Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
- Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill honored Norlin Cruz, a 6-year-old child abuse homicide victim, by planting a tree.
- Gill presented the inaugural Norlin Cruz Child Advocacy Award to Dr. Antoinette Laskey.
- Gill emphasized the importance of intervention in preventing child abuse tragedies.
SALT LAKE CITY — Prosecutors said it was one of the most brutal and violent abuse and torture cases they had ever encountered.
In 2023, Reyna Flores-Rosales was convicted and sentenced to prison for the death of her son, Norlin Cruz.
On Thursday, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill and his office honored Cruz by planting a tree and presenting an award in his memory.
"Norlin deserved to be remembered for much longer than his short life," Gill said. "There was a commitment to make sure we make this award in his name, so he can live a little bit longer."
The case first came to light in February 2019 when Sandy Police said Flores-Rosales called 911 to report that her son was unresponsive in the shower.
"The first responders noticed he had multiple degrees of burns over his body, multiple traumas over his body," Gill said during a news conference.
Doctors from the Center for Safe and Healthy Families at Intermountain Health Primary Children's Hospital helped prosecutors over a 4-and-a-half-year period as they built a case against Flores-Rosales, Gill said.
"She had systemically and methodically tortured this young lad over those years, and she also kept video records of it," Gill said.
Gill said the court case featured over 350 experts and testimony from more than a dozen subject matter experts.
"They all collectively testified that was one of the most brutal, violent torture scenarios that they had witnessed," Gill said.
Gill said everyone who worked on the case was affected by it, and he turned emotional discussing it once again on Thursday as he stood next to a portrait of Cruz appearing happy and next to a birthday cake on his 6th birthday.
"This is how we always want to remember Norlin, and forgive me if I get a little emotional because this is what every child should be remembered as — joyful, happy, celebrating and looking to a future full of possibilities," Gill said. "Unfortunately for Norlin, and for too many children, this is not always the reality."
Gill cited statistics that showed nearly 2,000 children die in the U.S. every year from abuse or neglect.
In honor of Norlin and others like him, the district attorney's office planted a tree out in front of the building that prosecutors said they would decorate around the holidays to remember victims of abuse.
Gill also presented the first-ever Norlin Cruz Child Advocacy Award to Dr. Antoinette Laskey, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Utah School of Medicine and division chief at the Center for Safe and Healthy Families, the organization that assisted in Cruz's case.
"When children suffer at the hands of those who are supposed to love and provide for them, it doesn't have to end in tragedy," Laskey said. "It can end because someone cared enough to ask for help or to make a report to someone who could intervene and help."
