Smallest Victims Pose Biggest Challenge : Child abuse unit: It is called the toughest police work. Detectives face an unending stream of heartbreaking cases.

VAN NUYS —  After 14 years on the grimmest outpost of police work, Detective Mike Houchen thought he had seen every cruelty death could inflict on society’s smallest victims.

Then he stood over the body of “the tiniest angel.”

Born with fetal alcohol syndrome, Samantha Hochman had an undersized head and a digestive disorder that required her to have a tube in her stomach her entire life. All three years of it.

Now the playful child was dead, and finding out why fell to a round-faced, 47-year-old detective who specializes in unraveling the toughest cases in the Valley branch of LAPD’s Abused Child Unit.

“I’ve gotta get my thoughts together,” said Houchen, who stood smoking outside the coroner’s office during a break in the autopsy.

“Once I get started, I won’t stop,” he says.

True to his word, he didn’t stop. But the little girl who was born in deprivation and died in mystery would be one of the most difficult cases in a career spent sorting out family tragedies.

The LAPD’s fiscal problems make it tougher every day. Because of a citywide policy designed to put more cops on the street, specialized units such as Houchen’s are suffering. Eight detectives are supposed to work out of the third-floor Abused Child Unit, with its special interview room that has a picture of Goofy on the door. During the time Houchen tried to unravel the case of Samantha, there were only five in the unit, a number that has since risen again.

The mystery surrounding Samantha’s death would be only a tiny portion of his caseload as the weeks rolled by. The six neat bins above his desk bulged with as many as 30 active files. For weeks, he ran the entire unit in the absence of a supervisor, as well as trying to keep up with his own caseload.

In a department swept up in wrenching change, cops such as Houchen are a link to the past. Not the racist, abusive past described by the Christopher Commission, but the duty-bound, hard-bitten tradition represented by the mythic Joe Friday. These are the cops who keep the department running. They do what they are told with the tools they are given. They grumble about it, as Houchen does, but they are the ones who make sure the job gets done.

Samantha’s case, and others over a three-month period, provided a rare opportunity to see the world from behind Houchen’s badge as he navigated rumors and misconceptions in search, not so much of anything as subtle as justice, but of truth.

Along the way, he would unearth blunders by officials charged with protecting Samantha that are the stuff of outraged headlines and 11 o’clock news teasers. Twice, she might have been saved if someone had done the right thing. But Houchen wouldn’t spend time condemning, because in his world, truth doesn’t reveal itself in black and white but in the hazy grays of best guesses and honest mistakes.

And besides, he says, the next case is on top of you too quickly to spend much time trying to figure out how the world got this way.

Surrounded by the chaos of torn families and violated trust, Mike Houchen is a man of regular habits. Every morning, he arrives early, his lunch in an electric green thermal bag that seems out of character for a cop whose manner reeks of the old LAPD, a little gruff, a little suspicious, very tough.

His appearance is Spartan. Narrow tie, sports jacket. He has a receding hairline and a tight mouth, literally and figuratively. Over the weeks, all he would reveal about his personal life was that he coaches soccer, rides motorcycles on weekends and is getting a divorce.

This personal spareness gives him room to do his job. The senior investigator in a unit whose territory stretches from Venice to West Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, he is, in the words of an admiring prosecutor, “a great detective.”

“He takes the most difficult cases and somehow he makes sense of them,” says a colleague.

There was the molestation victim whose mother fled to Texas rather than allow her daughter to testify against her husband. Then there was the infant with a broken leg; the father said his son had fallen off the stove.

And there was the girl, seven months pregnant, who lay down in the grimy restroom of a Pacoima park and told her friend to kick her in the stomach until her baby died.

The coroner’s office concluded the cause of death was blunt force trauma. Houchen asked for murder charges against the mother and her friend. But the district attorney’s office said killing a fetus when the mother helps is not murder, but an illegal abortion.

They could have filed charges of performing an illegal abortion against the friend. But prosecutors decided it wouldn’t be fair to go after the friend and let the mother go free. So they didn’t file anything.

That was that. Some cops would fume about a legal system that lets behavior like that go unpunished. But Houchen shrugged and went on. He knows that stewing over cases makes you sick or crazy. Worse, in Houchen’s pragmatic mind, “you become a useless investigator.”

On Friday, Sept. 23, the coroner calls Houchen to say he found some suspicious injuries, but still had no official cause of death in Samantha’s case.

Houchen goes out to his veranda for a smoke. The four-foot-wide ledge overlooking the police parking lot serves as a kind of retreat for the intense detective. He has a desk out there, and a phone.

“Something had to kill this child,” Houchen grumbles.

The most curious finding so far was an “enormous amount” of coagulated blood in the intestines. The doctor, like Houchen, is bewildered.

Grim as it is, the victimization of small children isn’t what makes Houchen’s job so hard. If justice is an elusive thing, finding it in the Abused Child Unit can be like negotiating a fogged-in landscape where nothing is certain.

The homicide detectives may not know who killed their victim when they roll up to the scene. But they know one thing that Houchen often cannot assume: Somebody did it. The death of a child can be caused by any number of things.

Almost no one kills a child on purpose, Houchen says.

That robs the detective not only of the certainty that a crime was committed, but it also steals from him the righteous indignation that can be a cop’s main defense against a chaotic world. Dividing society into good guys and bad guys, while simplistic, at least makes the world more understandable. Without that defense, detectives such as Houchen are confronted with death and injury to the most vulnerable members of society, often with no one to blame.

It can be a soul-deadening job, which is why few people do it for long. Houchen has been doing it 14 years.

In Samantha’s case, the detective was suspicious of her mother’s story that she put the child to bed, then checked on her later and found she wasn’t breathing. Mary Hochman passed up a ride to the hospital with paramedics, saying she would meet them there later. That made Houchen suspicious. Mothers almost never allow themselves to be separated from their dying children.

But just because it was suspicious didn’t prove anything. What if the mother didn’t do it? “Am I barking up the wrong tree? Am I traumatizing her? Her kid’s dead, after all,” Houchen muses, fingers curled around the steering wheel of his car.

He wants to see how the family lived. All he knew was that the Hochmans--Mary, 35, a slightly overweight woman with shoulder-length blond hair, and her two small children--shared a tiny apartment in a working-class neighborhood near Culver City. Shortly after she was born suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome, Samantha was sent to foster parents. A birth defect caused a digestive problem requiring the tube in her stomach.

The mother had recently won back custody after attending parenting classes and Alcoholics Anonymous.

Knowing that neighbors are often good sources of information, Houchen knocks on the apartment next door and is greeted by a young Pakistani woman in a blue shawl.

“The sick baby,” she says, nodding shyly, when Houchen explains his purpose. She stands aside and he wipes his feet before entering a tidy apartment that is almost devoid of furniture.

The woman says that one day, Mary’s 5-year-old son came into her apartment and the mother blew up. “She is very much yelling,” the woman says softly. “ ‘You bitch. Why do you let my son come into your home?’ ”

The neighbor frequently heard the little girl crying late at night. “She is too little,” the woman says, wiping a tear from her eye.

Another case involves Joan and Steven--not their real names. If they issued licenses to have children, it was a good bet that they would have remained childless. As it was, they had five. The eldest was in a mental institution and the youngest, an infant, was in the hospital with a broken leg that Houchen was sure Steven had caused, though he denied it. One clue was that Steven complained that his son was a behavior problem.

“A baby can’t be a behavior problem,” Houchen says. The other was the red mark on the side of the baby’s face that vaguely resembled the imprint of a hand.

Now, Steven was in jail, and the Department of Children’s Services was urging Joan to separate. She refused.

“I’ll never leave him, no matter what they say,” she says. Her three other small children stood next to her with morose, distrustful expressions on their faces while Houchen tried to sort through the wreckage of the family.

Joan, a heavy woman with a permanent pout, says she was a full-time cook and maid from the age of 12. Steven took her away from that.

Houchen asks how they discipline the kids.

“He makes them kneel in the corner,” she says. “I go and lock myself in the restroom and scream.”

Steven’s brother says both parents hit the children, sometimes knocking them to the floor. Making things worse, Steven recently lost his job and the family had to move in with his parents in a small North Hills bungalow.

In the perfect world inhabited by some child-welfare advocates, Steven does serious jail time. Houchen is not searching for the perfect world, just one a little less imperfect. He wants to give the father a lesson he’ll remember without crushing the family and leaving the mother resentful at the world and taking it out on her children.

“I look at this and I say, ‘Daddy sure lost it,’ ” Houchen says. “Do I think he should go to prison? No way. Maybe some county time so he doesn’t do it again.”

The day Steven appears in court, Joan is stuck in the hall with the baby, who sits in a car seat, cooing. “I can’t go in there with this little monster,” then hurriedly corrects herself: “Munchkin.”

Steven admits his guilt and, in exchange, is placed on probation with instructions to get counseling.

Joan plans to take Steven out and “buy him the biggest dinner I can find.” Houchen is already back to his caseload. Asked if he was concerned about the baby, he replies sharply. “No,” he says, then thinks. “Yes, I am. The parents need counseling, not just the father.”

Better than anyone, Houchen knows there are no guarantees that today’s best guess will not be tomorrow’s bad call.

Samantha’s case is a perfect example. When Houchen finally reaches the Department of Children’s Services worker who supervised the case, he finds out she allowed the child to stay with the mother despite suspecting abuse.

Having seen bruises on the child, the DCS worker ordered the mother to take Samantha to a doctor. The doctor did not positively link the injuries to abuse. So the young worker allowed Samantha to stay with her mother.

The foster parents, who had visitation rights, also saw bruises and called the child abuse hot line, Houchen learned. Another DCS worker went out and took the child away from the mother in August, only weeks before the girl died. The primary DCS caseworker sent the child back.

Now, she was devastated.

“She feels she could have saved this child’s life,” Houchen says. “She kept saying, ‘If I would have done this. . . . ‘ That’s a terrible thing to deal with.”

Houchen spends an hour with her on the phone. He doesn’t want to destroy her, but he doesn’t want her to be naive the next time someone tells her how hard he or she has worked to become a model parent.

Another law enforcement official familiar with the case was less forgiving, saying “this baby cries out from the grave to [the DCS].” Schuyler Sprowles, a spokesman for the Department of Children’s Services, said he could not comment on the case.

Armed with facts from the DCS worker, the coroner and the neighbors, Houchen was ready to talk to the mother.

She denied hitting the child. Houchen asked about a bruise on Samantha’s rear. She said she fell at Grandma’s house, Houchen said later.

Having planned this moment, Houchen took his glasses off and stared into her eyes. “The only way that bruise got on her butt was a spank,” he said, very firmly, drawing on the expertise he had gained from years of looking at injuries to children. “The child had to have the diaper off when that was inflicted.”

The woman started crying, Houchen said. She said she was abused as a child. Then, for the first time, she admitted hitting her children. She continued to deny having anything to do with Samantha’s death.

It may seem hard to believe that a woman would help the man who abused their daughter, but it happens. One Friday, Houchen drops everything when he discovers that the wife of a man about to stand trial for repeatedly molesting their 12-year-old daughter had fled the state with the victim and her other children.

The trail led to Houston, and if the detective couldn’t get the girl back in court to testify on Monday, the case would be dismissed.

It wasn’t his case, but Houchen spent the morning on the phone to Houston trying to arrange to have the children picked up. Because of differences in the law governing juveniles in the two states, authorities in Houston said they would not honor California’s warrant. A prosecutor warned Houchen that if the L.A. cops came and snatched the kids, it would be kidnaping.

“Right now, as of this minute, this man’s going to go free and there’s not a thing we can do,” he says angrily.

Sure enough, on Monday morning, the case is dismissed. The defendant, smiling, shakes his attorney’s hand and walks away. Houchen didn’t even bother to show up in court.

“You see why police officers get disillusioned?” he says.

Several months later, Houchen gets a call from a children’s services worker in Houston. They had a 13-year-old girl complaining at school that her father had returned from jail in California and she was afraid to go home. The worker was in a rage. How could Houchen have let the man go?

The detective laid it all out. “It’s your problem” now, he says bluntly.

Three months after she died, Samantha gave up her last secret. Final toxicological tests reveal that she died from consuming four times the lethal amount of rubbing alcohol.

Surprising as it was, the finding explained some things. Like the coagulated blood in the intestines.

“This is very odd,” Houchen says over coffee and the inevitable cigarette. “I’ve never run into something like this before.”

Now he has a whole new batch of questions. Did Mary Hochman use rubbing alcohol to clean the tube in Samantha’s stomach? Did she use it to soothe the baby when she cried, the way people used to coat their children’s tongues with whiskey?

“If she poured it down her throat to calm her, we have manslaughter. If she poured it down knowing what it would do, we have murder.”

One morning, the foster mother brings in pictures she took when Samantha was sent to the doctor for examination. She also drops off a poem she read at Samantha’s funeral at Our Lady of Malibu Catholic Church. The poem read:

I know that life is fragile, death creeps up unawares. You look, a life is gone too soon. . . . You took to flight with joy in life. Higher you soar, an angel now.

“What is she giving me these for?” Houchen complains. He’s got five other cases running around in his head this morning, he is in charge of the office in the absence of his vacationing supervisor, and the last thing he needs is emotional blackmail. He looks through the pictures. The bruises on the face and a nasty cut on the nose stand out red and ugly.

“Aw,” he says. “These should have been reported. I would have been involved and she would be alive today.”

On a cold morning in late December, the coroner rules the death battered child syndrome, “based on multiple injuries, internal injuries to the liver, and because of an inordinate amount of rubbing alcohol,” says Houchen.

Mary Hochman is arrested and charged with murder.

She sits in jail, awaiting trial. Her attorney, Deputy Public Defender Eleanor Schneir, says Hochman is “horrified she’s been charged with her daughter’s death. She has to lose her child, then she’s arrested for killing her child.”

Of Detective Houchen, she said she felt that “from the beginning he was looking for Mary to be the bad guy.”

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Behind the Badge

From the Christopher Commission to the O.J. Simpson trial, the Los Angeles Police Department is in the line of fire as critics challenge its competence, and its integrity. Times journalists John Johnson and Joel Lugavere spent three months in the Van Nuys Division, one of the city’s busiest, to find how well police officers serve and protect as the department struggles to redefine itself.

SUNDAY: Shedding the past for an uncertain future

MONDAY: A crusader for crime’s smallest victims

TUESDAY: Diversity or division--the new struggle for equality in blue

WEDNESDAY: Homicide--a killing season

THURSDAY: The thinning blue line and the resource crisis

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The Smallest Victims

Although child abuse investigations and the number of investigators declined in 1994, increasing the pressures on line detectives such as Mike Houchen, child abuse arrests were up almost 11%.

CRIMES INVESTIGATED

Yearly totals for the city of Los Angeles 1991: 5,187 1992: 4,183 1993: 4,097 1994: 3,811 Breakdown by type, of 3,811 crimes investigated in 1994: Physical Abuse: 944 Sexual Abuse: 1,817 Endangering: 1,035 Homicide: 15 ****

CHILD ABUSE ARRESTS

Yearly totals for city of Los Angeles: 1991: 1,120 1992: 1,177 1993: 850 1994: 1,011 Breakdown by type, of 1,011 child abuse arrests in 1994: Child Molesting: 667 Child Endangering: 229 Child Abuse: 103 Homicide: 12 ****

OFFICERS ASSIGNED TO CHILD ABUSE UNIT

The number of officers assigned to the Abused Child Unit has declined since 1994, due to attrition and a hiring freeze. 1995: 20 Officers assigned in 1995

Source: LAPD