the state Department of Human Services arrived.
The girl’s case history had been “doctored,” with handwritten notes of a caseworker who “never types anything” replaced with typed reports.
Adams County should have responded to repeated signs of child abuse by taking custody of Amanda and her sister.
The supervisor’s own assessment of the case, written before Amanda died, was missing from the case file.
Donald Cassata, Adams County’s social services director, asked his fellow director in Larimer County, Ginny Riley, to investigate. A copy of that report, with names of almost everyone involved deleted, was provided to The Denver Post.
Riley reported that typed notes had replaced “original handwritten notes” in the file, but found no reason to suspect two employees had changed anything because they said they hadn’t.
She dismissed the allegation that photos of Amanda were removed, noting that a county social services official “indicated” the photos were shown to state reviewers.
But according to Susan Ludwig, Colorado’s child fatality review team chairman, Department of Human Services reviewers sent to investigate Amanda’s death “never observed any photos, period.”
Ludwig said the fatality review team reported nothing about Amanda’s death because state reviewers “did not find any significant issues in the county’s involvement.”
She also said, however, that the state was never informed that the county had been accused of altering Amanda’s case file and removing photos of the girl.
Riley’s report concluded that there was no coverup. It called Amanda’s caseworker diligent, the abuse reports “somewhat suspect” and the supervisor’s allegations, in a “my word against theirs” case, unfounded. In hindsight, “we could probably identify minor areas where the services of Adams County could have been improved,” she wrote.
The supervisor, Margaret Taylor, declined to comment for this story on the advice of her lawyer. Top officials at Adams County social services say Taylor’s claims were investigated and dismissed.
“That particular person appears to have some kind of vendetta,” Cassata said. The department told Taylor “she ought to mind her own business,” he added.
The question left by the autopsy – was Amanda’s death murder or an accident? – remains open.
Officially, the Adams County Sheriff’s office has not ended its investigation. “It’s actually in kind of a holding pattern until more evidence develops,” detective Scott Fitzgerald said. “It’s difficult to develop any case unless witnesses are able and willing to come forward.”
