Living Victims, Stolen Lives

Parents of Murdered Children Speak to America

Brad Stetson

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351860369
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Psicologia
• Categoria: Salute mentale in psicologia

"Living Victims, Stolen Lives: Parents of Murdered Children Speak to America" is a gripping and instructive sketch of the intense psychic pain, anger, and frustration experienced by parents of murdered children. Drawing on intimate interviews with parents enduring murdered-child grief and the insights of professionals counseling them, this unique book gives a deeply moving psychological, emotional, and spiritual portrait of people immersed in epic tragedy and loss.

PART I

Voices of Parents
of Murdered Children

CHAPTER 1

Juanita Lopez

It was June 30, 1997, when 18-year-old B. J. Lopez was murdered by a stranger as he stood in the front yard of his Stanton, California, home. I met his mother, Juanita, some three years later at a meeting of the Orange County, California chapter of Parents of Murdered Children. A few weeks after that, on an unusually gray and overcast morning in late July 2000, I met Juanita again at Good Shepherd Cemetery in Huntington Beach, California, where her son is buried. A small, quiet woman with long dark hair and a gentle, round face, she talked in a hushed, almost reverential voice about her precious son. As we sat down together on a cold stone bench next to the grave, I began by reading aloud the inscription on B. J.’s tablet:

Our special boy, God put His arms around you, and whispered, “Come with me.” With tearful eyes we watched you leave, and saw you fade away. Although we loved you dearly, we could not make you stay. A golden heart stopped beating, hard working mind and hands at rest. God broke our hearts to teach to us, He only takes the best. We will love and miss you forever, ’til we meet again.

Brad: Well, those are beautiful words, Juanita. When we spoke on the phone the other day you told me that you and your husband would never be able to die in peace now that your son B. J. has been murdered. That really says a lot about how traumatic for parents this kind of a loss is. What happened to B. J.?

Juanita: Someone came to our home and helped themselves to his life, his beautiful life, his future. In minutes it was all gone. He was shot and he died in my arms.

Brad: How awful. Was the assailant caught?

Juanita: No, he’s still out there, the investigation is still active.

Brad: Was it a robbery, do you know what happened?

Juanita: We have no idea what happened. He was walking some visitors to our home out to their car, parked right in front of our house. He was standing there talking to his cousin and a friend after the visitors had left, and then all of a sudden someone ran up to them and shot at them.

Brad: It was a random killing.

Juanita: It was. Still, three years later now, I know he didn’t do anything to warrant this, for anybody to be so angry with him as to want to take his life, or to hate him so much to murder him. This showed such a carelessness for life, such a disrespect for life.

[a dog, frolicking in the cemetery, passes by us]

Brad: I see someone has brought their dog to the cemetery. Unbelievable. You wonder what that person is thinking, bringing their dog to a cemetery, let alone allowing it to run freely among the grave markers and tablets. But this is interesting. I think it underlines the fact that the huge majority of people just don’t understand, they simply do not have a sense of what intense grief is like, what it is to suffer something like the loss of a child. Do you think this comes from an unusual insensitivity, or is it more along the lines of something like this: I don’t speak Russian, because I’ve never lived in Russia and I don’t have any experience with Russian culture. In the same way, most other people don’t understand the language of grief, because they’ve never entered into this kind of suffering before?

Juanita: That’s what it is. Until you lose a child, you can’t even imagine, you can’t even grasp what it does to you. I’ve had my son’s death compared to the loss of other family members, and, although I’ve experienced the loss of family members like my grandparents, uncle and nephew, the grief just doesn’t begin to compare. After we lost B. J., it felt like something came inside of me, and just ripped my heart out of my body. It amazes me that I’m still standing.

Brad: You told me before you felt like this was the ultimate act of theft.

Juanita: It is. If B. J. would have had cancer, we could have tried all kinds of things to save his life, different treatments, therapies, all kinds of things that would have given us at least a glimmer of hope. But to lose him to murder, being shot right in the heart, left us no chance. I was told by the detective that the doctor who worked on B. J. the night he was shot said that even if he had been shot at the emergency room door, there was nothing he could have done to save my boy. It just hurts me so much to think about that! All this technology we have today, all the things we can do, and still there was no way to save my boy. I just don’t understand, I just, I just don’t understand anything.

Brad: It’s shocking, what a shocking experience.

Juanita: I don’t even remember much of the funeral. I remember bits and pieces, people’s faces, but it seemed like an out-of-body experience to me, like I wasn’t really there. The day after the funeral I returned to the cemetery, and I remember wandering around looking for B. J.’s grave, I couldn’t find it. I felt so disoriented. I went for months and months with that feeling of being dazed and disoriented. I couldn’t drive a car for 5 months. I couldn’t stop shaking, I couldn’t make myself say out loud, “he’s gone.” In the days after he was killed, I would dial his pager number, expecting him to call me back like he always did. I couldn’t believe that he was not coming back. How can you see your child laughing and smiling one second, and then being told the next second that he’s not ever coming home again? It doesn’t make any sense, none at all.

Brad: Losing him brought your life to a halt.

Juanita: The second he died.

Brad: Were you working at the time?

Juanita: I take care of my daughter, I have an adult handicapped daughter who I care for. But it’s been three years now since B. J. was murdered, and the truth is we still can’t really function. Everything is different. Our lives, the way they were then, ended, everything stopped being the way we wanted it to be, the way we had planned and expected it to be.

Brad: What has the grieving process been like for your husband?

Juanita: He’s still at day one. He still has trouble accepting that B. J. is gone. He won’t participate in anything, to try and go forward. He sees me try, he sees me take two steps forward but then go back 10, and I think it discourages him. He has no desire to participate in any activities.

Brad: What does he do for a living?

Juanita: He’s a bus driver.

Brad: What does he do after work?

Juanita: He comes here. He comes here in the morning on his breaks, he comes here in the afternoons sometimes, after work. We see more of each other here than we do at home, now.

Brad: Have you been coming here every day for three years?

Juanita: We both have, with the exception of two days, when my daughter was very sick. One day I came, but my husband drove me home when he met me here. I’d gotten wet, because it was raining, and he took me home. That was the first winter. But I felt that I had to be here, I had to be here. I couldn’t stand the thought that B. J. was getting wet. I couldn’t deal with him being here in the cold and the rain. He was always very thin, and getting cold, and I couldn’t stand that he was cold. I couldn’t reason, I couldn’t reason that he didn’t feel anymore.

Brad: As his mother you felt you had to come out here and take care of him.

Juanita: I felt like I should be protecting him from the rain, keeping him from getting wet.

Brad: Well, have you made any progress in grief in these three years, has anything changed, or is it just as it was in the days immediately after you lost your son?

Juanita: I’ve made a little bit of progress, I think. The main improvement is that I’m able to take care of my daughter again, I’m able to care for her by myself again. And I’m able to take care of myself, now. At first, I couldn’t, I’d sit and stare, I’d forget to eat. My parents and my aunt were really taking care of me then. I know that I wouldn’t be here now if they had not taken care of me. If I would have had to be at home without my son, taking care of the household, myself, my daughter all by myself, I never would have been able to do it.

Brad: Who else has been a help to you?

Juanita: The rest of my family, my brothers. They’ve been trying to teach me how to live without B. J., to take care of my daughter. They keep telling me that my work is not done, that I’m not finished. They tell me that something good will come of this. They want that to be the case, but I’m still searching. Every day I sit here, for three years, watching seasons come and go, and I ask God “What good have you done by taking my son? What good is this? I see no good.”

Brad: So you’ve not experienced any comfort or hope from God?

Juanita: It doesn’t seem like it. B. J.’s sister is getting worse, still after three years. She has no will to live, to this day she still cries herself to sleep every night. It’s all confusing to us.

Brad: What has your experience been like with the police?

Juanita: At first I was angry, bitter, feeling like not enough is being done, or like nothing at all is being done. But you have to realize what the police are dealing with. They have to try to work with people who have no respect for life at all, and others who just don’t want to get involved. Even if they know something about your case, they don’t want to come forward and say anything. So, I can’t fault them for the fact my case isn’t solved, but at the same time, you want everything to be happening in your case, for all the loose ends to be coming together. How can it be that my beautiful child is gone, and no one is responsible? Someone has to be held accountable! Someone took his beautiful life, stole it, just stole it, and they had no right to do that!

The first detective we had was very compassionate. He attended city council meetings with us, to try to get the city to post a reward for information that would help catch the murderer. The next detective to work on the case has also been very helpful, still working on leads, trying to develop new ones. He’s helped me publicize the case, to try to generate information.

Brad: You’ve done a lot of work on your own, haven’t you, Juanita, to try to publicize this case and gather information?

Juanita: We’ve had fund-raises to try to raise reward money, we’ve put up fliers asking for information all over town, we’ve advertised on tip lines, had articles about the murder published in the newspapers around here, all kinds of other things. There has to be someone out there who knows who murdered my son. They can’t be quiet forever, they will say something to someone at sometime. People have information.

Brad: Why do you think people in the community are tightlipped?

Juanita: It’s the fear of retaliation. The people who killed my son are heartless. These are heartless gangmembers. People in my neighborhood want to play them off as just having made an error that night, a mistake by shooting the wrong person, but these are not compassionate kids. They’ve continued to harass me after B. J.’s murder, they’re proud of their actions. Some people around here seem to think they are really sorry, but we don’t see that at all, the family doesn’t see that.

Brad: How have these gangmembers, the general crowd responsible for the murder, harassed you?

Juanita: Every time they see me, they find it very humorous. They ask me where he is buried, they ask me where he is right now. They know, but they think it’s funny. This is how they express pride in what they did, by instilling more pain in us.

Brad: How old are they?

Juanita: Old enough to know better, and to feel badly that a life was lost. Most of them are as young as 16, on into their early 20s.

Brad: Where are their parents?

Juanita: Well, these are people who do what those around them do. There is an attitude that says, “I have to live what I know, what else is there?”

Brad: That’s the attitude?

Juanita: That’s what I’ve seen. I’ve lived in this community for 20 years, and that’s what I’ve seen. That’s why we tried so, so hard to keep B. J. in sports, to keep him in school, to keep him close to our family. B. J. was very oriented toward his religion, toward the family, he just loved his family, couldn’t get enough of us. He loved being with us, he loved being with his sister. We got him a car the latter part of his junior year of high school, but he would never drive it to school, so he could have me and his sister drive him there, and pick him up in the afternoon. He wanted me to take him to school.

Brad: Did he like school?

Juanita: He loved it, he loved playing sports, especially baseball. He played baseball his whole life.

Brad: What position did he play?

Juanita: He pitched, and played second base and shortstop.

Brad: What kinds of other things did he do?

Juanita: He was a tutor, he tutored kids at school, and he always seemed to be talking to kids about their problems, and stuff. Counseling, I would call it. “You should charge them,” I would joke, “you’re always counseling.” On the phone late, or over at our house, he was always talking. He was a just a very involved kid. He had a great senior year of high school, things went really well for him. He was involved in student government and other things that year, 1997. He was nominated “most friendly” by his senior class, and crowned prince at his Senior Prom.

Brad: What were his plans for the future?

Juanita: Go to the University of Notre Dame. That had been his goal for years. But just before the end of senior year, he was having second thoughts about going there right away. He wanted to help some of his friends who were still struggling here, he saw so many of them wasting their potential, and it bothered him, it truly did.

Brad: So you think he was headed for a career in law enforcement?

Juanita: We think so. His father and I really strongly feel that he was.

Brad: What was the reaction of his friends to his...