FACING TRAGEDY, PASTORS PUT THEIR FAITH ON HOLD

Their daughter's death devastated two drug addicts turned ministers in Ontario.

As pastors, Ronnie and Yvette Rodriguez ministered to former gang
members and recovering drug addicts like themselves, all in the name
of doing the work of God.

They say they never sought reward for their service. But they never
expected to be punished either.

So why, they ask, did God take their Alyssa?

The child's death reverberated in her hometown. Her funeral drew
2,000. A churchgoer who was caring for the 4-year-old was charged
with smothering the child. But for the girl's parents, the
unimaginable death and the trial's mixed results brought deep
frustration and a painful sense of betrayal.

How could they love a God, they asked, who gave them Alyssa and then
allowed her death?

And then came their doubt: Maybe there isn't a God.

Long before Yvette, 36, and Ronnie, 37, met, they said, they lived in
parallel universes of drugs.

As a bored teenager in Chula Vista, Yvette turned to meth and stole
to support her habit. She had a son out of wedlock, and left him with
his grandmother in her childhood home while she lived on the streets.

Ronnie said he grew up in nearby San Diego, watching his parents
snort and smoke drugs. Dad bought a home with drug money. After he
went to prison, Mom sold it for drug money. By the time he was a
teenager, Ronnie was doing heroin.

Their lives intersected when a judge sent each to residential drug
treatment programs run by Victory Outreach, a 37-year-old Christian
ministry that runs dozens such homes worldwide.

In early 1997, Yvette and Ronnie met at a San Diego Victory Outreach
church. They were drawn to each other's emerging faith and became
licensed ministers during their courtship.

They were married the next year and moved to Montclair, where they
supervised a church-run house similar to those where they had lived.
Alyssa was born while they lived there. "I prayed and prayed for a
little girl," Yvette said. "When she came, I couldn't imagine how
life could be any better."

When Alyssa was 5 months old, the family took over another Victory
Outreach drug-treatment home in Ontario. The family shared one room
in the two-story house, and a rotating cast of men bunked in the
others. When Ronnie's stepfather, a pastor in the Ontario Victory
Outreach, became terminally ill in early 2003, Ronnie and Yvette
became its pastors.

Because of the religious environment that enveloped the home,
Alyssa's parents said they rarely worried about her being around men
with such hardened backgrounds. The men indulged her by playing dolls
and tea party. Together they blossomed, Yvette said.

"When they interacted with my child," Yvette said, "these men would
transform from gorillas to teddy bears."

They used the men's stories and their own to teach Alyssa about God's
love. In turn, church was the highlight of her week, and she refused
to eat dinner until everyone had prayed.

The girl, with wide, brown eyes, waist-length light-brown curls and a
love of jewelry, graced the home with her energy. Her vocabulary,
with words like "actually" and "regardless," belied her age.

In August she started preschool and, by the third week, had filled a
notebook with drawings. One showed her family: parents, half-brother
and Cha-Cha, her Chihuahua. The foreground was dominated by a cross
drawn in thick white crayon.

On Sept. 28, a balmy Tuesday, Ronnie and Yvette went to the church
office five minutes away to install a computer. They left Alyssa with
Veronica Trejo, one of the women in the Victory Outreach program.
Trejo, a 42-year-old mother of six and a former meth addict, can be
seen in the grainy home video of Alyssa's first birthday.

The parents instructed Trejo: Pick up the house a little, and change
Alyssa's pants so she would be ready for school that afternoon. And
since she bathed the night before, don't give her another.

But the child insisted on a bath, standing naked in the tub and
asking permission to turn on the water. Trejo said no.

"I hate you," Alyssa told Trejo, according to the woman's account to police.

San Bernardino County prosecutors said Trejo snapped, crushing
Alyssa's face to her chest. Traces of the girl's DNA were found on
Trejo's red tank top.

"She literally squeezed the life out of [Alyssa]," prosecutor Jason
Anderson would later tell jurors.

After pulling open the pink rose-printed shower curtain, another
church member found Alyssa in the bathtub.

Paramedics tried to revive Alyssa on the living room floor. At the
hospital, Yvette touched Alyssa's little hand, now cold. The coroner
ruled that she had died of asphyxiation.

A memorial for Alyssa drew 2,000 people to an Ontario church. She was
buried in a long, white dress and an angel necklace. A tiara was
perched on her curls. Her favorite baby boy doll was placed in her arms.

Alyssa loved infant boys so much, her parents believe, that she left
them with a gift.

Yvette became pregnant a month after Alyssa's death, and the couple
are expecting a boy this month.

Even as Yvette grows heavier with child, she and Ronnie drive every
Wednesday to Alyssa's grave in Bellevue Memorial Cemetery in Ontario.

After the cemetery grass has been mowed, Ronnie scrubs and polishes
the marble headstone until it shines. They adorn it with pinwheels,
leis and a picture of her favorite cartoon character, Dora the
Explorer. Angel statues and a plastic tiger sit on the stone,
inscribed with her name and a small cross.

Soon after their child's death, Ronnie and Yvette started disengaging
from religious faith. Their first step: resigning as pastors.

"We had devoted our lives to helping people, then one of those people
turned around and took away something so precious to us," Yvette
said. "If this is some twisted test of my faith, I admit that I failed."

In January, finding it too painful to live in the house where Alyssa
died, they bought their own home in Ontario.

But the memories followed.

In the backyard sits Alyssa's Barbie jeep, its cotton-candy pink
plastic fading in the summer sun. Poster-size photos of the child -
smiling with a birthday lei around her neck in one, clutching a gold
medal around her neck after winning a footrace in another - hang next
to the family computer and in both bedrooms.

Her toys rest on a shelf above her parents' bed.

The trinkets comforted Alyssa's parents while they awaited Trejo's
trial for second-degree murder.

In opening statements to the jury, the woman's defense attorney
blamed the other churchgoer working in the house. Trejo's lawyer said
the other woman, who weighed nearly 300 pounds, probably sat on
Alyssa while putting pants on the child, and inadvertently suffocated her.

The DNA on Trejo's shirt? It happens when you're a babysitter, the
defense lawyer said. The smears weren't from a child sobbing as she
gasped for breath, but from the strawberry ice cream Trejo had fed
Alyssa that morning.

Alyssa's parents say if someone shares the blame for her death, it is God.

"Sometimes I can't help but think God is punishing us for doing
good," Ronnie said, burying his head in his husky, painter's hands.
"Then I think it's more cruel than that, that he wanted to get back
at me for what I did when I was younger. He waited until I had Alyssa
so I would feel the most pain possible."

The trial lasted seven days, and jurors deliberated another three
before acquitting Trejo on May 26 of second-degree murder and
voluntary manslaughter. But they deadlocked on other serious charges:
involuntary manslaughter and assault on a child causing death.

Ronnie was dazed. "You keep on wondering what could have been done
differently, not just during the trial but in our whole lives," he
said. "Maybe it was a mistake to devote our lives to this. Maybe we
should have just let God do his work without us."

Still, the couple have taken small steps back to religious faith.
They attend Victory Outreach's San Bernardino church on Sundays. But
they still aren't ready to return to God's work.

"God took everything from us," Yvette said. "We have nothing left to
give to anyone else."

Then they were asked one more question that struck at the heart of
their Christian faith: Could they forgive? In so many words, that
question was asked by prosecutors who were debating whether to retry
Trejo on the remaining charges or drop the case.

For now, the Rodriguezes cannot forgive. They asked that the woman be retried.

While the case was in limbo, Trejo was free. She was ordered to
return to the Rancho Cucamonga courthouse Friday to learn what the
district attorney's office had decided.

The week before the hearing, the Rodriguezes were told that
prosecutors were leaning toward dropping the charges. Angry and
disappointed, the couple begged them to reconsider.

On Friday, Superior Court Judge Craig S. Kamansky in Rancho Cucamonga
allowed prosecutors to drop the remaining charges.

"Based on the evidence I heard," he said, "I don't believe that a
jury of 12 people could ever agree on a conviction."

No one from Alyssa's family was at the three-minute hearing. Their
conflict with prosecutors over whether to pursue the other charges
pushed them closer to God.

Without any legal finality, they started to realize he might be their
only source of closure.

"Veronica will be judged, whether it's in this life or by God,"
Yvette said. "With nothing else to hold on to, we have to start believing that."