Sandra Anna Gonzalez is a 35-year-old Houston, Texas, mom of six kids, whose record with the state’s Child Protective Services agency dates back to 2004. So, perhaps it came as no surprise to authorities when they found late last year that her 10-year-old son was so badly malnourished that, according to the Harris County sheriff’s deputy, who was called in by a school official who found the boy, he looked like “a prisoner of war who had been starved.”
Now, Gonzalez faces multiple counts of injuring both her 10-year-old and 12-year-old sons by abusing and torturing them in some of the cruelest ways imaginable, including repeatedly shooting them at close range with a BB gun, starving them, and smashing their faces into walls so badly that she had to cover up the bloodstains with a new coat of paint.
Interestingly, Gonzalez is also the mom of three girls, ages 5, 10, and 14 — but when investigators checked out the family, they found that Gonzalez treated her girls just fine and they all appeared healthy.
The boys, sadly, were another story. In fact, the two kids told investigators, not only did their mom shoot them with the BB gun as “punishment,” she enlisted the girls to shoot their brothers as well — and even a cousin got in in the torture, shooting the two boys.
The 10-year-old was discovered late last year sitting outside of his school at a time when class was not in session. When a school official asked him what he was doing there, he said that his mother abused him so badly that he didn’t want to go home. The boy had a black eye and visible bruises.
The school official called police right away , and the arriving deputies asked the boy to remove his shirt — revealing not only his severe starvation but numerous other bruises and wounds as well — a condition that caused the deputies to describe the boy as resembling a tortured prisoner of war.
The boy and his brother were rushed to a hospital, where they told doctors the full extent of the horrors their mom inflicted upon them, including locking them in a closet for days at a time, allowing them to eat only a single bologna sandwich per day, and forcing them to kneel on a bed of sharp seeds for hours, every day for several weeks, mangling the skin on their knees.
Just two days before the 10-year-old was discovered outside the school building, the boys said, they had tried to wake their mother for permission to eat breakfast. She wouldn’t wake up, so they helped themselves to some food.
When she caught them, they said, Gonzalez lifted the 10-year-old off the ground and threw him face first into a wall. On another occasion, she smashed the 12-year-old’s face into the wall so hard that blood splattered and stained the wall — which Gonzalez then painted over.
The Gonzalez case surfaces a week after a case in Indiana in which two parents are accused of locking their 2-year-old twins in a four-by-four foot cell in their home.
Gonazlez earlier lost custody of her children in 2004 and 2006, but she inexplicably got the kids back in 2009. After the new allegations arose last year, CPS took custody of her children. When Sandra Anna Gonzalez gave birth to her latest baby in February, CPS immediately took that child into custody as well.
[Image: Harris County Sheriff’s Department]