It was a May night in 2013 when Palmdale police responded to a 911 call of an unresponsive child. When he got to the hospital, Gabriel was clinging to life somehow, and the documentary opens with the clearly traumatized medical professionals and officers who were the first to truly document his injuries. As one says, it didn’t really seem possible that all of this could be on one child’s body. With scars and broken bones, the human body holds a record of abuse like nothing else can. Gabriel’s body told a horrible story.

Over six hours, director Brian Knappenberger (“Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press”) chronicles the search to find some form of justice for Gabriel. Of course, it starts with an aggressive trial against the people who committed this violence against the child, including trying to get his stepfather the death penalty. More than a mere TV special could possibly do, “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez” digs deep into the case in ways that we rarely see in projects like this. It's almost like the producers felt that leaving out any aspect of this story would be doing Gabriel a disservice. And so we hear a lot about decisions made by the prosecutors, hear from the witnesses who tried to get Gabriel help and where there the night he died, and even break down some of the final decisions with jurors. Of course, this is primarily a human-interest story, but it is also fascinating and informative as a procedural in terms of how high-profile cases like this unfold.

While the main thrust of “The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez” is on the case against his stepfather, the series eventually gets to one of the more interesting aspects of this true story in that Los Angeles also chose to prosecute four of the social workers who failed Gabriel. A Google search will tell you how that turned out, and the series does eventually seem to have some sympathy for some of these people who are caught up in a system that has gotten too unwieldy to be effective (although there’s one social worker for whom I would still have some serious questions and think bears some culpability.)