Catholic Charities should pay slain Cleveland boy’s family $81 million, lawyer tells jury (2024)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A lawyer representing the family of a 4-year-old boy whose body was found buried in his mother’s backyard in 2017 asked jurors on Monday to order Catholic Charities to pay $81 million for its failure to supervise an employee who lied about conducting in-person visits to the boy’s home in the months before his death.

Jordan Rodriguez was starving, and he had broken bones in his arm and ribcage in the final weeks of his life. The Catholic Charities worker assigned to his family would have noticed that had she actually seen him, attorney Jay Deratany said in closing arguments of the nearly monthlong wrongful death trial.

Instead of conducting the home visits, the worker -- Nancy Caraballo -- bought the food stamps from the boy’s mother at a deep discount and then went shopping for herself. Several of the reports she turned in to her supervisors featured portions that were directly copied and pasted from previous reports, down to the same misspellings.

“This case is about the complete lack of supervision and the institutional chaos that Catholic Charities Corp. created,” Deratany said. “For God’s sakes, for six months this child was suffering, but they weren’t going to the home, and they weren’t supervising it.”

Catholic Charities’ lawyer, Thomas Mannion, asked jurors to find that Larissa Rodriguez and Christopher Rodriguez, Jordan’s mother and her boyfriend who are both serving nearly three-decade prison sentences, are the only people responsible for his death.

Monday’s closing arguments wrapped up what was nearly a month of testimony and evidence presented to the jurors.

The case stems back to December 2017, when Cleveland police discovered Jordan’s badly decomposed body buried in a shallow grave in his mother’s backyard.

What was left of his body weighed 15 pounds, but the Cuyahoga County medical examiner’s office was unable to determine an exact cause of death. In the months before his death, he had suffered a broken arm and several broken ribs.

Larissa Rodriguez and Christopher Rodriguez pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and were each sentenced in 2018 to more than two decades in prison.

Caraballo, who was contracted with Catholic Charities to provide services to Larissa Rodriguez’s family and had been working with them for nearly two decades, filed reports to her supervisors about home visits she was supposed to be conducting. In one of the reports, filed in July 2017, Caraballo noted that there was “low food” in the house.

The supervisors submitted the reports to the county, which in turn paid Catholic Charities for the services it provided.

The supervisors failed to catch that Caraballo was copying from her previous reports or ever checked on the Rodriguez family themselves. The home where Jordan’s body was later discovered sits 551 feet from the Catholic Charities’ administrative office on Detroit Avenue.

Caraballo continued filing false reports saying she visited the house up until December 2017, when Jordan Rodriguez’s body was found. The medical examiner’s office estimated the boy died in September or October of that year.

Caraballo later pleaded guilty to food stamp fraud. She was sentenced to three years in prison.

Christopher Rodriguez testified during the trial and for the first time claimed that Jordan died in September 2016 -- a year before anyone has ever claimed before. He said the boy got a scab on his head that eventually became infected because the boy would not stop picking at it, and he stopped eating. Christopher Rodriguez said he came home one day to find the boy dead, and he and Larissa Rodriguez concocted a plan to bury Jordan’s death along with his body.

Mannion said in closing arguments Monday that, if jurors believed Christopher Rodriguez’s version of events, then other entities like Cuyahoga County Department of Children and Family Services and Cleveland Metropolitan School District deserved blame for not discovering the boy’s death sooner.

A county child services worker testified that she failed to review the agency’s notes on the Rodriguez family when she got assigned to investigate a claim of neglect in December 2016. As a result, she did not know that Jordan existed.

Testimony also showed that Larissa Rodriguez did not take Jordan to school in the fall of 2016 for a special education program that she had enrolled him in that summer. She told school officials that he had moved to Texas with his father. She also didn’t take him to scheduled doctor appointments in the spring of 2017.

“If you think in anyway anyone other than Chris and Larissa were responsible for this, then look at everybody,” Mannion said.

Deratany told jurors that Christopher Rodriguez only made that claim after Richard Blake, another lawyer representing Catholic Charities, met with him for more than an hour in the county jail to prepare him for his testimony. The claim is also undercut by Christopher Rodriguez’s own plea bargain, in which he admitted that he abused Jordan from January to September of 2017.

Christopher Rodriguez also made several accusations against Larissa Rodriguez’s older children and her sister, Michelle Rodriguez, who is the administer of the estate, that Deratany said were not supported by any facts or evidence that was brought up at trial.

“They just want to tear down this family,” Deratnay said, turning to Michelle Rodriguez. “They’re not going to tear down your family, Michelle.”

Deratany told jurors that Christopher Rodriguez and Larissa Rodriguez have already been held accountable in criminal court. It’s time, he said, for Catholic Charities to be held to account in civil court.

“It has been too many years that this defendant has walked away without being held accountable,” Deratany said. “The moment is now.”