Tragedy in Texas: How CPS Failures Led to the Death of Nayeli Perez
Laid out on a bathroom floor wearing only a soiled diaper, 16-year-old Nayeli Perez weighed just 78 pounds when police found her lifeless body in March 2024. The Houston teen, who had developmental disabilities and functioned at a first-grade level, had been starved, dehydrated, and brutally abused. Paramedics noted horrific injuries, including stab wounds to her genital area. Even more shocking, her foster mother, 48-year-old Tracy Gonzales, had allegedly been systematically neglecting and beating Nayeli while continuing to cash the disability checks meant for the girl’s care. This needless death has horrified the community and exposed a cascade of failures by Child Protective Services (CPS) and the broader child welfare system that effectively sealed Nayeli’s fate.
A Foster Mother with a Troubling Past
Long before she met Nayeli, Tracy Gonzales had a deeply troubling history with child welfare authorities. State records reveal that CPS, under Texas’s Department of Family and Protective Services, investigated Gonzales repeatedly for child abuse and neglect allegations dating back to 2006. In 2006, police found two of Gonzales’s young children filthy, unkempt, and wandering a parking lot alone. They had been left without a parent for two days. All three of her kids were removed from her care after that incident. A few years later, in 2009, Gonzales was investigated again for injuring and neglecting her infant grandson. Officials confirmed she had medically and physically neglected the baby, and she was barred from unsupervised access to him thereafter. Even as recently as 2018, CPS labeled Gonzales a high risk to children. She had gotten into a physical fight while holding her infant daughter, and tested positive for marijuana, methamphetamine, and amphetamines during the ensuing CPS probe. That investigation resulted in Gonzales’s infant being placed with a family friend for safety. By any measure, Tracy Gonzales was a known danger to children.
Despite this alarming track record, Gonzales somehow ended up caring for Nayeli Perez, a vulnerable, cognitively impaired teenager, just a few years later. In late 2022, Nayeli was placed in Gonzales’s home by a family friend who had been Nayeli’s informal caregiver. That friend was arrested on drug charges, and instead of alerting authorities, she entrusted Nayeli to Gonzales’s care as a stopgap. This backroom arrangement meant that Nayeli was never formally placed or monitored by the state. She simply slipped through the cracks. Gonzales was not a licensed foster parent. She was essentially a self-appointed caregiver with no CPS oversight, despite her own checkered history. It is a bitter irony that a child in need of protection was handed off to someone with decades of red flags in her file.
Months of Abuse and Missed Warning Signs
Once Nayeli moved into Tracy Gonzales’s Houston home, the teen’s life deteriorated into a private hell. Neighbors recalled that Nayeli seemed like a normal girl who attended a local school and loved chatting with classmates. But roughly a year before her death, she stopped showing up to school altogether. Whenever concerned neighbors asked about Nayeli’s absence, Gonzales always had an excuse, claiming she was homeschooling the girl or that Nayeli’s issues were being managed at home. In reality, behind closed doors, the disabled teen was slowly dying from neglect.
Medical records later revealed the stark decline in Nayeli’s condition. In February 2022, before living with Gonzales, the 5-foot-2 teen weighed about 118 pounds. By the time of her death in March 2024, she weighed only 78 pounds, a loss of forty pounds, or one-third of her body weight. Gonzales had effectively starved the girl, providing little food or water. The foster mother also deprived Nayeli of basic hygiene and medical care. When first responders entered Nayeli’s bedroom, they were hit with the stench of disinfectant attempting to mask filth. They found the teenager lying on a deflated air mattress on the bathroom floor, clad only in a disposable diaper. Every article of her clothing was fouled and unwearable. Her body was covered in wounds, some fresh, others in various stages of healing, spanning from bruises on her temples to a horrific laceration in her vaginal area. Investigators later found a belt adorned with metal beads in the bedroom, which Gonzales admitted she used to whip Nayeli in bouts of rage. In her own words, Gonzales would beat the girl with the belt out of frustration at Nayeli’s disabilities, punishing her for not being able to use the toilet or feed herself independently. She claimed she would even close her eyes while swinging, not knowing or caring where the blows landed. The abuse was as cruel as it was unconscionable.
Tragically, no one in a position of authority realized what was happening to Nayeli until it was far too late. Gonzales never once took the teen for medical help or alerted authorities as Nayeli’s health nosedived, later confessing that she deliberately avoided seeking help because she feared CPS would take away her two young daughters if they saw the girl’s condition. Gonzales effectively kept Nayeli’s existence hidden. By withdrawing her from school, she removed the teachers and counselors who are legally required to report signs of abuse. By isolating her at home, she ensured that doctors, neighbors, and other mandated reporters could not see the bruises and emaciation. The system’s safety nets, school, doctors, community, were systematically cut away, and CPS had no active case open on Nayeli at the time. When Gonzales finally called 911 on March 25, 2024, claiming she had come home to find her foster child unresponsive, it was too late. Paramedics arrived to discover the nightmare that had been unfolding in silence. Nayeli Perez was pronounced dead at the scene, her death later ruled a homicide caused by complications of dehydration, malnutrition, and blunt-force injuries.
It took nine agonizing months for investigators to piece together the case and formally charge Tracy Gonzales. Finally, on December 30, 2024, Houston police arrested Gonzales and charged her with injury to a disabled person with serious bodily injury, a first-degree felony, for her role in Nayeli’s death. As officers led Gonzales away in handcuffs, Child Protective Services belatedly intervened to remove her own two daughters from the home for their safety. The very agency Gonzales had evaded ultimately swept in, but only in the aftermath of irreversible tragedy. Neighbors watched in shock as CPS carried the little girls away, realizing that the signs they had missed or been misled about had concealed a lethal pattern of abuse next door.
Systemic Failures Exposed
In the wake of Nayeli’s death, one question haunts every discussion of the case. How could the system meant to protect children allow this to happen. Child Protective Services officials have been quick to point out that Nayeli was not under an active CPS case at the time of her death. She was not even in official foster care, since her placement with Gonzales was informal. They argue that no one alerted them to any danger. “If nobody makes a call of abuse allegations, there’s no way for us to know,” one former CPS caseworker explained, underscoring CPS’s stance that the agency can only react to reports it receives. In other words, CPS contends its hands were tied because Nayeli’s situation remained off the radar. However, that very reality is a damning indictment of how the system operates. A vulnerable child’s life fell through the cracks of a passive, reactive bureaucracy.
Critics note that CPS had plenty of information to foresee the risk. Tracy Gonzales was a walking red flag, yet there was no mechanism to track or restrict her access to children once past investigations were closed. The fact that a disabled teenager could be handed to a person with Gonzales’s history without so much as a background check or home visit reflects a glaring lack of interagency communication and oversight. It appears that one arm of the system knew Gonzales was dangerous, but another arm had no clue, or no constraints, and thus an informal transfer went unchecked. Furthermore, CPS’s heavy reliance on mandatory reporters like teachers, doctors, and police to sound the alarm failed Nayeli. By pulling the girl out of school, Gonzales eliminated the most likely source of an abuse report. It is painfully clear that CPS had no backup plan for children who disappear from public view. As one Texas lawmaker put it, the agency is so intent on reducing its contact with families that it often leaves children in peril unless a crisis explodes publicly.
The death of Nayeli Perez is not an isolated incident, but rather part of a harrowing pattern in Texas’s embattled child welfare system. A recent court-ordered review found that 16 children died in the Texas foster care system in just a 15-month span ending in early 2025. Many of those children were medically fragile or had disabilities, and their deaths underscore how even removal from abusive homes is no guarantee of safety when oversight fails. More broadly, Texas Public Radio reports that over 1,200 Texas children died from abuse or neglect between 2018 and 2023, despite many having prior CPS involvement. Alarmingly, more than 400 of those deaths occurred after CPS had investigated the family two or more times, and over 300 of the children died within a year of CPS closing an investigation into their household. In case after case, CPS agents failed repeatedly to remove children from dangerous situations, even when there were clear signs of ongoing abuse. In one especially horrific example, a 9-year-old Texas girl was starved and beaten to death by her mother and stepmother in 2023, despite neighbors, relatives and even police raising concerns to CPS. The agency had opted for a minimal family monitoring approach and then closed the case, leaving the girl and her brother with their abusers. Such tragedies expose a system stretched thin, riddled with communication breakdowns, and too often paralyzed by a culture of inaction.
Texas’s CPS and foster care system has been under scrutiny for years, from scathing federal court oversight to legislative hearings, yet meaningful change has been sluggish. A federal judge overseeing a long-running lawsuit about Texas foster care described the status quo as untenable, noting that children have been subjected to abuse, overcrowding, and unsafe conditions even in state care. Reforms have been piecemeal. For instance, in 2023 Texas lawmakers passed bills to tighten background checks on caregivers and to mandate CPS inform parents of their rights during investigations. But at the same time, the legislature also passed House Bill 63, which bans anonymous reporting of child abuse in Texas. Critics warn this could further chill the reporting of abuse, as teachers or neighbors might fear retaliation or hesitate if they must reveal their identity. The last thing an overburdened CPS needs is fewer reports, yet Texas has now put up another barrier to the very calls that could save lives. It is a decision that, according to child advocates, could mean more cases like Nayeli’s go unreported and undetected until it is too late.
No More Excuses: Demanding Accountability
In the case of Nayeli Perez, every system designed to shield her instead became a shield for her abuser. The lack of proactive follow-up on a high-risk guardian, the absence of any check-in when a special-needs child vanished from school, the failure to connect the dots between Gonzales’s CPS history and her new role as a caretaker, these were not just oversights, but fatal errors. It is not enough for CPS to shrug that they had no report and therefore no responsibility. A child is dead. A young girl with her whole life ahead of her suffered unimaginable pain and loneliness, while bureaucrats maintained tunnel vision on technicalities of custody and reporting. The horror of Nayeli’s last months demands an urgent look in the mirror for Texas DFPS and CPS offices everywhere. How many other children like her are out there, hidden in back bedrooms and makeshift arrangements, silently wasting away. How many warnings must be ignored, and how many prior closed cases will turn out to be precursors to the next tragedy.
Nayeli’s story has sparked outrage and calls for accountability. Advocates are demanding a thorough investigation not just of Gonzales, but of CPS’s failure to intervene at any point during the downward spiral. Was there a breakdown in communication when Nayeli’s previous guardian was arrested. Should there be protocols to flag at-risk youths, especially those with disabilities, when their caregivers change outside of court. And why was a woman like Gonzales, who had literally lost her own children to CPS in the past, free to take in a child without so much as a home inspection. These questions point to a child welfare system in dire need of reform. Some propose creating a registry to track individuals with a history of child abuse allegations, so they cannot so easily gain access to new victims. Others stress the need for better support and monitoring of informal kinship placements, which are often chosen to avoid foster care bureaucracy but can leave kids unprotected. At minimum, when a caregiver with custody of a child is suddenly incapacitated by arrest or otherwise, authorities should be notified so that no child is simply handed off under the table.
As of early 2025, Tracy Gonzales remains behind bars on a 200,000 dollar bond, awaiting trial for the felony charge related to Nayeli’s death. She will face justice in criminal court. But the officials and institutions whose inaction enabled this nightmare must also face judgment in the court of public opinion. It is cold comfort to note that CPS did swoop in to rescue Gonzales’s other children. Those little girls are safe now because the system decided after the fact that their mother was unfit. Had the system been as vigilant from the start, Nayeli Perez might be alive today. Instead, she joins a growing list of children betrayed by the very entity charged with protecting them.
Nayeli’s short life, and its horrific end, should serve as a clarion call. No child should ever be allowed to wither away in secret while red flags languish in a file cabinet. No disabled child should be left at the mercy of an unvetted, abusive caretaker cashing their disability checks instead of providing care. We owe it to Nayeli, and to all the voiceless kids depending on adults to do the right thing, to fix this broken system. The next vulnerable child is out there right now, counting on us to notice. We must not look away again.
