ENGLEWOOD — To her neighbors, Alyssa Garcia was a reclusive newcomer with a hot-headed younger boyfriend and three well-mannered kids.
Many had no idea Garcia, 27, had a fourth child, whom she hardly ever let outside. The child, 4-year-old Manuel "Manny" Aguilar, was found dead Wednesday morning after months of alleged neglect and abuse.
Prosecutors claimed Thursday that Garcia had regularly locked Manny in a back room with urine and feces, denying him food and slapping him. The boy died on July 29.
On Tuesday, Garcia, her 17-year-old boyfriend and his brother, 19-year-old Christian Camarena, wrapped Manny in a blue blanket, drove him to an abandoned home in the 1400 block of West Marquette Road and set his body on fire using lighter fluid, prosecutors said.
Manny was so malnourished that firefighters thought he was a 9-month-old baby when they found his body, according to fire officials.
Garcia often left her children at home without food during the day, according to a woman who lived downstairs from the family in the 6300 block of South Wolcott Avenue.
The woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she sometimes left extra portions for them when she cooked for her own kids.
"I tried to keep to myself and mind my own business, but after that happened I had to curse her out," the woman said. "I had to say, 'You can't do that no more. You can't do that to your children.'"
Unlike her other three children, Garcia never let Manny out of the narrow two-story house, the woman said. On the rare occasions that she saw him, he looked tired and emaciated.
"He didn't really talk much," she said. "Sometimes he said he was hungry."
Garcia, who worked at Olive Garden, had only won back custody of her kids about a year earlier from the state's Department of Children and Family Services, the woman said.
The family disappeared last week, she said, when Garcia gave birth to twins she was carrying. The next news the woman heard was late Wednesday night, when Camarena's mother pounded on her front door, she said.
"It's f---ing devastating," the woman said, sobbing. "It hurts me so much, 'cause if they needed help like that, they should've come to me. You can't do that to no kid."
On Thursday afternoon, a group of older men stood on the sidewalk exchanging rumors and shaking their heads in disbelief. In the middle was S. Taylor, who declined to say his full first name, selling snow cones and Red Hots from behind a plastic table.
Taylor said his "intuition was sparked" Tuesday morning, when he saw Garcia and her boyfriend walk out of their house with a large bundled blanket and bring it to their car. Garcia's oldest son followed them holding two bags of laundry, he said.
When the news erupted across the block Wednesday, "it clicked," he said.
"I've been here 41 years, and I've seen a lot of things come and go on this block," Taylor said. "But to do that to a kid like that — you don't mess with the kids, man. Not the kids."
Taylor had only seen Manny once, he said, at a block party about a year earlier. He described him as a "frail little boy."
"I'm a grandfather, and hearing about it just makes me sick as hell," Taylor said, looking down and shaking his head. "It just hurts you to your core. You can't tolerate that s---."
The news was especially shocking, Taylor said, because "99 percent of us didn't even know that boy was in there."
That included Randy Williams, a retired deacon who lives with his elderly mother across the street from Garcia's house.
Sitting on his front porch, Williams said he always saw three children playing in front of the home, often "howling, fussing or throwing rocks."
Like other neighbors, Williams said he rarely saw Garcia. But when he did, she appeared angry or erratic, he said.
"She was fighting with her boyfriend a lot, and cussing out her kids all the time," he said.
Rasheed, 8, said he sometimes played with Garcia's older children. The only time he saw the woman, she was "chasing [the oldest boy] down the block and screaming at him," he said.
As Rasheed spoke, a young man rode by on a bicycle.
"B---- was crazy," he said.
But no matter how Garcia acted, Williams said, no one caught a whiff of the horror that had been happening inside the house.
"We have a lot of stuff going on on this block — but to hear something like that has been going on under our nose this whole time is just ridiculous," he said. "The devil's been on this block real strong lately."
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