In re J.S.C. CA2/3

BACKGROUND

As the parties’ briefs fully set forth the factual and procedural background leading to the court’s termination of parents’ parental rights, our summary focuses on the facts relevant to the juvenile court’s adoptability finding. 1. Current and past dependency petitions Mother and father are the parents of J.S.C. (born April 2010), K.S.C. (born September 2012), and N.C. (born December 2014). Father is not a party to this appeal. The current dependency petition arose when the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (the Department) filed a Welfare and Institutions Code1 section 300 petition on May 15, 2017, on behalf of the three children. The juvenile court sustained the petition—based on mother’s physical abuse of J.S.C. and father’s failure to protect, father’s physical abuse of J.S.C., and parents’ violent altercations in their children’s presence—and removed the children from both parents’ care.

All subsequent statutory references are to the Welfare and Institutions Code.

2 J.S.C. and K.S.C. had been declared dependents of the juvenile court two years earlier, in January 2015, based on mother’s inability to care for them…