Aarabella McCormack tried to run away from her family’s Spring Valley home. Her little sister told a grand jury they both wanted out.
Two years before Aarabella died at age 11, she briefly made it out. And when a good Samaritan spotted the little girl early one November morning, shoeless and carrying a backpack, the then-9-year-old pleaded not to be returned to her family. Testifying last October before the same San Diego Superior Court grand jury, the woman said Aarabella told her “they didn’t feed her.” And, the child told her, she feared no one would believe her.
After hearing testimony from several witnesses in the prosecution’s case, that grand jury handed up an indictment charging the child’s adoptive mother and adoptive grandparents with murder and a special circumstances allegation of torture. That allegation makes the punishment either life in prison without parole or execution.
Leticia McCormack and her parents, Stanley and Adella Tom, had already been charged with murder for the girl’s 2022 death but not the special circumstance allegation. They were slated to have a preliminary hearing in El Cajon on Wednesday, but that hearing was supplanted by the grand jury indictment the prosecutors secured last fall. Wednesday’s hearing was to set a future court date for further proceedings.
They have pleaded not guilty.
A spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office said the office “does not discuss our decisions in pending cases except to say the law provides two avenues for a defendant to be held to answer for felony charges: a preliminary hearing or a grand jury.”
The two proceedings are different paths to the same ending: a finding of whether there is enough evidence to order a defendant to stand trial.
None of the attorneys representing the defendants immediately responded to a request for comment Wednesday.
The grand jury indictment lays out 641 overt acts by McCormack, her parents or her husband, Brian McCormack, that prosecutors said were committed in furtherance of an alleged conspiracy, including routinely depriving the sisters of food, water and bathroom trips. Some of the allegations arise from text messages to each other.
The first of the alleged overt acts was in February 2019. The last were the days before Aarabella died in August 2022, alleging failures by the McCormacks and Stanley Tom to seek medical care for her. Brian McCormack, a veteran Border Patrol agent, killed himself the day his daughter died, when deputies tried to talk to him. Prosecutors have said he would have been charged if he were alive.
Testimony from the multi-day hearing included first-hand accounts from Aarabella’s two younger sisters and several others, including her first-grade teacher, doctors who treated the sisters and first responders who encountered the family the day the girl died.
Aarabella was unresponsive when deputies and paramedics arrived at her family’s home about 2 a.m. on Aug. 30, 2022. She died at a hospital about 10 hours later. She was so emaciated — 48 pounds — prosecutors say she weighed less than she did when she was 5 years old. She also had cuts, bruises and still-healing fractures. Her cause of death was COVID-19 in a “setting of severe malnutrition/neglect.”
Aarabella and her two younger sisters first moved into the McCormack home in 2017 while in foster care, and the couple later adopted them. Aarabella’s first name has also been spelled in court documents as Arabella. According to grand jury testimony, she went by “Bella.”
The middle sister was age 7 when her older sister died. They shared a room.
Now 10, the surviving sister told the grand jury she and Bella were not allowed to play or even talk to each other in the room but were forced to lie on their beds, hands at their sides, with cameras trained on them and alarms on their beds. They were not allowed to move. She said every movement — even while sleeping — was punished.
“I couldn’t sleep because I was too afraid,” the girl said.
The girl said neither she nor Bella were always allowed to go to the bathroom when they needed to, and when they cried about it, their parents “would just say ‘shut up.’” When they soiled themselves in bed, she said, they were forced to lie in it. It also brought punishments, according to her testimony.
She said they were struck at varying times with a belt, paddles and paint stirring sticks.
The child said their adoptive grandparents forced them to exercise, running up and down a flight of stairs 200 times. When one child exercised, the other had to lie in bed, she testifed. Any movement brought a smack with a ruler to the bottom of their feet, she said.
Food and water, she said, were restricted, and they were not allowed to drink until after they ate.
The baby sister, who was 6 years old and weighed 27 pounds when Aarabella died more than two years ago, also took the stand. A stuffed unicorn with her as she testified, she said she was kept in her crib in her own room much of the time and made to wear diapers.
The two surviving sisters now live with a foster mother, who testified that the youngest girl couldn’t easily walk when she first took them in. She said both girls since have made strides on several fronts.
Aarabella’s first-grade teacher told the grand jury that the girl “was a role model. She was a dream student to work with.” But, he said, Leticia McCormack asked him not to let her have recess or any special recognition or classroom jobs, not even a pencil that read “star student.” He said he was also asked to — even on very hot days — limit her water intake to one Dixie cup.
Aside from the criminal case, a civil suit has been filed on behalf of Aarabella’s sisters, alleging that several agencies, organizations and workers failed to report possible abuse. The suit says the surviving sisters suffered from a syndrome that presents after prolonged starvation and had to be gradually renourished.