HAGERSTOWN, Md. (AP) – Jack Garcia was a challenging kid – smart, but stubborn and uncommunicative, especially in his early years, according to those who knew him.
But by third grade, before his mother moved him across the country to live with a man she’d met online, “he was ready to soar,” said Margaret Saleh, assistant superintendent of pupil services in the Goleta, California, school system.
Once in Maryland, though, the 9-year-old’s life changed dramatically – and ended brutally. His mother, Oriana Garcia, didn’t enroll him in public schools and considered home-schooling instead.
Rather than seeking professional help for Jack’s behavioral problems as she’d done in California, police say his mother, Oriana Garcia, allowed her boyfriend, Robert “Roy” Wilson, and her brother Jacob Barajas to physically discipline the red-haired boy.
During the four months they all lived together in Wilson’s three-bedroom Hagerstown apartment, the 30-year-old warehouse worker’s methods escalated from slapping and sparring to smacking his legs with a bamboo sword, Barajas told police. Then came the handcuffs, with Oriana Garcia’s knowledge, “to teach Jack not to steal,” she told investigators.