A Coachella mother pleads guilty to murdering her 5 year old son, four years after deputies found the boy dead in her home

Vanessa Cervantes Rangel stood before Riverside County Superior Court Judge Kristi Hester in Indio on Friday and pleaded guilty to killing her youngest child. Rangel, 41, of Coachella, admitted to first degree murder, assault on a child resulting in death, torture and four misdemeanor counts of child abuse, during a pretrial hearing at the Larson Justice Center. Court minutes did not show whether the plea was made directly to the judge or negotiated with the District Attorney’s Office beforehand, and no sentencing date was announced. She is held without bail at the Robert Presley Jail.

Deputies were called to Rangel’s home in the 50400 block of South Kenmore Street on the night of September 8, 2022, on reports of a child in medical distress. They found the 5 year old boy unconscious and gravely injured. Paramedics pronounced him dead at the scene minutes later. Rangel was arrested five days afterward. Her mother and her sister were taken into custody one day after that.

At a preliminary hearing in November 2022, prosecutors presented evidence of what the boy’s body showed. He had lesions up and down his body, a split lip, a bump on his head and about an inch and a half of skin missing from his right arm. Sheriff’s investigator Ruben Martinez testified that the surviving children told him their mother often beat the boy and kicked him so hard that he fell. The children also said their grandmother treated the boy’s wounds, changed his diaper, carried him and wiped his tears away “so that his mother wouldn’t see that he was crying,” Martinez testified.

Rangel had lost custody of her children before the boy died. Detective Martin Alfaro testified that her sister, Miriam Silva, became the legal guardian of the 5 year old and one of his siblings in 2019, while the grandmother became guardian of the other children, after Child Protective Services opened an investigation. Rangel kept visitation access. Prosecutors said her other children were also abused. At the time of her arrest in 2022 they were a girl of 13, a girl of 6 and a boy of 9.

The case against the two women who held guardianship is still open. Hilaria Cervantes Rangel, 59, the boy’s grandmother, and Miriam Silva, 44, his aunt, are each charged with first degree murder. The grandmother is also charged with four counts of child abuse and Silva with one. Both are free on bonds of 75,000 dollars and are set to go on trial beginning January 15. Their defense attorneys argued at the preliminary hearing that the women took no active part in the abuse and are not liable for murder. Prosecutors answered that the grandmother gave medical aid “so that the abuse she knows is coming can continue to be perpetrated by Vanessa,” and that Silva, as legal guardian, had a binding duty of care and committed the homicide by omission. Rangel had no documented prior felony convictions in Riverside County. Neither did her mother or her sister.