The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts (6 page)

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 dev
astated. 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

I
n 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 popula
tion. Nine percent of aggravated 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.

There was no evidence that John or Angela abused the children before the crimes, but scenes such as one in neighbor Nydia Hernandez's statement to police about an incident two weeks prior to the murders added to a concerning portrait:

“I saw the male subject and the female subject together and they had one of the children in the stroller. The male subject allowed the stroller (with the child in it) to go and it rolled down the sidewalk and it slammed into my truck. The child who was in the stroller started to cry. Neither one of the subjects did anything. All that the male subject did was pull the stroller back.”

I found a few images of the children online and in the court record. A Polaroid shows John Stephan sitting on the floor in dia
pers, with aviator sunglasses and an oversize cross around his neck, a sly smile on his face like a baby Hells Angel. In a photo of John Stephan and another little boy, John Stephan is wearing a blue-and-yellow-striped polo shirt, a tiny pair of jeans, and sneakers, and he gazes up at the camera with a tuft of dark hair swept across his forehead. In the several photos of Julissa at various ages of toddlerhood, she has curly jet-black hair, sometimes pulled into pigtails. In one, she is smiling fiercely, all her teeth bared. In another, she is snuggled with John and John Stephan on a bed, with a soft, close-lipped grin. In the only image of Mary Jane, a healthy and happy-looking John is holding her up for the camera, bursting with paternal pride. She's tiny and wears a red-and-blue onesie and looks up and to the left, her soft, toothless mouth open and her tongue sitting near her lips.

One day, when I was trying to find neighbors willing to be interviewed, a young woman with bright-pink lipstick wearing a pink silk blouse and daisy dukes approached me. She looked as if she'd stepped out of a photo shoot. Her car was idling by the curb while she glanced anxiously at the house I was approaching. She was waiting for her boyfriend, she said, and he was at his grandmother's house. She wanted to know if I would knock on the door because his grandmother intimidated her. Dogs were in the yard and I paused. Maybe we could call him? She asked if she could borrow my phone. A couple minutes later Miguel Angel Ramos, tall and lanky, walked out of his grandmother's house and onto the curb.

“She's writing about that family in that building,” the girlfriend told him. Then to me: “He knew them, he used to tell me about it. He used to play with the kids.”

Miguel Angel's eyes grazed the building, as if he could see the
family walking around the corner. “I used to play with them on the basketball court when they were little. The mom and dad were always at the crack houses.”

Miguel Angel told me that John and Angela would often leave Julissa and John Stephan at the Boys and Girls Club, catty-corner to the apartment building. The children, just toddlers, would play for a while with the other neighborhood kids, their unchanged diapers weighed down, and then, as if an inaudible whistle had blown, they'd return home.

Miguel Angel was young when the murders happened—around eleven years old. It's easy to imagine him wading deeper and deeper into the mythology of the murders like a character in
The
Goonies
. Across the street, there was a family with fourteen children. Miguel Angel said he and his friends called them Los Hernandez, like a gang. That's whom Miguel Angel hung out with, along with the little kids from the Rubio building.

Then, on March 11, cop cars swarmed the street.
The area was barricaded and the apartment cordoned off as evidence. When the police departed, Miguel Angel remembered going into the apartment and seeing the blood on the floor, the porn magazines. He even said that he had had a confrontation with John the day before the murders. John, Miguel Angel said, was standing on the sidewalk, hitting little John Stephan. Miguel Angel's friends, a few of the Los Hernandez siblings, told John they were going to call Child Protective Services. According to Miguel Angel, John said he didn't care if they called CPS. Miguel Angel said that a friend of his did, indeed, make a call, but that the children were dead the next day. I asked Miguel Angel why he wasn't subpoenaed, why no one
had heard this perhaps crucial piece of information during either of the trials.

“We were always out there,” Miguel Angel said, indicating the corner where the neighborhood kids used to hang out across from the building. “They didn't even ask us any questions. They just told everyone to clear out.”

I found an article in
The Houston Chronicle
quoting a Maria Hernandez, mother of fourteen, who told the paper she had called the Brownsville Police Department shortly before the murders and reported that people in the apartment were using drugs.

“They never listened when I made the call,” she told the
Chronicle
. “It didn't have to happen.”

In the article, Police Chief Carlos Garcia said the department did get a call about the apartment. “But with those kinds of calls, you have to corroborate the information. We consider it intelligence,” he said. “You don't just go and knock on people's doors and violate their rights. Even if we had followed up on this information, that doesn't mean these killings wouldn't have happened.”

Miguel Angel still kept watch on the building when he came to Brownsville and noted the changes. Even with my regular pilgrimages, I'd failed to notice a new fan in a second-floor window, above the Rubio apartment.

“Someone's living in there,” he said.

His girlfriend had heard the stories many times. The tale of the crimes had become part of Miguel Angel's story. He looked over the evidence like a kid detective; through that final confrontation with John, he was linked to the day the crimes took place.

An intangible echo of the children's essence began to manifest
through Miguel Angel's stories. They were like shadows to me now: long and inexact and opaque, but a whisper more than nothing.

At Good Neighbor, a couple of toddlers were eating lunch. One had curly hair, one straight. Their young mother scooped them up soon after I sat down at their table, along with slices of bread and cookies folded into napkins, taken home for later. Sister Luz Cardenas testified that she often saw John, Angela, and the children at Good Neighbor. John was always polite, she told the court, and would compliment the food. He was gentle with the children, serving them before he served himself. Angela, she said, was usually quiet.

Within a few minutes I was asked if I was married by a large, sweaty man with a dead front tooth and was told a series of incoherent conspiracy theories by a kind-faced former scientist in need of psychiatric medication. The latter presented me a manila envelope full of papers and told me we were going to write a Nobel Prize–winning article together. Two of the documents were apparently from government entities in Switzerland and Mexico. One letter thanked the man for his paper and stated that it had indeed been accepted for a 1978 conference in Zurich. One sheet listed random names and phrases: Leon Panetta; Nikola Tesla; Cure for Cancer; Michael Faraday; Elixer; $93 Billion (ESCROW). He read these off to me as if they were part of a coherent whole. I told him I had to go, that I had a meeting, but he insisted that we make copies in the front office.

As I walked out to my car, the director of Good Neighbor approached me. I asked him if he knew anything about the scientist's backstory.

“He showed us some pictures where he was in a classroom setting and of course he was much younger, and it looked like he was
lecturing, and from what I understand at one time he was a very bright, very intelligent guy.”

“I believe it.”

“He has a lot of knowledge up there.”

“So what do you do for someone like that? I mean, is there anything you can do, or do you just help him when he comes in?”

“There really isn't much we can do. He doesn't want to be helped. He'll want to call up the president. . . . He calls a lot of people.”

I went back to Good Neighbor to check out a crafts class, where a group of women were given free materials, with the goal of ­helping them make a profit from their crafts and create a self-sustaining enterprise. That week, in preparation for Thanksgiving, they were using ribbon, thread, and hot glue guns to make turkey pins. The tail ­feathers were yellow, and the turkeys, with googly eyes, had little orange feet hanging down at the bottom. A petite, enthusiastic woman from Matamoros had started the class two years earlier
.
She'd come to Good Neighbor to spread God's word, but realized that the soup kitchen's patrons also needed a way to make money.
She changed the arrangement, teaching one hour of art, one hour of Bible study each week. After the turkey pins were done, a plain-looking woman who had formerly said little took charge of a microphone attached to a ­karaoke machine.