An 11-year-old girl weighed 48 pounds when she died. Less than she weighed at age five. Her bones were visible through her skin. She had 15 healing fractures, bruising across her body, lacerations. First responders found her pale, unresponsive, with no pulse at a home in Spring Valley at two in the morning on August 30, 2022. She died shortly after reaching the hospital.
That girl was Arabella McCormack. The woman charged with her murder is Leticia McCormack, her adoptive mother, an ordained elder at the Rock Church in San Diego. Prosecutors say Arabella was starved, beaten with paddles and sticks, denied food and water, and forced into physical exercise. Her two younger sisters survived the same household. They are in foster care now.
Leticia McCormack’s parents, Adella and Stanley Tom, face three counts of torture and three counts of willful child cruelty each. All three have pleaded not guilty. McCormack sits in San Diego County Jail without bond. The San Diego DA’s office announced it will seek the death penalty. Trial is set for August 2027.
Now ask yourself the obvious question. How does a child waste away to 48 pounds in a household with three adults, a megachurch network, neighbors, teachers, and a child welfare apparatus that exists for exactly this situation, and nobody intervenes until she is dead?
Brian McCormack, Arabella’s adoptive father and Leticia’s husband, was a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent. When police contacted him the night they responded to the home, he shot himself in the head in front of officers. According to prosecutors, he had told his wife in the days before Arabella’s death that the child “was starving to death and he believed she was going to die.” A federal law enforcement officer knew a child was dying under his own roof and his solution was a bullet. Funny how the people sworn to protect things always seem to vanish when the thing needing protection is in the next room.
Then there is the Rock Church, founded by former NFL player Miles McPherson. When the story first broke, McCormack was described as an ordained elder. The church issued a statement: “The Rock no longer has any official relationship with Leticia.” Condolences, hearts going out, legal process running its course. Very tidy. But by December 2025, when Arabella’s surviving sisters received a $31.5 million settlement from several organizations accused of failing to intervene, the church had revised its posture. Now McCormack was “previously a volunteer.” Not paid staff. Not a pastor. Not an official pastoral leader. Her ordination, the church says, was completed elsewhere and transferred to Rock Church in January 2022, eight months before Arabella died.
So which is it? An elder or a volunteer? A leader or a nobody who just happened to be ordained and affiliated with your institution while a child was being starved to death in her bedroom? The Rock Church paid $3 million as part of that settlement. They did not admit liability. They never do.
And the death penalty announcement? Pure theater. Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on executions in California in 2019. The state has not carried out a single death sentence since. Prosecutors can ask for capital punishment all they want. Nobody is getting a needle in this state. The DA knows it. The defense knows it. The public is supposed to feel reassured that the system is taking this seriously, when the system’s own track record says otherwise.
Every institution that touched Arabella McCormack’s life had a chance to save her. The church. The schools. Child protective services. A federal agent living in the same house. Every single one looked the other way or looked after itself. A $31.5 million check does not undo that. A death penalty announcement nobody will ever carry out does not undo that. What it does is tell you exactly how much an 11-year-old girl’s life is worth to the people who are paid to care.
Forty-eight pounds. Fifteen broken bones. And five years to get to trial.