Julie Vega could see it coming. She'd seen it coming from the moment in early March 1998 when someone called her from Arizona Boys Ranch near Oracle to say her son, Nicholaus Contreraz, was dead.
"The thing that scared me all along was that these people who killed my boy were going to get away with it," she said.
Then, it happens.
Pinal County prosecutors dropped criminal charges against nurse Linda Babb, the last of five former Boys Ranch employees originally accused in the 16-year-old's death.
Contreraz died of an infection in the lining of the lungs that was complicated by asthma and other ailments. That's the medical analysis.
The thing that actually killed Nicky Contreraz was cruelty and something close to hatred.
He was a troubled kid in a place meant to help troubled kids, and he wound up dead. Instead of recognizing that he was sick, the staff at Boys Ranch treated him like a slacker, forcing him in the last minutes of his life, as he gasped for air and begged for mercy, to do push-ups over a bucket of his own excrement-soiled clothes.
An autopsy revealed more than 2 quarts of pus in the lung lining and a collapsed lung.
Babb was the nurse at the school. She had been charged with manslaughter and child abuse. In the beginning, five employees at the school were charged with murder.
Now, after a problem with conflicting testimony from an expert witness, Babb was let off the hook.
"All I would have asked," Vega said, "is that a jury get to decide what happened that day. These are not people who just made mistakes. My son is dead. To me, there was a crime."
Not in the eyes of the law, however. Not any longer.
Already the Contreraz family has settled a lawsuit against Boys Ranch for what is estimated to be about $1 million.
"At the time we did that, there were five people being prosecuted," Vega said. "I never would have agreed to settle anything if I thought there would be no criminal trial for this."
The prosecutor in the case, Sylvia Lafferty, told me that a reversal in the testimony of Dr. Robert Kearl, an expert she expected to pin the blame on Babb, caused her to drop the prosecution.
Lafferty is actually the second prosecutor to work the case. She was sent in, many believe, to clean up an initially botched job. That's certainly what Vega and her family believe.
That's why they wanted a trial. It's why they deserved their day in court. They know a jury would have seen through the conflicting testimony and lawyers' tricks.
After all, if there was no crime then Contreraz could be said to have died of natural causes, a notion that reeks almost most as much as the bucket of filth over which he breathed his last breaths.
E.J. Montini's e-mail address is montini@arizonarepublic.com