The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

by Laura Tillman

  John’s second letter described his time growing up in Brownsville, his “poor, disfuntional family,” and the beatings his mother frequently endured.

  It was six of us living in the same house. My mom, my dad, my older half brother, myself, and two younger brothers. All us kids slept in the same bed most of the time except when we were kids and our parents bought us two bunk beds, one for each of us. We all slept in the same room always because we would get small places to live.

  As a child I imagened myself living in a house built just for me. My perfect wife and perfect kids. I always wanted to be in the milatery so I thought this dream would come through some day and even promissed my mother that some day I would make her a house right next to my own so I can have her close to me forever. Growing up I loved both my parents but I was closer to my mom because she showed interesse in the things I did and liked. At least that was the way things were until she started doing crack cocain and changed alot.

  I wanted to stay in Brownsville but buy a peace of land undeveloped where there is not much people or houses so it could be quiet. Enjoy the trees, animals that run around grassy places and the stars. I loved to see the stars. Makes me think alot of the amazing univers we live in.

  Hilda testified that John’s father beat her so badly, sometimes she couldn’t open her eyes, and her older brother Juan said that both John and Hilda were beaten. “He used to just throw him all over the place, like if nothing mattered.” Juan told defense attorney Nat Perez Jr. that he wished he had reported the abuse to police, but didn’t because “we were going to take care of it ourselves.” Hilda said John’s father merely spanked him, but said that he did start giving John alcohol as early as age five, when he would feed the kindergartener beer.

  “My father was very abusive, psysically, emotionally and mentally,” John wrote. “He seemed to struggle with expressing and/or excepting love.”

  The mitigation phase, during which his attorneys tried to show how difficult John’s life had been and give the jury a reason to spare him the death penalty, put his family in a harsh light. As John was sentenced during the second trial, neither Hilda nor his brothers came to support him.

  I drove by one home near Porter High School, where John graduated in 1999, when he was almost nineteen. He remembered an exact address. The house was painted blue, with white bars over the windows and the door, and was surrounded by a large green lot. It didn’t have the claustrophobic feeling of the apartment that would be John’s final home before prison. Here the boys could have played together, kicking a soccer ball through the grass, not unlike the children a mile away, in backyards abutting resacas. They might have watched some of John’s favorite movies—The Wizard of Oz, Grease, The Sound of Music, and Mary Poppins. John remembered playing video games as a kid, one of his favorite activities. Sometimes, he played a cowboy game his father found at a flea market. He also liked catching tarantulas.

  In one of his letters, John described his rivalry with his brother Jose Luis:

  I was very wild, climing trees, running around, playing all kinds of crazy games and my little brothers would follow me around because I would do fun stuff. Rodrigo was more garded, to himself but let go when we were playing. He took things seriously. Jose Luis as like my arc-enemy, or so he thought I was his. He would always be looking to get me angry with him. He would lye in wait for me, hit me and then run to our parents yelling at the top of his head “Juan [John in Spanish] wants to hit me for no reason.” Really, for no reason!!! He was such a big lier an acter that my parents always believed him and it did not help that he was the baby of the house.

  During the second trial, defense attorney Perez confronted Hilda with prior testimony that she had used crack cocaine while pregnant with John, but Hilda was adamant that she had not. She did admit to drinking a six-pack of beer a day all nine months, despite having been told that she shouldn’t drink while pregnant. Her brother Juan testified that he saw Hilda huff paint during the pregnancy.

  Dr. Jolie S. Brams, a psychologist who testified at the second trial, said John likely had a thought disorder as early as preschool, and his ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy was impaired. Dr. Brams found John’s parents to have had a “toxic” influence, “whose negativity and their behavior and their dysfunction in their daily lives hampered John Rubio’s ability to be a normal healthy individual.”

  John struggled with language as a child. Dr. Brams said he was unable to speak English fluently and “would talk to things that weren’t there. But even when he spoke to his family members, he kind of did it in his own gibberish, as if he were living in his own world.” His motor skills were also delayed—he never crawled and walked late. He had night terrors and believed in witchcraft. These, Dr. Brams said, were early “seeds of psychosis.” Dr. Brams concluded that John’s difficult upbringing exacerbated his developmental problems.

  But young John loved Hilda and clung to her, and his recollections in letters were of a mother in whom he could confide, who cared about his problems. He loved her more than anyone else and described her as a “best friend, a father and a mother, a counselor.” His uncle Juan described her as a good mother who loved her children and worked hard to support them for many years, until “the picture turned around.”

  “You know, it’s like when you look in the mirror and you see yourself, all of the sudden you just grab the image that’s inside and bring it out, and that’s the opposite side of you? That’s what happened to her.”

  An ex-boyfriend of Hilda’s, who met her while she was working as a nursing assistant in the nineties, said Hilda quit her job after several steady years, telling him that “she was tired.” It seems that after this point, her substance abuse problem worsened.

  When I asked John for good memories of his childhood, he told me this story twice: His special-education class was putting on a performance, and the children were to pretend they were playing paper instruments while music swelled in the background from the stereo.

  I needed white gloves, white button shirt, and black slacks. My father thought it was stupid but my mother thought it would be good for me to gain confidence so she bought me what I needed and because my dad didn’t want to drive us to school, my mother and I walked the 2 miles or so to the school.

  John was handed a cardboard saxophone, he recalled, and pretended it was real as the tape played behind them.

  I was full of childish joy and loved the fact my mother didn’t just get the things I needed but came with me all the way to school. My dad really did think it was stupid but because my mother saw it was important to me it did not matter if it was stupid or not, she just wanted to give me a little happyness.

  Hilda recalled throwing John birthday parties every year, buying piñatas and having his friends over, but John’s brothers remembered a different Hilda when they were on the witness stand. At John’s ROTC parades, Hilda was absent. The four brothers shared a single bedroom and woke most mornings to find Hilda passed out from drinking. They had to dress John and make sure he tied his shoes before school, something they said he sometimes had trouble doing even in high school. Manuel, the oldest, would cook for the boys when he was home, but once he moved out, they often had to fend for themselves, eating whatever was around. John’s younger brother Rodrigo remembered getting a book as a gift for Christmas one year, and a Tonka toy. Those are the only Christmas presents he ever recalled receiving from Hilda. John’s uncle Juan painted an even bleaker picture, based on the time he lived with them: John went to school wearing dirty clothes, birthdays were not celebrated, and as for Christmas, “We had no Christmas tree, we had no presents, we had nothing.”

  Brownsville has ranked several times as the poorest city in the United States. As of the most recent census, more than a third of its residents lived below the poverty level, with a population that was 93 percent Hispanic, the vast majority of Mexican descent. The region’s institutions of higher educa
tion have historically been underfunded by legislators in Austin. There is no law school here, or for 250 miles within the United States, and only after decades of battles has a medical school at last been planned. As an outgrowth of this, the region has lacked doctors who specialize in mental health. To become a professional in medicine or law, the best and brightest have continuously been drawn far away. If they stay in Brownsville, they often find that they cannot realize their aspirations because the tools to do so are simply nonexistent.

  In a city of such overwhelming poverty, John and his brothers’ lives may not have been so unique. Many families struggled to feed their children, and getting government lunches at school was not the exception but the norm. Parents worked late hours or lived in Mexico and sent their children to live with a relative, so a lack of homework help wasn’t unusual. In one way, such children might have seen themselves as fortunate: they weren’t among their classmates who had just crossed la frontera from Mexico and spoke no English.

  I met one of John’s teachers from elementary school, Pablo Coronado Jr. When he’d heard about the case on the news, more than a decade after John left his classroom, he didn’t immediately recognize his former student. Then it clicked: he had been a silly little boy in his class during one of his first years as a teacher. John, he remembered, always tried to make his classmates laugh.

  Coronado remembered John as a child who was in need of care, whose clothes were often dirty. Sadly, Coronado said, his situation was not unheard of, even in the second grade.

  “They come with a lot of baggage already,” he said. Coronado remembered that he tried to begin the process of getting John extra help. He requested a psychological evaluation. In third grade, John was diagnosed as emotionally disturbed and Hilda said John told her he was seeing shadows. She reported this to the Social Security office.

  When John heard or saw something strange, he told me that he would ask the person next to him if he or she did, too. Sometimes people said they had. He took such occasions as evidence that unusual forces were in the world that other people were also at a loss to explain. Hilda corroborated this in her testimony, saying that John told her he was the chosen one, but that she didn’t see this as a cause for concern.

  Dr. Brams believed Hilda didn’t handle John’s delusions appropriately: “One of the issues here is that children will become what their parents help them become. And I know that may sound trite, but that’s very true.” Hilda and John had a love-hate relationship, according to Dr. Brams’s analysis. “She rejected him but she also manipulated him. And one way that she did that was by convincing him that witchcraft was real and demons were real and that these spirits might really exist. And instead of what a good parent would do—‘Look, John, these things are not real, and I’m going to help you and comfort and support you’—she encouraged him to believe that those apparitions, those delusions, had some substance.”

  Juan remembered John saying that he was going to destroy the devil. When asked in court why he didn’t tell Hilda, Juan said, “I wasn’t going to snitch on him on his mother.”

  John mailed me copies of some of his school reports from his elementary days through high school. In his request for a psychological evaluation, Coronado wrote that eight-year-old John required “constant attention in class in order for him to complete assignments.” He also exhibited low self-esteem.

  John is not motivated by rewards offered for completed work or good behavior. He seeks approval and acceptance by his peers but their interactions with him are often limited. Peers tend to avoid interactions with him. He often feels that no one cares.

  On the same form, below the question “What is the problem as the mother sees it?,” Hilda’s take is that “he is just spoiled.” His father noted John’s mood swings: “He can be happy one minute and unhappy the next.” Juan also told me that John would get angry when he didn’t get his way. The same year, his teacher reported that John had thoughts that were inappropriate to a given situation, and that his behavior could be “self-serving” and “manipulative.” He lacked social awareness and could act in ways that were “idiosyncratic” and “bizarre.” Young John was already found to show signs of pervasive depression, a term the teacher underlined.

  Coronado said that John seemed like he had potential, but the support wasn’t there in his home life to help him realize it.

  At age ten, John’s learning abilities seemed to be improving. His special-education teacher wrote that John “has made huge strides in reading this year,” “uses fluent English,” though he did not always use correct grammar, and had excellent math and science skills. But at the end of an otherwise positive report, the teacher wrote that John was a “very emotionally needy child—he often reverts to babyish behavior as a coping or attention getting behavior. Parents should be encouraged to do parent training classes. (This has not happened so far).”

  The following year, a teacher noted he had “little patience, he calls out, he gets upset when someone says anything mean or upsetting to him. He has trouble ignoring.”

  The checks to support John’s disability helped keep the family afloat. John told me that Hilda used them to pay the rent, and she sold food stamps to pay utility bills.

  In sixth grade his emotionally disturbed label was removed after he took behavioral improvement classes.

  John couldn’t remember his exact age when his parents split for good, but it was around his fourteenth year. In the past, Hilda had broken up with her husband after a particularly bad brawl, only to get back together. This time it was permanent. When John’s father came to visit, he took John to a bar and bought him a beer. John remembered waking up the next day to screaming.

  JOHN! JOHN!

  His mother was yelling for him to come help her, he wrote: His father had stayed the night, too drunk to drive home, and Hilda needed John’s help to protect her from him. John said he asked his father to sleep it off or leave.

  He told me he was my dad, that he tells me what to do NOT the other way around. I told him the same thing again and he slapped me. When he slapped me in my mind I saw ALL the times he beat up on my mom, how he would tell me I was worthless and always would be worthless, and lots of other things he would say and do that were really hurtful, and I put all that hurt and anger into a punch that hit him right in the face and I knocked him out.

  John went outside with his two brothers. When they came back, their father was gone.

  My mom would pick guys ever since that would hit her and I’d defend her from about 4 of her boyfriends. But my father I rarely saw except those 5 times within 8 or 9 years from when they separated until I got arrested for this.

  Hilda’s sister Genoveva Ramirez testified that there was a sudden change in her behavior. She’d been a good mother, a provider, and then “she just turned around and went for the worst.” John’s brother remembered Hilda’s calling John mongolo as a child, a slang word equivalent to “retard.” Dr. Brams found that the more John clung to Hilda, the more she rejected him. John remembered that Hilda’s “most important priority was crack.”

  During John’s high school years, he found some companionship and purpose in extracurricular activities. He had a talent for dancing and participated in parades during Charro Days, doing traditional Mexican folk dances with his classmates, and Juan said John’s abilities stood out. He also performed choreographed dances with a group of about six other teens at neighborhood parties, including the elaborate birthday parties for fifteen-year-old girls called quinceañeras. Memorizing the steps required intense concentration. John remembered performing almost every week, sometimes multiple events in the same weekend. He did backflips; he liked the challenge and the attention they brought. The dancers would split the money they received.

  John was then on the swim team and in the ROTC, or Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, as well. As a kid who was always different—in special classes, struggling with behavioral proble
ms—he’d found a couple of spaces where he could belong, wearing the same uniform as his classmates, and was given positive reinforcement. The ROTC meant even more than that—it was a gateway to joining the military and therefore resolved the question of what John would do once school ended.

  His swim coach, Luis Ortega, still worked at Porter High School when I contacted him. He’d been there since 1979. With his clear and intentional responses to my questions, it was easy to imagine him teaching Advanced Placement government classes, as he did when he wasn’t coaching. He punctuated pauses with a question of his own—Am I making sense?—the refrain of a teacher determined to keep his students engaged.

  Ortega told me that many students didn’t know how to swim when they joined the team, and everyone who did join was provided with a uniform, cap, goggles, bag, and a warm-up suit, free of charge. Though John wasn’t on an especially winning team, he made a lasting impression on Ortega as a diligent teammate who led workouts and dependably showed up for practice. He wasn’t particularly tall, but Ortega called the good-looking, fit young man Big John, to mentally build him up. After his having been called many variations of “stupid” at home, it’s easy to imagine how much this must have meant to him.

  “He wasn’t a troublemaker. He wasn’t a kid we could say had major issues, at least I didn’t see that,” Ortega said. “He was a kid that was very much involved in taking care of his image; he was always in great shape. He worked hard in the water. He wasn’t the greatest of swimmers at all, but one of the better kids that we had in terms of being committed to what we did, working out, never complained, did everything we asked.”

  Ortega said that it was almost more common for students at the school to be poor, to struggle outside of Porter’s walls, than not. The swim team, like the basketball or football team, served many functions for the athletes. It was a way to avoid neighborhood gangs and other truant behavior. The swimmers were so exhausted after a day of school and laps, they had no energy to search out the influences that got their peers into trouble. In this way, Ortega saw himself as providing more than swimming lessons or fitness for the students.