The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

by Laura Tillman

  Today, Porter is a magnet school, known for its engineering program. The population has changed slightly, as Brownsville has become a bigger city, and the school has larger and better facilities than when John was attending. But it’s still located in the poor Southmost neighborhood, and many students continue to fend off local gangs and drugs in an effort to make better lives for themselves. Porter has always had successful students, too, who have gone on to the Ivy League and high achievement. It’s frustrating for Ortega and his fellow teachers whenever an article in the Herald indicates that a recent crime was committed by a “former Porter student.”

  “We at Porter have not lost that essence of what we’re supposed to be doing for these kids: giving them the sense of belonging, even though they don’t have it at home.”

  The school responds to the emotional need that students have to belong to a community, as well as addressing survival requirements that are far more basic.

  “They come and eat breakfast and lunch, and most of them don’t have dinner at home,” Ortega said. “Some kids can’t get out of wherever they live because it rains and they’re flooded in. It’s cold, it’s warm at school. It’s hot, it’s cool at school.”

  When he saw the headlines about such students, he thought “that we failed them. That we failed them. Somehow, we didn’t get to them,” Ortega told me. “It hurts to a certain degree because we were not able to put them in the right direction, because he did what he did.”

  While at Porter, John appeared for his first couple of years to have had his life on track, although he faced some challenges. In the school library I looked at yearbooks of the mid-to-late nineties, when John attended, but found few pictures of him. In one, he was lined up with the rest of the students in the ROTC. In a solo portrait, he was smiling, relaxed, with thick black hair and the barely visible mustache of a kid who hasn’t yet begun to shave.

  Though John said it wasn’t until around age twenty that he first engaged in prostitution, Dr. Brams concluded that Hilda pushed him into these activities at around age twelve. Until his arrest, John had both male and female lovers. Jose Angel Nuñez Jr., part of the dance troupe, was one such partner. John wrote to me about Jose Angel.

  He said that I would never do this as there was nothing that I ever wanted was to be a father. He knew this because we had spent alot of time talking about what we each wanted out of life. I was only 16 years old but wanted to be loved and love a family of my own. That is why he said that about me. His additude was very similar to Angelas which is why I think they got along so well that first time they met. I believe he only came one more time and they still got along great. Even so I would not leave Angela and my kids for anyone.

  When he testified, Jose Angel remembered two sides of John—a young man who seemed, most of the time, to be engaged in normal teenage activities like dancing and going to the movies—but who also acted oddly, sometimes getting up in the night to talk to his grandmother, who wasn’t there, as he rocked back and forth. John believed his grandmother to be a witch, or bruja, and Jose Angel said, that was his “whole world.” John’s grandmother had died in 1994. She had a collection of troll dolls, which Hilda called a hobby, but John saw as something more sinister. His brother Manuel described her at trial as someone a small child would realistically find frightening. “She looked like a witch,” he testified. “Puffy hair, long hair, long nails.” About three inches long, he said, and John wrote to me that they were curled like claws. Rodrigo said he avoided talking to her because she scared him. “She was always being really mean to everyone.”

  But their uncle Juan insisted that she was not a witch. She may have taken them to curanderas as kids or had some religious objects in her home, but she was not practicing black witchcraft, he said.

  “She was the mayonnaise of the family,” Juan said. “She was the one that binded everything together.”

  In 1997, when John was a high school junior, he met Georgina Castillo, Jose Angel Nuñez’s cousin, who was known as Gina. She was about ten years older than John, with two young kids of her own. Gina and John began having sex every few weeks, he told detectives, and she tried to give him money afterward.

  “I was like, ‘No, I don’t want no money, I feel like you’re paying for it,’ you know. She said, ‘No, accept it. I know you need the help.’ ” On the witness stand, Gina told the court that she never paid him for sex, and the insinuation was upsetting.

  Gina, John said, got him to quit the dance group, out of jealousy. “Even if I wasn’t flirting with them, a girl would be flirting with me,” John asserted. For a time John and Gina lived with Hilda, and then they moved into a place of their own. John felt he’d found real love. Defense attorney Perez, who served as cocounsel for John at both trials, said that Gina was a mother figure for John.

  “He has somebody that loves him, somebody that cuddles him, somebody that makes him breakfast,” Perez said. But there was a problem. “Gina was looking for a boyfriend, somebody that, as a man, was going to pull his weight. And like she clearly said to me, it was like having a third child.”

  Gina said that John would spend the day playing video games while she worked two jobs and cooked the family’s meals. She claimed to have banished John from the kitchen because she was afraid he’d burn himself.

  Gina also remembered John’s being fixated on his grandmother. When he told her about these episodes, he’d cry nervously. John wrote to me that he had never been close to his grandmother in real life, but that she often played a part in his dreams.

  Q.Was there an occasion that John told you about a vision that he had?

  A.On one occasion he was asleep, he was asleep and I woke him up, and he was frightened.

  Q.And what was it that John told you?

  A.That his grandmother who did not leave him alone, and that he would be the chosen one to continue with whatever she had been doing.

  John’s eleventh-grade special-education case manager was Delfina Treviño, a woman he sometimes called Mom. Delfina remembered John as respectful, well behaved, and high functioning compared to her other students, some of whom couldn’t read or write. Delfina wrote in John’s report that year that he was hyperactive and liked “to goof off.” “He will ask his regular teachers permission to go to content mastery then spend the time roaming the halls, talking to different people.”

  By 1999, at age eighteen, John was living with Gina and her kids. A school report indicated that his emotional troubles hadn’t disappeared and may have been worsening.

  John has had trouble in some of his classes. His teachers [ROTC] reports that his lack of discipline led to his termination in the ROTC program. His inappropriate behavior on the access of the internet led him to be barred from using the internet through BISD [Brownsville Independent School District] equipment. He has had excessive absences and is aware of his need to appeal for credit.”

  By the twelfth grade, John was reading and doing math on a fourth-grade level, but he graduated anyway.

  At the end of high school, John recalled setting out to accomplish his dream of joining the military. It was before 9/11, and he didn’t have a cause in mind. “I wanted to be all that I could be,” he told me, inspired by the army slogan. A military career could have helped John realize his goals: buying a house, creating a family with Gina, and providing for them. Maybe his mother would turn her life around and spend time with them, nurturing grandkids the way he remembered her doing for him and his brothers early in their childhood. He hoped to build something permanent, something no landlord could take away. It was at around that time that John’s grandparents’ house burned down, where he had lived before moving out with Gina and her kids. “My deploma, clothes, and everything burned down with the house,” he wrote.

  In letters, John told me that he attempted to apply to join the army and then the marines, but failed the required aptitude test several times. Physically, he said he
was capable, but he couldn’t pass the written exam. John had dreamed about joining the military since he was a kid, watching G.I. Joe cartoons. Now, that dream was finished.

  After about two years together, Gina broke off the relationship. She was frustrated, she testified, that John would spend the whole day at home, doing nothing but playing video games. John was devastated. He’d smoked pot for fun in high school, but now he was smoking to forget and dull the pain of heartbreak. He moved back in with Hilda, along with Jose Luis, Rodrigo, and his wife. Sometimes Hilda would buy him pot, saying it was a protective measure: she would interface with drug dealers so John wouldn’t have to.

  Sometimes, John recreationally took rufilin, the date-rape drug, which he called roach pills. “They made me blackout and violet,” he wrote. Usually he huffed paint, a cheap high that resulted in a fleeting euphoria and dizziness. He’d been huffing since he was a teenager and told a court-appointed psychiatrist that he rarely went three or four days without using spray. John recalled that inhaling the fumes made his thoughts come faster. “I felt more like the real me, or like I used to feel when I was a kid alive and active,” he wrote. “It was like my mind was a clogged up drain and the spray was draino so the thoughts came easyer and more automatic.” He stopped using spray and other drugs for a time. He was subjected to drug testing while on probation for possession of marijuana, and he also submitted to testing to get the kids back after Child Protective Services intervened. Still, it seemed that the urge to self-medicate, or simply addiction, never disappeared.

  Angela hated for me to do spray paint. She told me contless times that she would rather I smoke weed than do spray paint. She and I had never fought over anything else except twice for this in the almost 3 years we were together. I wanted to make her happy but found myself craving the sansation the spray gave me so after about 2 or 3 months of not doing any I would fall off the wagen as they say for about 2 weeks or so.

  After high school, John had intermittent jobs at fast-food restaurants and considered himself good at fixing things, but without his goal of joining the military, he lacked direction. The drugs were also taking a serious toll on his brain, as his IQ dropped from a childhood score upwards of 90, close to average, to 72 by the time he was twenty-three.

  At that time, John and Angela were living in the same apartment complex, and John saw that Angela was being abused by her boyfriend.

  “I used to say that reminds me of when my ex used to treat me that way. I said, if I had a woman like that, I would not treat her that way,” he told detectives. “I would make her happy until the last moment of my life. Until the day I die, I would make her happy.”

  Angela and Julissa came to live with John, Hilda, and his brothers. It was crowded, and they would soon move out on their own.

  In some cities the threat of violence is open. In Caracas, Venezuela, a city with one of the highest murder rates in the world, I remember the visceral chill that went through me when I realized the sun had gone down and I would have to walk the half mile back to the apartment where I was staying. It was tragic to see the orange blush of the sky and feel the cool mountain air and find yourself filled with dread. I’ve never felt this kind of fear in Brownsville. The violence here is mainly shuttered inside homes or waiting on the banks of the Rio Grande when drug loads are dropped. The police logs are filled with intimate crimes, and while random theft and acts of violence do occur, domestic abuse and drug-related crime is far more common. When someone is killed seemingly at random, most people assume he or she knew the wrong people, was involved in the wrong thing. If you kept to yourself, to people you trusted, you’d be safe.

  As I drove around looking for the remains of John’s childhood, it felt both accessible and cordoned off. True comprehension was a moving target. New details invited new questions, some impossible to answer. What does it feel like to have your own mother say that prostitution is a viable option? What would compel a person to voluntarily and repeatedly take a drug that others use to facilitate the rape of unsuspecting victims?

  I’d gone looking for Hilda several times, once with Manuel, the nephew of Minerva Perez, one of the building’s neighbors. They both knew Hilda and had many friends in the neighborhood. Conversations with residents across Barrio Buena Vida led us to her little apartment on a street corner. After several attempts we found her at home, and she told Manuel she would talk with me another day. But when I followed up, she didn’t answer the door, and eventually I found a note written in large letters on a piece of cardboard—a declaration to leave her alone. I obeyed. John’s brothers refused to speak with me, saying through a relative that the experience was still too painful. I left them notes at every address and business I could find in Brownsville that was linked to them and contacted them online, but when I continued to be refused, I left it alone. So much had been said during the trials, a history of abuse, sorrow, regret. They’d endured cameras, the rejection of their community, in addition to living through the death of their nieces and nephew. I knew I would never understand what they’d endured. The sadness here was suffocating, a tidal wave that threatened to crush all in its path, then pull the wreckage out to sea.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

  I miss them dearly. I need them so much.

  —ANGELA SALDIVAR, GRANDMOTHER

  In the court file are copies of the children’s medical records. At two years and three months, Julissa was taken to the Brownsville Kiddie Health Center and found to be dirty, her feet black, clothes smelly, and her skin covered with scars from insect bites. She was anemic and prescribed iron. The assessment read “child neglect.” At four months old, John Stephan was also found to be filthy, his skin crusty and oily, his clothes smelling of mildew. His eyes were mildly sunken and he was in the third percentile for height, fifth for weight. The same month, a report had been filed with Child Protective Services alleging that the children were malnourished, anemic, covered in mosquito bites, and that John was likely using drugs. John recalled that the family had been homeless, often sleeping on a mattress in an alley or an abandoned building during that period. A CPS worker would testify that the family was found to be staying in a one-bedroom apartment with no electricity or running water, and no food. Though the children were anemic and had not received immunizations, they were not found to be malnourished.

  A CPS caseworker came to visit the family and observed men who were visibly intoxicated around the children, though Angela was not on drugs herself. Rather than having the children forcibly removed, Angela decided to bring them to Los Fresnos to live with her mother. Since John was not the biological father of Julissa or John Stephan, the decision was hers to make. John was arrested for possession of marijuana close to that time, but his sentence was suspended and he was put on probation.

  The family usually ate their meals at the Good Neighbor Settlement House, a soup kitchen in Barrio Buena Vida that supplies three meals a day, clothes, and showers to the needy. The spare, cinder-block cafeteria is full most every day. During the week, when the older kids are at school, adults dominate the room. They’re a mixture of homeless and low-income people trying to supplement food stamps. John and Angela’s children never made it to school; they were too young. The family was a fixture at Good Neighbor, located conveniently a few blocks away. Along with the Boys and Girls Club, it was the children’s main point of contact with the rest of the city.

  In May of 2003, just two months after the crimes occurred, the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College published a report about Barrio Buena Vida. Though the researchers tried to highlight the area’s assets, like its central location and walkability, they also included some disturbing data about violent crime from the previous few years. In 2002, 91 percent of all reported rapes in the city happened in this neighborhood, a small section of the city that was home to just 2.1 percent of its population. Nine percent of aggrava
ted assaults and 7 percent of robberies occurred there as well.

  The Brownsville Herald is located here, as well, and I’d often pass Good Neighbor on my way to work. The friendly-looking center had a cubist mural with two women’s faces painted on the far wall. The whole complex was surrounded by a high chain-link fence.

  It was the children who led me back to Good Neighbor. They were the victims at the center of the crime, but I knew just a few scattered details about each of them. I struggled to glimpse a fragment of their identities. I wondered what made them laugh, if they were friendly to other children, what games they played with each other, what their voices sounded like. I wondered how the precariousness of their living situation affected them. In a way I was searching for the DNA of whom they would have become. A colleague I told about the story remarked that children can weather tough situations, playing with whatever’s available. I wanted to believe that. John’s assessment that the family was “happy just to be together and content with the little we had” was also a comforting fantasy. But I’d studied the catastrophic ways childhood trauma can impact people for life. In the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, Dr. Robert Anda from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Vincent Felitti from Kaiser Permanente tracked a group of more than seventeen thousand adults, mostly middle- and upper-class white San Diegans, and found that adverse experiences during their early years had a major impact on their physical and mental health later in life. There was a direct correlation between the number of ACEs they’d had and their likelihood to suffer from depression, addictive behaviors, heart disease, cancer, and early death. In his book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, journalist Paul Tough writes about the resilience it takes for children to overcome this early adversity, observing that it is just one in a set of noncognitive skills needed to achieve success. Though many children face the same obstacles, some are able to rise above while others are not. Their relationship with their parents is an especially important predictor of which group they will fall into. Is there a sense of empathic understanding or indifference? Is there safety, or the stress that comes with uncertainty? The love that Angela and John showed the children was important, but the idea that Mary Jane, John Stephan, and Julissa were happily gliding through the chaos that surrounded them was suspect. John blamed his problems on his dysfunctional childhood, then insisted that his own kids were perfectly happy even when they were sometimes homeless, and their father was doing drugs, working as a prostitute, and suffering from mental-health issues that likely extended to schizophrenia.