The deaths last week of three young West Sacramento siblings was the latest incident in what local prosecutors see as an uptick in violent child fatalities to occur in Yolo County and beyond in recent years.
“There have been more. It’s been just this tragic explosion of these killings,” said Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig, whose office has obtained convictions in three other high-profile cases involving slain children since 2014.
Now, prosecutors are considering which charges to file in this latest child-death case, in which 32-year-old Robert William Hodges stands accused of killing his own children: Kelvin, 11; Julie, 9; and Lucas, 7 months.
“This one is the most horrific, and I don’t think it’s isolated to Yolo County,” Reisig added, noting that nearby Sacramento County also has experienced a recent rash of child homicides, many of them stemming from abusive relationships that escalated “to the ultimate act of violence.”
“Why is that?” said Reisig, who offered an answer to that question. “Domestic violence under California law is not treated as a violent felony. That’s a real disservice to victims of domestic violence, and I think it needs to be fixed. We need to treat it for what it is — a violent crime against an intimate partner.”
Stronger laws, Reisig said, would help keep abusers behind bars by making domestic violence a strike offense under California’s “three strikes” statute, increasing bail amounts and restricting the credits for time served that a suspect receives while in custody.
Authorities have not disclosed details about a motive in the West Sacramento killings, which were discovered Wednesday night by police officers responding to a domestic-violence report involving Hodges’ wife, Mai Sheng Hodges, at their Touchstone Place apartment.
A neighbor told The Davis Enterprise that Robert Hodges assaulted his wife when she arrived home from work, and that she later discovered the bodies of her children inside the apartment.
Asked whether his agency had responded to prior domestic-violence incidents at the Hodges residence, West Sacramento police Sgt. Roger Kinney said that information would not be released in light of the pending homicide case.
But Mai Hodges denied the couple’s marriage was an abusive one, according to KCRA Channel 3, which reported Friday on a message the grieving mother posted on Facebook, then apparently later took down.
According to the report, Mai Hodges described her husband as “once a loving and caring husband and father to our children.”
“I was never in abusive marriage, he had always been a caring and loving person, but for whatever reason went thru his mind, heart to do this I can never imagine why. And I ask myself everyday ‘why?’ ”
Mai Hodges’ post also requested quiet and privacy “as I try to live through each day without my precious, loving children.”
Autopsies on the victims were completed Friday, but their cause of death has not been released pending further testing and investigation, Yolo County Chief Deputy Coroner Gina Moya said.
The District Attorney’s Office plans to hold a news conference Monday morning to announce the charges being filed against Hodges, who is scheduled to be arraigned at 1:30 p.m. that day in Yolo Superior Court.
Prosecutors had yet to receive any police reports about the case as of Friday afternoon, and a charging decision likely would be made over the weekend, Reisig said.
Yolo County Public Defender Tracie Olson said her office expects to represent Hodges, and that Deputy Public Defender Ron Johnson has been assigned the case. She declined further comment.
Hodges remains in Yolo County Jail custody on a no-bail hold. He has declined requests for media interviews.
Also to be determined is whether prosecutors will pursue the death penalty against Hodges. Multiple murders is one of 15 special-circumstance crimes that expose California murder defendants to capital punishment or, alternatively, life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In the county’s most recent child-fatality cases, Yolo County prosecutors have obtained convictions for murder and assault on a child causing death. The defendants have been two mothers and a mother’s live-in boyfriend.
The oldest victim was 5, the youngest just 19 days old.
They include:
- Tatiana Garcia, 5, whose mother Aquelin Talamantes drowned the girl in the bathtub of her sister’s home on Glide Drive in South Davis on Sept. 26, 2013, then drove to a relative’s apartment in Sacramento with the girl’s body in the trunk of her car.
Talamantes raised an insanity defense, claiming that mental illness led her to believe she was saving her daughter from harm by police. But a Yolo County jury rejected that argument, finding the 29-year-old mother guilty of first-degree murder and child assault.
- Cameron Morrison, age 20 months, who died Jan. 15, 2014, of traumatic brain and internal injuries sustained during repeated beatings that prosecutors said were inflicted by his mother’s boyfriend, Darnell D’Angelo Dorsey, at the family’s Olive Drive trailer in Davis.
Dorsey’s lawyers contended that a severe case of pneumonia caused Cameron to stop breathing and triggered the toddler’s injuries, but that explanation didn’t add up for the jury, which convicted Dorsey of assault on a child causing death.
- Justice Rees, who died of exposure at just 19 days of age after his mother, Samantha Green, swam with him across Ridge Cut Slough in Knights Landing and kept him outdoors overnight while under the influence of methamphetamine on Feb. 24, 2015.
The DA’s Office successfully prosecuted Green for second-degree murder and next month will try the baby’s father, Frank Rees, for involuntary manslaughter and child endangerment. Prosecutors allege the Woodland man facilitated Green’s drug use despite knowing Justice was born with drugs in his system and that social workers ordered Green to seek treatment for her addiction in order to maintain custody of the baby.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene