Florida failed Nubia in every way possible.
It was the social workers who pushed her and her twin brother into the arms of Jorge and Carmen Barahona; the system that dismissed the guardian who raised red flags; the legislature that for years starved the Department of Children and Families of money for protection; the family court that blessed her adoption by the couple, instead of sending her to loving relatives.
Twelve years after the 10-year-old girl was tortured to death, stuffed in a bag and thrown in a truck bed, Florida is failing her yet again.
Jorge Barahona, her adoptive father and accused murderer, is successfully escaping trial.
Because Barahona is already held in a Miami-Dade County jail, there is an argument that a trial is a moot issue. As long as a jury does not get an opportunity to decide otherwise, he will remain behind bars until he dies.
But justice is about more than sentencing. It’s not just the specter of the death penalty Barahona is evading.
Nubia will come alive for the last time in a trial. It’s her messy pink bedroom we would see, her ravenous hunger and uncombed blonde hair, her bruises and her fading courage.
It’s Nubia’s voice, ignored by so many when she was alive, that Barahona would be forced to listen to. It’s Nubia who will finally be seen.
This is not merely a child abuse case. What Nubia and her brother endured was torture, with multiple types of physical and psychological abuse over a long period of time, ending with permanent disfigurement, disability or death.
Breaking bones is only a means to an end. Breaking a child’s will to live is the goal.
Hers may not be the worst child torture case in Florida, but in 2011, Nubia’s murder made national headlines after Jorge Barahona’s truck was found on the side of a Palm Beach County road. Her decomposing body was tossed in the back. In the front, Barahona doused himself and her twin with scarring chemicals, then pulled off the highway and waited for the convulsing child to join his sister in death.
The ensuing investigation found state accomplices everywhere.
When family members wanted to take in the twins after they were removed from their biological parents, the state gave them to the Barahonas instead.
When teachers reported concerns about Nubia’s hunger and dirty clothes, Florida’s refusal to regulate homeschooling allowed the Barahonas to sweep her from public classrooms and prying eyes.
When a court-appointed guardian ad litem for the children raised red flags and tried to keep the adoption from going through, he was dismissed.
There is a litany of reasons why the case has not gone to trial. One longtime lawyer withdrew, citing a criminal investigation into billing. Two others dropped the case. A new lawyer must sort through almost 1,000 docket entries in the case file and more than a decade’s worth of depositions, pleadings and investigative documents.
A spokesman for the Miami-Dade state attorney claims to have been told that the defense will essentially start from scratch.
From jail, Barahona continues to claim innocence. His 2021 handwritten letter to an appeals court is shot through with victimhood, citing conspiracies, hidden evidence, bad lawyering.
Assume, for the moment, that Barahona is not guilty. Assume he never laid a hand on Nubia. He would still have been a silent witness to her murder. As long as he never goes to court, he remains free to live in a self-comforting cocoon of indignant innocence.
It’s a peculiar kind of freedom, but he’s free all the same.
As long as Barahona does not have to sit in a courtroom, he does not have to see the faces of jurors when they first look at photographs. He won’t have to look at them either.
Barahona will never be forced to listen to a clerk read aloud multiple counts of child abuse and first degree murder. Never have to sit silently as his now ex-wife, who has already confessed to murder and agreed to testify against him, reveals the daily horrors the couple worked so hard to keep secret.
There’s also this. More than one child lived in the Barahona home. Nubia’s brother and a third child would be young adults now, old enough to see the same judicial system that enabled their abuse continuing to spare their alleged abuser the discomfort of a trial.
More than the state systems failing them, they understand Barahona is not the one being denied a chance to tell his story in a court of law. Nubia is, too.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee.
