When Laura Barahona’s brother, Jorge, showed up at her house last February after a three-year estrangement, his 10-year-old adopted son sported a cut lip that looked so bad she thought he had cleft palate. His wrists and ankles showed signs that he’d been tied up.

Laura called another brother, Julio Barahona, who called police. Laura then spent the night at a friend’s house, while Jorge and his adoptive son, Victor, remained at her home.

“My brother told me to stay away from the house, because we were expecting the cops to come,” Laura said.

But the cops never came.

Not on Feb. 12, when Julio Barahona told them his nephew looked liked he’d been horribly abused, and that Victor’s twin sister had simply vanished.

Not a day later, when a Department of Children & Families investigator visited Jorge Barahona’s West Miami-Dade home and declared: “This is a job for the police.”

And not on Feb. 14, when Laura Barahona went so far as the Broward Sheriff’s Office to get someone’s attention.

By then it was too late: That Monday afternoon, Victor Barahona, a sandy-haired boy with a Nerf toy and a Game Boy, had been found slumped in his adoptive father’s red pickup truck on the side of Interstate 95 in West Palm Beach. His father, Jorge Barahona, was nearby, unconscious.

Immersed in unknown, but highly toxic chemicals, the father and son were the likely victims of a murder-suicide attempt, police thought.

Victor’s twin sister — relatives often referred to Nubia Barahona simply as “the girl,” as they barely knew Jorge’s family — was discovered hours later in the pickup’s flatbed, also awash in chemicals, decomposing, and stuffed in a black garbage bag.

The grim tale of Laura and Julio Barahona’s futile efforts to find a savior for their niece and nephew is contained in hundreds of pages of police reports and interviews released to The Miami Herald Thursday by Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, who is prosecuting both Jorge Barahona and his wife, Carmen. The couple both have pleaded not-guilty to charges of first-degree murder and aggravated child abuse, and are awaiting trial in a Miami-Dade County Jail.

The odyssey began early in the day on Saturday, Feb. 12. Laura Barahona thought it was odd when her much older brother, Jorge, showed up at her Miami home unexpectedly after a three-year separation. He looked terrible: He had a new, scruffy beard. He had lost 35 or 40 pounds. He kept grinding his teeth while he spoke. And he twitched.

But it was the little boy, Victor, who most concerned Laura. “It was like a child with a cleft lip. The lip was completely cut. It was still open,” she told detectives in an interview on March 2. “The lip and his gums were swollen.”

When Laura asked her nephew to wash his hands before eating a McDonald’s chicken meal — the boy had been horsing around with Laura’s dog and cat — she noticed something even more troubling. Victor’s hands looked like he’d been tied up. His ankles, too.

Worse still, Victor’s twin sister, Nubia, was missing, and Jorge could give her no explanation for the child’s absence. Laura took her dog for a walk and called her mom. “I told her that they were giving me answers about Nubia’s whereabouts that I wasn’t believing, and that I wasn’t comfortable with it.”