A Little Girl, Murdered
TUCKER, WILLIAM
A Little Girl, Murdered by William Tucker It was a story of almost uns pea kable horror. A bright, vivacious six-year-old was brutalized by her mother and stepfather, sexually abused, hung from a...
...In other words, the whole federally funded poverty establishment lined up for Awilda, doing what it does best-aiding and abetting the worst instincts of the poor...
...He was the one who hung her on the shower rod...
...Rather, the real problem is the breakdown of other social institutions-all too often facilitated by government programs...
...It was no contest...
...When Elisa was born addicted, hospital social workers immediately gave her to Gustavo...
...O'Connor contacted CWA (which reportedly said it was "too busy"), but found himself hogtied by federal regulations governing his own agency, which forbade him from filing Awilda's statements to the CWA without her permission...
...Here is the way Time describes their confrontation in family court: "Canizares arrived for the June 1994 custody hearing alone...
...Then Awilda changed her mind...
...Someone in her office, however, did manage to leak a memo from Croft to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in which the deputy administrator blamed budget cuts...
...To be specific, the much touted epidemic of child abuse is in fact the result of one thing-the growing number of children who are living with adult men who are not their fathers...
...A bright, vivacious six-year-old was brutalized by her mother and stepfather, sexually abused, hung from a shower rod "just to see if she would die," tattooed with ring imprints that police first thought were cigarette burns, and beaten until her bones were protruding from her fingers...
...A cousin, Elsa Canizares, who also knew of the beatings, tried to prevent Elisa's return to her mother and offered to adopt her...
...Two weeks after Elisa's death, the city's attention was riveted once again when another six-year-old girl was stabbed with a hypodermic needle by a crazed vagrant on a midtown subway platform...
...When the girl lost control of her bowels under this torture, her mother smeared her face with feces, used her head to mop the floor, and finally threw her against a concrete wall, killing her...
...This convinced Awilda that the child's late father had "put the devil in her...
...He was bad enough in any case...
...William Tucker, a writer living in Brooklyn, contributed "Why We Should Decriminalize Crime" to the Nov...
...Then in November, Carlos went back to prison for violating his drug parole...
...Anyone can supposedly be a father, and as long as there is a "male role model" somewhere on the horizon, single mothers can be entrusted with a growing portion of the nation's children...
...Officials at the Montessori school also filed a complaint with the CWA, to no avail...
...But he seems to have concentrated on Elisa...
...After Elisa's murder, police said they had never seen a child so brutally beaten...
...As his condition worsened, he made plans to leave Elisa with relatives in Cuba...
...Probably this one will be blamed on the government's failure to provide enough sterilized needles...
...Miraculously, the young Cuban refugee turned out to be a good father...
...Carlos Lopez, the third father in Awilda's life, seems to have been particularly resentful of Elisa, who was an interloper and nearly the same age as his own two children...
...With appropriate interventions, services, and follow up, [Elisa] would be alive today...
...She lost control of her bowels and refused to communicate...
...He died before he could make the journey...
...Yet the creation of these deadly constellations is continually aided and abetted by welfare, a $25-billion-a-year subsidy that enables women to have children by a series of men without worrying much about social or economic consequences...
...If indeed New York City's Child Welfare Administration (CWA) had been neglectful, no one would ever know...
...No government agency, no matter how draconic or intrusive, could possibly police every home for child abuse...
...But all this is much too complex for public discourse...
...Yet this is manifestly untrue...
...In fact, as the records showed, Croft's agency and other government agencies were intimately involved all along...
...Elisa Izquierdo was born in 1989 while her mother, Awilda, was living in a Brooklyn homeless shelter...
...Husband and wife beat her daughter so badly that she began to regress...
...The death of Elisa Izquierdo, then, is a tragic tale of lower-class life-the inertia of poverty, the emotional chaos of families that fail to form, the inability of people with even the best of intentions to make much of a difference...
...Their efforts, however, had been on the side of the child's killer-her mother...
...Also backing Awilda was the CWA...
...He placed Elisa in a Montessori school, where the vivacious girl was introduced to Prince Michael of Greece, who promised to pay Elisa's tuition to the exclusive Brooklyn Friends Academy...
...Meanwhile, pleas and warnings to the CWA from school authorities, neighbors, and relatives were all brushed aside...
...At one point, in a moment of rationality, Awilda pleaded with O'Connor of Project Chance to take the girl off her hands...
...The epidemic of child abuse that supposedly reveals the hard-hearted core of America in fact has nothing to do with the size of social-services budgets or the caring or non-caring of institutional bureaucracies...
...One of the most carefully hidden facts of the current "crisis" is that the vast majority of child abuse is being committed by stepfathers and "boyfriends" who are "filling the male role" in single-parent households...
...The public will have to wait months to see if the girl has been infected with AIDS...
...It was on these visits that the beatings and torture began...
...The Elisa Izquierdo story was a heartbreaking example of this brutal logic...
...They were responsible because flint-hearted budget cuts had left harried social workers unable to deal with the overload of cases...
...Her lawyer that day was from the Legal Aid Society, which maintained that its case workers had visited the Lopezes and found that 'Elisa expressed a strong desire to live with her mother' and siblings...
...The child and her family should have got services," argued Croft...
...Gianni Agostinelli at the funeral...
...She also secured unsupervised visits with Elisa...
...Yet it took only three days for the New York Daily News to find the real culprit-Newt Gingrich and the Republicans...
...Finally, there was Project Chance, a federally funded parenting program for the poor run by a man named Bart O'Connor...
...27 edition of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Awilda soon became convinced that Elisa was "possessed by the devil" and (perhaps to placate her husband) began abusing her as well...
...As David Blankenhorn points out in Fatherless America, the prevailing ideology among social workers and academics has become that "fathers don't matter...
...The father, Gustavo Izquierdo, was a cook at the facility...
...From there it was all downhill...
...In the meantime, Awilda had married Carlos Lopez, a crack addict and small-time criminal, and managed to regain custody of her first two children from relatives...
...It is, apparently, unacceptable for Newt Gingrich to implicate the welfare system in some grisly murders, but it is entirely acceptable to implicate him in this one-him, and a general social malaise that had the papers talking of Kitty Genovese...
...Awilda, by contrast, brought a small army...
...When such a "serial mother" finally hooks up with a man, that man is likely to be indifferent, even hostile, to the welfare of her previous children-as testified by the "wicked stepmothers and stepfathers" that populate the fairy tales...
...According to one recent study, a child living with an unrelated male is 40 times as likely to be the victim of abuse or incest as one living with its natural father...
...Awilda got the child...
...As usually happens in such dysfunctional families, the weakest, most vulnerable member becomes the scapegoat...
...As Elisa told her father of the beatings, Gustavo became alarmed and petitioned the family court to end the visits...
...A month after the birth of his second child, he stabbed Awilda 17 times, putting her in the hospital...
...And so it is easier to blame "uncaring bureaucracies" and argue for more funding...
...She was not killed by an individual, but by the silence of many," proclaimed Time, carefully excerpting a statement made by the Rev...
...Awilda-who had two older children by another man-was addicted to crack...
...Hiding behind state confidentiality laws to protect complainants, its executive deputy director, Kathryn Croft, refused to open files on the case...
...Privacy laws precluded the three-time escapee from mental institutions from being tested himself...
...Then Gustavo contracted cancer...
...Awilda apparently cracked...
...O'Connor visited the apartment, found urine and feces everywhere, and agreed...
Vol. 1 • December 1995 • No. 14
