Everyone in the neighborhood knew the boys.
There were three of them, brothers, a little rambunctious as you’d expect for their ages, 12, 10 and 5.
They tooled around Oakmont’s streets on bikes or scooters, just down from the local elementary school that the older ones walked to in the morning. They bounced like crazy on their backyard trampoline and tossed a football with their dad, Jose Salazar Sr. Sometimes neighbors would hear their mom, Laura Ramriez, yell for them in Spanish to come inside. Neighbors said the boys were well-mannered, healthy and pleasant, if a bit shy.
For the past four years or so, the family had rented one side of a duplex on 10th Street. It was a white, frame house, and it often hummed with activity. Mr. Salazar would tinker on his vehicle in the back alley. Men, apparently workers at his drywall business, regularly popped by. Family members would suddenly appear, including, in recent months, three of Ms. Ramriez’s sisters — ranging from 5 to 20 — who ended up moving in. Ms. Ramriez would sometimes play music — Spanish-language rap — so loudly that it set some neighbors’ nerves on edge. The family had a lone dog, down from four or five at one point, whose barking once prompted a call to police.
The house seemed perfectly normal. But only on the outside. Neighbors, who were never invited in, weren’t privy to what went on behind closed doors. Jose and Laura, as they were known, were private. “They weren’t warm or fuzzy by any means,” one neighbor, Amanda Keefer, said. “They weren’t rude. They just weren’t welcoming. They kept to themselves.” Neighbors said conversations with the couple were cordial but limited.
It wasn’t until the afternoon of June 9, when a stream of emergency vehicles rolled into the neighborhood and first responders carried a naked child out of the home on a pediatric backboard, that anyone realized that another little girl lived there. One neighbor could tell right away that it wasn’t Ms. Ramriez’s youngest sister; that girl, he said, had long, jet-black hair. This little girl’s scalp was patchy. No one recognized her. She was rail thin, pale and lifeless.
“I said, ‘Who the hell is that?’ ” Ms. Keefer recalled. “I thought, ‘Oh, Laura must be babysitting.’ ”
Maybe the child had choked, Ms. Keefer reasoned. But she hadn’t. At the hospital, the girl was pronounced dead. She was almost 4 years old and weighed 29 pounds. Malnourished, the doctors said. Wasting away, losing her hair, failing to thrive.
“This girl was never outside one time, ever, nobody had seen her, zero people on our street had seen the girl until she was carried out dead,” Andrew Hodge, a next-door neighbor, said.
It wasn’t until a little later, after detectives began canvassing the neighborhood and stunned residents of the close-knit street began piecing things together, when people realized that not only had a little girl been living in their midst, all but invisible, but she was actually Mr. Salazar’s daughter.
The three boys, it turned out, had a secret little sister.
Her name was Bella
She had a name: Bella Rae Seachrist.
Bella had grandparents in North Carolina, where her father was from, who loved her, according to an online obituary. There were 32 people, some children, listed as her relatives.
“She is also survived by many more family members and close friends who knew and loved her,” the obituary said.
But love couldn’t save Bella.
What role all those relatives played during her last months is unclear. Were they ever in the house where police say Bella was pummeled, knocked unconscious, bound, gagged, sexually abused and kicked down the stairs? Were any of them aware of the mistreatment that police said Bella suffered at the hands of her stepmother and her aunt, Alexis Herrera, Ms. Ramriez’s 20-year-old sister? Did they talk about Bella with her father, who told police that he knew his daughter was being abused but did nothing, who would come home from long days of work covered in plaster dust and claim that he was out of the house while the women took care of the kids?
Mr. Salazar told detectives that he thought Bella suffered from a condition that caused hair loss and swollen feet and prevented her from putting on weight. He acknowledged that the family hadn’t taken her to a doctor in almost two years, according to a criminal complaint. He told police he knew that Ms. Ramriez beat Bella. While Ms. Ramriez’s lawyer declined comment, Mr. Salazar’s attorney noted that authorities have not described his client as participating in any physical abuse.
Police paperwork details Bella’s last day and the torture leading up to it, some captured in videos, pictures and texts recovered by investigators. Detectives said Ms. Herrera told them that as far back as February Bella was being tied to a staircase. She was beaten with a spoon and a belt, and police said Ms. Ramriez punched the girl so hard she knocked her out. Food was withheld.
Mr. Salazar told detectives “that he has seen blood and blood stains on the front of several items of Bella's clothing and that Bella's nose was bleeding a lot the past couple of weeks [month]. He noticed that Ramriez sometimes would have marks on the knuckles of her hands and Ramriez explained that she had to stick her fingers in Bella's mouth to swipe food out that she hadn't eaten, and Bella would bite her fingers,” the complaint said.
“Ramriez would then beat and hit or punch Bella in the face and body with a closed fist. When [Mr. Salazar] asked about Bella's hair. Ramriez told him that it was falling out or Bella pulled out her own hair on her own.”
Her obituary expanded the boundaries of the little girl’s life beyond beatings.
Bella “loved to dance, French fries, and eating spicy chips,” the obituary said. “She enjoyed swinging, stroller rides, visits from Jose's parents, and seeing her [youngest] brother...”
Dad gets custody
Bella was born in August 2016 to Mr. Salazar and Nicole Seachrist of Verona after they had an affair. Mr. Salazar, 29, cheated on Ms. Ramriez, 28, his longtime companion, according to the police paperwork charging the couple and Ms. Herrera with abusing and ultimately killing Bella. He didn’t take precautions, he said, and Bella arrived.
On May 31, 2017, authorities took Bella away from Ms. Seachrist and placed her in a foster care.
Ms. Seachrist, who did not respond to interview requests, had substance abuse problems, and Bella was “without proper care or control,” according to papers filed with the courts.
A caseworker with Allegheny County’s Office of Children, Youth and Families contacted Mr. Salazar the next day “regarding the child and return to his care,” according to a filing in his custody case. He began supervised visitation with Bella.
On June 28, 2017, child protective services deemed his household “proper and suitable for a child.”
Jacki Hoover, deputy director of Children, Youth and Families, described the agency’s assessment process in general.
“We would visit the home, we would run a ChildLine [the state child abuse hotline] and criminal history, and we get that back immediately. And then we would also interview everybody in the household. We observe the interaction between children and their parents. We ask a multitude of questions that you would then get a picture around the parenting capabilities. We have a risk assessment that we’re required by the state to follow,” Ms. Hoover said. “We ask a lot of information about behavioral health, about substance abuse, about intimate partner violence.”
But while Ms. Hoover discussed the framework of an assessment, she said the agency is prevented by law from discussing specific cases or even confirming or denying investigations.
“Nobody has that crystal ball to say, ‘These things make a situation unsafe,’ ” Ms. Hoover said. “Our agency is something that happens after maltreatment occurs. We can’t predict it. We get a call after a child has been hurt. If there were more resources available prevention-wise, then maybe abuse wouldn’t occur.”
By July 9, 2017, Bella was living with her father, her brothers and Ms. Ramriez. One month later, Common Pleas Judge David L. Spurgeon granted Mr. Salazar sole custody and closed the case. Mr. Salazar had no criminal record, was raising three seemingly well-adjusted boys, had a steady job and, according to his sister, wanted Bella.
Judge Spurgeon declined comment. Ms. Hoover noted that a judge makes the final decision on placing a child, and also determines when to close a case, thereby ending her agency’s involvement until and unless it is activated by another claim of abuse. Ms. Hoover also said that her agency is but one voice in the courtroom making recommendations to the judge. The child has an attorney, as do the parents, all of whom provide input.
“Sometimes the stars align, and we all make the same recommendation to the judge,” Ms. Hoover said, “and sometimes they don’t.”
The mystery girl
Ms. Keefer wondered if a little girl she once saw on Ms. Ramriez’s hip — she guesses it was 12 to 18 months ago — might have been Bella.
One longtime resident believes she saw Bella in summer 2017 as Laura Ramriez put her into her SUV.
“And then in later time, I said to Laura, ‘Where’s the baby?’ ” the resident recalled. “And she said, ‘Oh, we gave that baby back.’ ”
Another parent on 10th Street thinks he might have seen Bella around August 2018. She would have been 2.
“We saw this little girl appear at the house. And so we inquired. It’s strange to all of a sudden see your neighbor have a little girl. Laura had said, ‘Oh, we’re fostering this little girl.’ There was nothing in that conversation that seemed overly strange to me,” that person said.
But the parent noticed that anytime he saw Ms. Ramriez with the girl, she was always carrying her into the house, which struck him as strange.
“This kid’s old enough to walk,” he said. “Why is this kid never walking?”
He and his wife would see the girl once a week, perhaps. She would be with the boys.
“We didn’t really see her playing much or anything. We would see her occasionally in the backyard, not a lot by any means, but she didn’t appear to my wife or me to be in bad shape at all. She just looked like a small, little girl. In fact Laura had said to us, ‘The reason we’re fostering her is she came from a bad family and wasn’t treated well.’ She gave us the impression she was the knight in shining armor out to protect this kid.”
One day, about nine months ago, he said, the little girl vanished.
“My wife had inquired to Laura, ‘Where’s the little girl? Is she in North Carolina?” And she said, ‘We gave her back to the family.’ And that was it. You usually don’t ask more follow-up questions than that. She was back with whoever she belonged to.”
After about a year caring for Bella, around summer 2018, Mr. Salazar sent her to his family in North Carolina, investigators said.
Bella was apparently thriving before her father brought her back to Oakmont last summer. “Photographs of Bella from the August/September 2019 time frame show a well-nourished child without any apparent injuries,” the criminal complaint said.
Warning signs?
In the weeks since Bella died, the neighbors on 10th Street in Oakmont have tried to figure out if there was something they missed. Should they have been aware of “this mystery child,” as one neighbor described Bella. Were there warning signs?
“Every single day I rack my brain thinking, ‘God, was there something I could have done?” said Ms. Keefer, 40, whose 12-year-old son was a classmate of Bella’s oldest brother. “We just didn’t know she was there, that was the bottom line.”
The neighbors gathered on porches. They consoled one another. Some cried. They endured jabs on social media from people skeptical that no one in the community suspected anything.
“When this all came out, it was unbelievably shocking, not just to me but the entire street. How could there be another child there without anyone knowing?” said Mr. Hodge, 32, who has a year-old daughter. “I want to really stress, this girl, she was nonexistent, 100% nonexistent.”
It almost defies logic that no one in the family ever ran into an adult who had a reason to probe.
“Almost every abused child every single year is intersecting with adult professionals who could protect them,” said Victor Vieth, a former child abuse prosecutor and director of education and research at the Zero Abuse Project, a nonprofit in St. Paul, Minn. “Most tortured kids at least at some point in their life have intersected with other adults. So they’ve intersected with doctors, they’ve intersected with maybe a day care. ... But at some point, the torturer decides to remove them from society.”
Police said that Ms. Herrera, the aunt, told detectives that Bella had not been outside since January.
Mr. Vieth said that many professionals, including child advocates, are ill-trained to spot signs of child abuse.
“The field as a whole receives virtually no meaningful training at the undergraduate or graduate level,” he said.
“I think we need to educate the community that if you have intersected with a family and they’ve got several children, and one child you suddenly never see anymore, you never hear of anymore, you need to be suspicious, and you need to be connecting with authorities and expressing your concerns and say, ‘I haven’t seen this child outside for a year, let’s say.’ ”
While Bella disappeared, her brothers stayed visible. The boys were enrolled in school. They occasionally played with kids in the neighborhood and would have likely visited pediatricians and endured teachers’ innocent questions about their families on the first day of class.
“My questions would be, like, how did these two boys not ever slip up in school or mention something at school to a teacher? That’s crazy. You’re talking two kids who should be fairly impressionable going to an elementary school on a daily basis. How did nothing ever come out? That’s what’s wild to me,” Mr. Hodge said.
The neighbor who said she once saw Ms. Ramriez put Bella in her SUV described it this way: “They were respectable people. They drove nice vehicles. I knew the three other boys. I spoke to them. I talked to them. I had a dog. I would often walk to school with the boys. They were not big talkers. They were quiet, but not an unusual quiet. Never suspected that they maybe had something to hide.”
“Sometimes the parents are really upstanding members of the community, and they’re shiny clean on the outside and they’re really good at coming up with a story,” Mr. Vieth said.
That story could have stretched as far back as Mr. Salazar’s custody hearing for Bella, suggested Pearl Berman, a psychology professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a child abuse expert who reviewed the criminal complaint.
“They can go to court, they dress very appropriately, they talk logically, and they know they’re supposed to express, ‘I love this child, I’m worried about this child, give me custody. I’m in the Boy Scouts, I take my kids to the doctor. Give me custody.’ And people have a tendency to take them at face value,” said Ms. Berman, who has a doctorate in clinical psychology.
“And what we have to do for every single case is a very thorough initial investigation and provide follow-up services where we check if they’re doing well.”
The last day
On the weekend before the last day of Bella’s life, her father and stepmother traveled to Columbus, Ohio.
It was their 15th anniversary. They left Bella with her aunt, Ms. Herrera.
Bella seemed “really tired,” Ms. Herrera told police.
The couple returned home Monday evening, June 8. Ms. Ramriez gave Bella some “medicine,” police said. She told detectives that she wrapped Bella in blankets and turned on a space heater. The little girl had on white PJs with a pink and orange print design. Everyone went to bed around 8 p.m.
Mr. Salazar left early for work the next morning. By 9 a.m., Bella appeared “really sick,” Ms. Herrera told police.
Ms. Ramriez swung by Target in Harmar to pick up Pedialyte. She gave it to Bella along with some orange juice. Ms. Ramriez put Bella on a cot in the hallway. The girl’s hands were cold.
The women cleaned the house until 12:30 p.m. and then ordered Chinese food for lunch from a restaurant in Richland. They went to pick up the meal, leaving Bella on the cot, wrapped in the blankets, the space heater running. When they got home an hour later, Ms. Ramriez went upstairs.
“When they returned home with the food, she checked on Bella and saw ‘brown-reddish stuff’ on her face,” the criminal complaint said. “Based on the smell, she believed it was vomit. Ramriez stated she rinsed Bella's face off and noticed she wasn't breathing.”
She called Mr. Salazar, who told her to call an ambulance. Ms. Herrera put Bella under a cold shower and then dialed 911. Ms. Ramriez, she said, performed CPR.
Around 1:45 p.m., the emergency vehicles started to arrive from Lower Valley Ambulance Service. Curious neighbors lined the street. An Oakmont police officer found Bella on her back in the second-floor bathtub. She was cold and had only a diaper on. Her arms and legs were bruised.
Emergency workers hooked up a defibrillator to the little girl. The unit advised against shocking her. They did CPR but noticed that her jaw was tight.
That’s when the medics took Bella out, and the neighbors got their first glimpse of Mr. Salazar’s daughter. She was just skin and bones.
People thought maybe she had choked or fallen. A short time later, though, the detectives showed up. Residents knew then that something terrible had happened.
Mr. Hodge recalled thinking how odd it was that no adult got into the ambulance with Bella, though Lower Valley Ambulance Chief Bill Negrich said Ms. Ramriez indicated that she was waiting for someone to watch the other children. About 10 minutes later, Mr. Hodge said, Bella’s father and stepmother walked outside, got into their SUV and left, headed for the hospital.
“If they would have just put this girl on any one of our doorsteps, we would have taken care of this girl. But no one knew she existed,” Mr. Hodge said. “It’s what makes it so heartbreaking.”
Jonathan D. Silver: jsilver@post-gazette.com.
First Published: July 20, 2020, 9:15 a.m.
