Father, stepmother who Crown says carried out 'torture campaign' on children await sentencing

WARNING: This story contains graphic content.

The children call them their "war scars."

They are reminders imprinted on their bodies — the scabbed-over remnants of years of prolonged abuse at the hands of their father and stepmother.

Now, brothers Diego and Liam, who were just 10 and 13 years old respectively when their ordeal started in 2016, are inching closer to justice as sentencing hearings were held last week for their father and stepmother in Superior Court in Toronto.

CBC News is using pseudonyms for the brothers as well as the offenders. Their identities are covered under a publication ban meant to protect the victims.

The hearings are one of the final steps in proceedings that began in the fall of 2021, in what Crown attorneys have categorized as a "torture campaign" against two young boys who were beaten, burned, sleep deprived, starved, and hung by their hands and feet in the basement of a Toronto home at various points from the summer of 2016 to June of 2019, when one boy managed to escape and alert authorities. 

And though children's aid was notified multiple times about the possibility of abuse in the family's home, subsequent investigations didn't lead to the brothers' rescue, leaving outside family members to wonder how obvious signs of trauma weren't sufficient for intervention by an agency meant to keep kids safe. 

"We weren't able to be regular brothers. We were survival partners," Diego wrote in a victim impact statement, which was read out in court during his stepmother's sentencing hearing last week. 

"It allowed us to be open with each other, but we were always in survival mode."

In September 2021, the boy's father, Gabriel, pleaded guilty to a host of charges, including assault with a weapon, aggravated assault and criminal negligence causing bodily harm. Their stepmother, Sofia, was later found guilty of similar charges at a judge-alone trial before Ontario Superior Court Justice Kelly Byrne in May.

The abuse began in August of 2016. That's when Diego, Liam and their father moved from Mexico to Toronto to live with his new wife and her two children from a previous relationship.

Court documents show that shortly after arriving in Canada, both boys began to be severely abused by their father and stepmother. All contact was cut off with their grandmother, aunt and uncle in Ontario, as well as their mother, who remained in Mexico.

The boys endured frequent "punishments," court documents show, which were often carried out by their father at their stepmother's direction — though Sofia also assaulted them herself, court heard. 

In her decision, Byrne said both parties were equally culpable. In sentencing submissions entered at Gabriel's hearing, however, both the Crown and defence maintained Sofia was the architect, and she pressured Gabriel to carry out much of the abuse through fear and intimidation, as his sponsor in the country.