Roxsy Lin reported this three-part series while participating in the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund. Read Pt. 2 here and Pt. 3 here.
SANTA ROSA, Calif. – After a long day working in the grape fields, Anita Noriega, 51, was driving home on May 5, 2022, when she saw a caravan of police cruisers and ambulances rushing through her neighborhood, just blocks from her house.
Noriega slowed down, offering a silent prayer, unaware that moments later she would arrive home to find her daughter, Lesly (17), had been killed inside the house by her boyfriend, Anthony (23), who then shot and killed himself.
Lesly died just four months after a judge denied her request to extend a protective order against Anthony who, with a felony conviction, used a ghost gun — an untraceable firearm made using at-home kits or 3D printers — to commit the crime.
Her story exposes a gap in Sonoma County, where more than 400 wineries depend on farmworker labor, yet where little is done to reach those workers with information about domestic violence protections and legal aid.
In Noriega’s case, that meant navigating a justice system that can be difficult to access before it is too late.
Planting roots
Noriega has worked in the fields around Santa Rosa, about an hour north of San Francisco, for the past 8 years, building a life in a city where warm weather and a close-knit community made it feel like home.
In 2015, she came to the U.S. from Mexico to reunite with the love of her youth, Juan Enriquez, bringing with her two of her youngest children, Jared and Lesly, 12 and 10 years old at the time. Her two older children stayed in Mexico.
The kids soon adjusted to their new life. Enriquez remembered Lesly as a lively child who quickly grew comfortable in the new city and learned English within the first three months.
On Saturdays, the family would jump into the car and drive to Richmond, California, to attend Cielos Abiertos (Open Heavens), an evangelical church they had come to love. Along the way, they would pass the San Francisco Bay, and Enriquez recalled how much Lesly loved looking out at the water during the trip.
When Lesly was a teenager, she introduced Anthony to the family. Noriega said she initially got along with him, that he seemed respectful and kind. “He didn’t seem like the kind of person who would have dark feelings,” she said in Spanish.
For most of the couple’s relationship, Noriega said she believed Anthony was a teenager like her daughter. She was unaware that he was seven years older than Lesly and had a felony conviction. She learned both facts only after Anthony was briefly detained by police, and Lesly confided in her mother.
Records obtained by ACoM show that Anthony was convicted of carjacking in 2018.
The first letdown
In September of 2021, Lesly left the house and did not return for three days. When she stopped answering her phone, Noriega grew worried and filed a missing-person report with the Santa Rosa Police Department.
A day later, an officer from the Police Department called Enriquez to tell him they had found Lesly and that she was safe. But the department did not bring Lesly home, despite Noriega’s request.
According to Noriega, the officer explained that Lesly had said she was not a minor and had verbally given a different birth year. Showing no signs of drug use or physical assault, officers determined she was fine after questioning her briefly.
ACoM contacted the Santa Rosa Police Department to learn more about the procedures it follows for missing-person cases involving minors, including whether officers verify a person’s ID after locating them. The department did not provide a definitive answer, stating that its procedures vary depending on the circumstances of each case.
For Noriega, the call offered little comfort: “According to them, I should stop worrying, because they said they saw my daughter and said she was okay,” she recalled.
For Enriquez, the system let them down. “It was the only thing we trusted. I mean, we thought, ‘They’re going to find her, they’re going to bring her back, or maybe they’ll take her to a juvenile center so she is safer.’ But it didn’t happen that way … You trust the justice system, and then the justice system fails you.”
Two days later, Lesly returned home, stating her intention to move in with Anthony at his parents’ house. Soon after, Noriega learned her daughter was pregnant.
Red flags
It was around this time she recalled the growing control Anthony exerted over Lesly’s life. One of the first signs, she said, was the cellphone. Anthony made Lesly sell the phone her family had given her and replaced it with one of his own, a device that allowed text messages but blocked calls from anyone but him.
Over time, he also isolated Lesly from most of her friends, allowing her to maintain contact with only one female friend.
“There were many red flags that I didn’t notice,” Noriega said.
For farmworkers, long days in the fields can mean coming home with little left to give. After hours of exhausting labor, many return home with barely enough time to prepare a meal for the next day, rest, and get ready to do it all over again. Noriega said that relentless routine — the time away from home, the fatigue, the need to keep working — made it harder to notice the early warning signs of Anthony’s abuse.
On multiple occasions, Noriega left work to pick up her daughter following arguments between Lesly and Anthony. “I think that a lot of the time, not even an hour would pass after we got home before he’d show up looking for her, talk her into returning, and take her away again,” Noriega said.
Anthony’s behavior is consistent with a form of abuse known as coercive control, whereby the abuser “unreasonably interferes with a person’s free will and personal liberty.”
California’s penal code recognizes coercive control as a legitimate claim in cases of abuse where one party is seeking a restraining order against another.
The second let-down
On Jan. 6, 2022, Lesly gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Fifteen days later, Noriega said, an argument between Lesly and Anthony turned violent. According to a police report reviewed by ACoM, Anthony grabbed Lesly hard enough to leave bruises on her arm, then struck and choked her while she was holding the baby.
When Anthony’s mother learned about the incident, she asked him to leave the house because she was afraid the police might arrest him. Later, she also asked Lesly to leave because she feared that Lesly might call the police.
“At 2 a.m. in the middle of January, my daughter, who had just given birth, was kicked out of the home with a newborn baby … it made me so angry,” said Noriega, “I told her, ‘You have to file a report,’ She said she wasn’t going to do so because he was her daughter’s father, but I insisted that she do it.”
On January 27, 2022, Noriega and Lesly went to the Windsor Police Department to file a report. Noriega said Lesly was granted a three-day emergency protective order against Anthony, but a judge later denied their request for an extension. According to Noriega, it was denied for lack of evidence.
“If the judge had made a different decision, Lesly might still be alive,” said Enriquez.
A lack of outreach
A fundamental challenge faced by farmworker survivors of domestic violence is the lack of outreach and education from public agencies about the legal protections and services available to them.
Effective outreach requires meeting farmworkers where they are, recognizing that long workdays often prevent them from attending community events, and that information is more likely to reach them in the places they regularly visit.
In other parts of California, organizations have adapted by setting up informational tables outside laundromats, swap meets, and agricultural fields, allowing workers to access resources during lunch breaks or while running errands.
Yet in Sonoma County, this type of targeted outreach appears largely absent.
Marsha Lucien is executive director of the Family Justice Center of Sonoma County (FJCSC) headquartered in Santa Rosa. She acknowledged the organization does not conduct outreach specifically aimed at farmworkers.
“We do a number of outreach activities,” she said. “Typically, they’re community-based outreach events … it’d be some sort of a resource fair or Community event where we’re invited to be able to table.”
Many farmworkers interviewed for this series said they are unaware that restraining orders exist or that local organizations can provide free legal assistance, including help completing and filing the necessary paperwork. That lack of information can become a major hurdle to accessing aid.
Cracks in the system
That was the case for Noriega and Lesly. When they went to the Windsor Police Department, they did not know how restraining orders worked, what steps they needed to take after the initial three-day order expired, or how to continue the process.
Neither did the Police Department inform them that free local assistance was available nor did it refer them to any organizations that could help.
“Why would they know about a legal remedy if they’ve never had to use it before or if they’ve never seen a friend or a parent or someone do this?” said Sheila Miller, an attorney with the Domestic Violence Supervising Team at Legal Aid of Sonoma County. For her, some people learn about this legal option only through law enforcement.
“I think this case is a really good example of a lot of flaws, a lot of areas for improvement,” she said.
ACoM contacted the Windsor Police Department, which operates under contract with the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office. The Sheriff’s Office said that, as part of its standard procedure, officers provide domestic violence survivors with a resource pamphlet containing information about local services and phone numbers they can call for assistance.
In an interview with ACoM, Sergeant Juan Valencia emphasized that “as soon as we get a restraining order and it expires and they [the survivor] don’t do anything else, that falls on the victim, not on us.”
Then there’s Form DV-100, the official document used in California courts to request a domestic violence restraining order. The form is available in multiple languages, including Spanish, but only for reference. The actual filing itself, including detailed descriptions of the alleged abuse, must be submitted in English, a hurdle for people with limited or no fluency in the language.
According to Miller, this has forced survivors to rely on bilingual family members, including children, to help translate or complete the forms. That can be especially harmful when the person they seek protection from is the child’s other parent, noted Miller.
‘We can’t do anything’
In an interview with ACoM, Mayra Arreguin, community organizer at the non-profit La Familia Sana — which has a long history of supporting farmworkers in the area — said that some survivors report partner abuse to police, only to be told there is nothing officers can do.
“If you don’t have visible signs, they then say, ‘Well, we can’t do anything,’” said Arreguin in Spanish. “So, what? Do you have to wait until something happens? Until the partner kills the person? That must change.”
Lucien also said that FJCSC’s “current framework doesn’t align well” with farmworkers’ availability. That makes partnerships with organizations like La Familia Sana or Corazón Healdsburg — another local nonprofit dedicated to helping farmworkers and their families — essential.
Even so, relying on these nonprofits presents its own challenges for survivors seeking help.
La Familia Sana is in Cloverdale, about 31 miles from Santa Rosa, while Corazón Healdsburg is approximately 15 miles away. For farmworkers, those distances present an added burden. In addition, neither organization has an attorney on staff, which limits their ability to provide direct legal assistance to victims.
ACoM also reached out to the Young Women’s Christian Association of Sonoma County (YWCA), which provides a domestic violence crisis line and counseling for survivors, to learn more about its services and outreach to farmworkers. The organization did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The third letdown
The afternoon of Leslie’s death, Enriquez was the first to arrive home and noticed the baby was crying loudly. When he opened the door, he found Anthony lying in a pool of blood on the living room floor. He called out for Lesly several times, but there was no answer.
Enriquez stepped out of the house and called 911. He said police arrived almost immediately, took the baby out of the home, and later confirmed that Lesly was dead.
When Noriega got home and learned what happened, she felt as if her world had collapsed. Police later told her that Lesly was holding the baby in her arms when she was killed.
“Nothing stopped him. Not even his own daughter, nor the love he claimed to have for my daughter. Nothing stopped him,” she said. It had been just four months since she and Lesly unsuccessfully sought an extension of the restraining order.
Anthony, for his part, should have been barred from owning a firearm given his past felony conviction. But with ghost guns proliferating nationwide — between 2017 and 2023, law enforcement recovered 92,702 suspected ghost guns at crime scenes — access to such a firearm proved cheap and all too easy. This despite California’s more restrictive laws governing ghost guns.
At the time, Anthony had been living in Noriega and Enriquez’s home. Enriquez recalled packages arriving constantly and believes Anthony completed the assembly in about a week.
Then came the final blow
After a year of court hearings, mediations, and $9,000 in legal fees, custody of Lesly’s daughter was awarded to Anthony’s parents. Noriega said she was initially allowed to see her granddaughter on weekends, but after the custody was awarded, the visits abruptly stopped. She has not seen the child in more than a year.
The couple said they sought help from several local organizations, including the Family Justice Center, hoping to find support for the case. But they said every door seemed closed.
“A great injustice was committed,” said Noriega. “My daughter was killed, my granddaughter was taken from me, and now this woman won’t let me see the child.”
During the reporting of this story, Legal Aid of Sonoma County told ACoM that discussions throughout the reporting process inspired the organization to strengthen its outreach to farmworkers. As a result, Legal Aid contacted the Graton Day Labor Center, a local nonprofit with a long history of serving farmworkers, to explore offering outreach services at the center’s offices.
Roxsy Lin is a California Local News Fellow with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
