A lawsuit filed against Riverside County on behalf of the 3-year-old daughter of Jake and Rebecca Haro claims that social services caseworkers “botched” an investigation into allegations that the couple abused the girl, and that the resulting lack of monitoring of the family allowed the Haros to harm baby Emmanuel undetected before he died in 2025 at 7 months old.
The Cabazon couple were sentenced to prison in Emmanuel’s death after Jake Haro pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and assault on a child under 8 causing death, and Rebecca Haro admitted to involuntary manslaughter.
Attorney Roger Booth, appointed by a judge at the request of the girl’s guardian, filed the lawsuit in Superior Court in Riverside County on Monday. July 27.
The Press-Enterprise is not identifying the girl because of her age.
The girl was removed from the Haros’ home six days before her parents were arrested on Aug. 22, 2025, in connection with Emmanuel’s disappearance. She was behind developmentally, didn’t know how to use a spoon, cried uncontrollably, was afraid of men and had difficulty sleeping, the lawsuit says.
County Department of Public Social Services spokesman Gene Kennedy said Wednesday that the county has not received the lawsuit.
“Riverside County is deeply concerned whenever any child is harmed and takes every allegation of child abuse or neglect very seriously,” Kennedy said.
The Haros built a resume laden with abuse before Emmanuel died, according to the lawsuit.
Jake Haro was convicted of child cruelty in 2023 after the 10-month-old daughter he had with his then-wife Vanessa was found with fractures and suffering from Shaken Baby Syndrome in 2018. She is bedridden and blind. Haro claimed she was injured when he accidentally dropped the girl on the kitchen sink.
Three reports alleging Rebecca Haro had abused and neglected her two children had been made to child-welfare authorities by the time she and Jake Haro began dating in 2020, the lawsuit asserts. They wed in 2021.
On June 28, 2024, someone told authorities that the couple was neglecting the 3-year-old and her 17-year-old half-sister. The day before, the lawsuit says, law enforcement officers conducting a probation-compliance search on Jake Haro found a gun in Rebecca’s purse. When a caseworker investigated, Jake Haro said he had a child endangerment charge on his record but that it was a false accusation and that the charge was dropped.
The caseworker, the lawsuit says, “Took no steps to verify whether what Jake said was true. In investigating this referral, DPSS never conducted any other interviews of witnesses.”
But DPSS knew Jake Haro had violently abused the daughter from the previous marriage, the lawsuit says.
“The fact that Jake was now lying about the events from six years earlier, had violated his probation and was raising another baby should have set off alarm bells,” the lawsuit continues. “Remarkably, (the caseworker) recorded that Jake never physically injured a child.”
Were it not for these “botched assessments,” the lawsuit says, DPSS rules would have required opening a juvenile dependency case. The agency could have then actively monitored the family or sought a court order to remove the children. The parents would have been required to take parenting classes or receive mental health treatment.
A different caseworker took over the investigation in July 2024 and closed it, finding that the allegations against Rebecca Haro were substantiated but that the situation had “stabilized.” With the case closed, there was no monitoring of the family after Emmanuel was born on Dec. 21.
Yet the county was well aware of the Haros’ abusive history, the lawsuit pointed out. The county’s petition to a judge for permission to remove the 3-year-old from her home cited four events that happened before Rebecca Haro falsely reported that Emmanuel had been kidnapped out of her arms on Aug. 14, 2025.
“Thus, by the county’s own admission, it should have taken action to protect the Haro children long before Emmanuel’s death,” the lawsuit says. “The county’s failure to timely intervene cost (the 3-year-old) her relationship with her brother and Emmanuel his life.”