Stalemate Traps Dead Baby's Parents
Pair Paying for Delaware's Abandonment Legacy, Some Say
By Tom Jackman, Washington Post Staff Writer
Originally published in the Washington Post, May 6, 2001
Two young people from the Northern Virginia suburbs. A vivacious, driven 19-year-old woman studying to become a nurse. An introverted, intelligent 18-year-old man with a college scholarship awaiting him. Two mistakes. She became pregnant. Then, in a panic of shame and confusion, they abandoned their newborn daughter on the floor of a portable toilet, where she died.
Two devastated families. Hardworking, successful parents, left bewildered that their children could—would—conceal such momentous events.
Now the lives of Abigail V. Caliboso and Jose E. Ocampo have been derailed in a maelstrom of controversy in Delaware, where they left their hours-old daughter in March 2000. A plea bargain that would have resolved the case collapsed this spring, ultimately raising issues of race, fairness and Delaware's difficult legacy of infant deaths.
Almost immediately, the media compared Caliboso and Ocampo to Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson, the New Jersey teenagers who abandoned their baby in a trash bin in Delaware in 1996. Both upper-middle-class suburban couples hid their pregnancies and delivered their babies in a motel room. Plea deals resulted in prison terms of 2 1/2 years for Grossberg and two years for Peterson.
So when Caliboso and Ocampo agreed to serve five years as part of their plea bargain, a Delaware judge rejected it, saying that that was too harsh in comparison and that the public might think race was an issue, that Delaware was treating the Virginia couple more harshly because they are Filipino American.
But soon after the disintegration of the deal, prosecutors upped the stakes and charged Caliboso and Ocampo with murder by abuse or neglect—punishable by a minimum of 10 years in prison.
Caliboso and Ocampo are now backed into a corner. They have confessed. Prosecutors won't settle for less than five years, and the judge won't accept anything more than 2 1/2. The alternative is a trial, where a conviction automatically means a decade behind bars.
"We didn't have any idea that there was going to be a battle or power plays," said Ocampo's father, Dennis Ocampo.
Delaware's attorney general's office, which handles felony prosecutions, acknowledged that it believes the sentences for Grossberg and Peterson were too short.
"We had hoped that the sentence in Grossberg-Peterson would be an exception, not the norm for killing a baby in Delaware," Attorney General M. Jane Brady said in a statement.
Caliboso, now 20, of Woodbridge, has grown weary of the waiting. She wants to pay her penalty and move on. So when the case stalled in March, she asked to have her bond revoked and has begun serving time in a Delaware jail even without a conviction. Ocampo, 19, of Chantilly, is working in Northern Virginia, waiting for the lawyers to solve the stalemate. But no plea negotiations are underway, and no trial date is set.
The manslaughter plea began crumbling in January, when Superior Court Judge Richard S. Gebelein told prosecutors that he thought five years was too much when compared with other cases, particularly Grossberg-Peterson. Gebelein noted that the young Virginia couple cooperated with police (Grossberg and Peterson hired lawyers), intended for their baby to be found alive (Grossberg and Peterson placed theirs in the trash) and were remorseful. The judge also cited another baby abandonment case, in which a mother who left her newborn to die in a toilet was sentenced to three years.
"The defendants in this case," Gebelein wrote in a letter to prosecutors, "are arguably far less culpable than the other previous defendants … The perception such disparity creates is extremely difficult to overcome."
In a heated conference with the lawyers, Gebelein also noted another possible public perception: "The previous three individuals … all happened to be white, and all happened to get a substantially less severe sentence. I think you ought to consider this issue."
Deputy Attorney General James V. Apostolico fired back at the judge, saying "we were extremely disappointed the court injected race into this entire case … We are offended by that."
He added, "Because of how the court has handled this, there have been lines drawn in the sand." He then withdrew the plea deal.
Abe Caliboso said that his daughter "would gladly accept time. But time that is fair. Is this the price for cooperating with the investigation?"
The parents of Abigail Caliboso and Jose Ocampo, speaking publicly for the first time, described teenagers who traveled similar paths through childhood and adolescence. Both grew up in spacious single-family homes in neatly manicured neighborhoods. Both were born to parents who said they ran strict households and who sent their children to Catholic schools from the start. She attended Bishop Ireton High School in Alexandria; he went to Paul VI Catholic High School in Fairfax.
Both sets of parents have spent the last year lambasting themselves. What did they do wrong? Why did their children not confide even a slice of the dramatic secret?
"We are from a culture that frowns on pregnancy when you are single," said Dory Mojica Caliboso, Abigail Caliboso's mother. "She was born in a different culture, all the permissiveness … I'm sure she was very conflicted. I guess she was just scared."
Abe Caliboso added, "It was fear that we would disown her."
Abigail and Jose became a couple in Abigail's junior year, when she was 17.
"He was with her all the time," Dory Caliboso said. The Calibosos were not impressed by the relationship, telling Abigail, "You need to focus on college. You can't do that with this boy." They found Jose quiet and unmotivated. But the teenagers remained inseparable, and even when Abigail began her freshman year at James Madison University, Jose was around whenever she came home.
Jose is "more serious," his father said. A former altar boy, he would sullenly do as he was told, while his older sister might ask why, Dennis Ocampo said. Jose tried lacrosse and took saxophone lessons but was happier on the computer and had his own Web site "before people even knew what Web sites were." In the middle of his senior year, when his parents realized he hadn't applied to any colleges, they hurriedly shipped out seven applications. Jose was accepted at all seven, receiving an academic scholarship to one.
Abigail is the outgoing one, both sets of parents agreed, volunteering time at her church, helping with disabled children, working as an aide at the World Bank, where her mother works. "She's not the type of person who's going to sit and mope," her mother said. She seemed to be adjusting well to her freshman year at James Madison.
The young couple stayed together for two years. Sometime late in 1999, the teenagers learned that Abigail was pregnant.
Abigail's weight would occasionally fluctuate, her mother said, but in January 2000 her parents asked her whether she had a weight problem.
"She said, 'Well, Mom, I've been binging. We order pizza all the time,'" Dory Caliboso recalled. Her parents shrugged it off as freshman year anxiety, even when they saw her two months later, when she was nine months pregnant. "I feel so stupid," Abigail's mother says now.
On March 25, 2000, according to court records, Abigail and Jose rented a room at the Sierra Suites hotel in Fairfax. Abigail didn't have the baby that night. Jose returned the next morning after attending church with his parents and found that Abigail had delivered a healthy girl.
Abigail told police she breast-fed the infant three times that Sunday, while she and Jose frantically tried to decide what to do. They got on the highway and drove, heading north on Interstate 95, and when they crossed into Delaware, they left the highway and began looking for a church, Dennis Ocampo said.
They had no idea Delaware had a history of baby abandonments, Dennis Ocampo said. They wanted to find a church that was open. But at each church, "there were people there," Jose's father said.
"They saw a new construction site. They thought, 'Somebody's going to work tomorrow,'" Dennis Ocampo said. They tried the site's office. Locked. So they wrapped the infant girl in a towel, placed a pacifier in her mouth and put her on the floor of a portable toilet. "How did they know the temperature was going to go down to 30 degrees?" Dennis Ocampo asked.
The infant, discovered by construction workers at 6:30 the next morning in the town of Bear, died of exposure.
Jose and Abigail drove back to Fairfax, and then Abigail went on to Harrisonburg and her dorm at James Madison. But she was bleeding.
Fairfax police called and asked about the blood in the hotel room, and she told them she'd merely had a bad menstrual period. Abigail grew worse.
On April 1, Abigail checked into a Harrisonburg hospital and was taken into emergency surgery. A blood infection nearly killed her, doctors told her parents. Though Abigail claimed she'd had a miscarriage, the doctors could tell otherwise and notified authorities. Abigail finally told police what happened. Fairfax police then interviewed Jose, and he corroborated the story.
After she was extradited to Delaware and released on bond, Abigail attended to the burial of her baby—Angel Marie Teresa Caliboso Ocampo. Both families visit the baby's grave regularly.
Neither Abigail nor Jose was available to be interviewed for this article.
Now the attention turned to Brady, Delaware's top prosecutor, to see how she would handle another tragic baby death. At the start of the Grossberg-Peterson case, she charged the teenagers with first-degree murder and said on national television that they could face the death penalty.
Brady declined to be interviewed but faxed a statement: "We considered the nature of the crime, the terrible consequences of the defendants' conduct, and their failure to alert anyone, even by anonymously calling 911 from a pay phone."
Gebelein, she noted, said that he felt two years would be an appropriate sentence for Abigail and Jose; sentencing guidelines call for 2 1/2 years for manslaughter. "We do not agree that is a sufficient sentence for this crime," Brady responded. "We believe such a sentence reveals a lack of compassion for the defenseless babies who have paid the ultimate price for the selfish acts of these defendants."
Neil Kaye, a forensic psychiatrist who has testified in numerous baby death cases, said that the judicial system is not equipped to handle the killing of infants, which he estimated happens 300 times a year. "It happens everywhere, and nobody is immune," Kaye said. "It might even be more prevalent in higher economic classes," because unwed mothers are more unusual in an upscale community, Kaye said.
As the judicial process slowed, Abigail Caliboso became wracked with anxiety. "Every time there was a postponement, she would practically scream," her mother said. In January, she told her parents, "I would really rather start serving the time."
Her father said: "I think it shows she's being remorseful and responsible. She's not shy to say, 'Hey, I did this, I made the mistake.'"
Eugene J. Maurer Jr., Abigail's attorney, told the judge when he asked that his client's bail be revoked that her request "may be the most mature act in this case."
