Word: awilda
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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SENTENCED. AWILDA LOPEZ, 29, to 15 years to life in prison for the murder of her six-year-old daughter, ELISA IZQUIERDO. Elisa's death, after years of sexual and physical abuse, attracted attention to the failings of the child-welfare system...
...WOULD THINK OUR WORLD COULD never produce such a horrible story as the one about young Elisa Izquierdo, who was beaten to death by her mother Awilda Lopez [COVER STORIES, Dec. 11]. Surely all who read about her will wonder how anyone could be so cruel and inhuman. The answer is simple: drug abuse and lack of personal responsibility. That child should have been taken permanently from her mother at birth, when it was clear that Lopez was unfit to care for Elisa. Until we clean the streets of drugs and hold people responsible for their actions, these pathetic tales...
REGARDLESS OF THE SHORTCOMINGS OF the CWA, I place most of the blame for Elisa's death on people in the neighborhood who knew this family. Awilda Lopez, a brutish beast of a woman who unmercifully abused Elisa and beat her to death, could not have got away with this if someone had stopped by to question and report her as many times as was necessary to get the child away from her mother. We are all our brothers' and sisters' keepers. We cannot wait for someone else to do the right thing. If we see something that is wrong...
...next morning Awilda called Francisco Santana, a downstairs neighbor. "She was crying, 'I can't believe it, tell me it's not true,'" he says. When he arrived at her apartment, she showed him Elisa's motionless body. He put his hand to the child's cold forehead, pronounced her dead and spent the next two hours pleading with Awilda to call the police. When he finally called himself, he says, she ran to the apartment roof and had to be restrained from jumping. When the police arrived, she confessed to killing Elisa by throwing her against a concrete wall...
...referring to an aspect of the tragedy's aftermath that has dumbfounded the city. The people of New York could do nothing about Awilda's drug-induced delusions or her timid neighbors. But they wanted an accounting from the CWA. Instead, Executive Deputy Commissioner Kathryn Croft has steadfastly maintained that state confidentiality laws designed to protect complainants prevent her from revealing any details of a case. Thus the public may never know how many cries for help the agency actually recorded or what it did about them. It may never know whether the CWA really made an extended effort...