The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts (5 page)

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 “idiosyn
cratic” 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 problems—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.

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.