SAN DIEGO (CN) — The biological mother of an 11-year-old that prosecutors claim died after she was repeatedly tortured by her adoptive parents can’t pursue her own wrongful death and negligence claims against San Diego County, the church the adoptive mom was a youth ministry leader at and other defendants because she lacks inheritance rights, a judge ruled.
In her lawsuit filed in San Diego Superior Court in 2023, Torriana Florey, biological mother of Arabella McCormack — who died in 2022 while under the care of her adoptive parents, Leticia and Brian McCormack — argued that under California’s 2009 Tribal Customary Adoptions law, she still had parental rights over Arabella.
But San Diego Superior Court Judge Richard Whitney, in a tentative ruling, found that “if a TCA order does not specify that a biological parent retains inheritance rights, then there is a conclusive presumption that the tribal customary adoptive parents are vested with inheritance rights.”
Whitney finalized the ruling Friday, granting San Diego County’s motion to dismiss Florey’s claims without leave to amend at a hearing in San Diego Superior Court that Florey’s attorney did not attend.
“Her parental rights were never terminated under the probate code,” said Shawn McMillan of the Law Offices of Shawn A McMillan, Florey’s attorney, referring to California’s probate code that governs inheritance rights in the state, over the phone after the hearing. “We disagree with the court’s analysis and we’ll be appealing it.”
Tribal Customary Adoption law allows Native American children to be adopted by the child’s own tribal group without requiring the biological parents to give up their parental rights.
Florey wrote in her complaint that Arabella’s father is Native American and the Mesa Grande Band of Mission Indians had requested to intervene in her case in 2016.
“Plaintiff makes great effort to distinguish traditional adoptions from adoptions under the TCA to assert that parental rights survive under the TCA. While there is no direct authority on point, the court is unconvinced the TCA was intended to alter traditional adoptions as far as the ultimate effect of changing inheritance rights of the parents. The TCA is clearly focused on ‘the child’s best interest.’ Plaintiff fails to point to any provision of the TCA that indicates the intent was to protect a biological parent’s inheritance rights,” Whitney wrote in the tentative ruling issued Wednesday.
Eleven-year-old Arabella was only 48 pounds when she died in San Diego of organ failure and cardiac arrest in 2022. Prosecutors claim Leticia and Brian McCormack, and grandparents Adella and Stanley Tom, imprisoned, starved, tortured and beat Arabella and her younger sisters for years, which ultimately caused her death.
Brian McCormack, a border patrol agent, killed himself the day Arabella died.
Florey claimed in her suit that San Diego County’s Health & Human Services Agency, San Diego Rock Church and their employees, along with the McCormacks, were responsible for Arabella’s death.
She also named a San Diego police officer and others in the suit, like Pacific Coast Academy, a home-schooling program where teachers saw Arabella and her sisters, and a local nonprofit that supports court appointed special advocate volunteers foster care kids and their employees, accusing them of failing to protect Arabella from abuse and neglect, including by not following up on reports of her being abused.
Florey asked the court to grant damages after a jury trial as Arabella’s inheritor and successor in interest, but San Diego County filed a demurrer asserting that Florey did not have standing to bring her claim.
Along with a parallel criminal trial, Arabella’s surviving minor sisters are also pursuing a wrongful death, assault and battery, Fourteenth Amendment violation and failure to report child abuse and neglect case against many of the same defendants.
San Diego County declined to comment on an ongoing court action.
“The county joins the community in grieving Arabella’s death,” a spokesperson for the county wrote in an email.