Word: awilda
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...Connor, however, was regretting his recommendation to the judge. He received a series of hysterical phone calls from Awilda complaining that Elisa was soiling herself and drinking from the toilet and had cut off her hair. Finally she asked O'Connor to take Elisa away. Convinced the girl's symptoms had existed prior to her contact with Awilda but were now driving her mother over the edge, he rushed to the apartment. "You could smell urine and see she had defecated everywhere," he says. "Her toys were thrown around. There were feces smeared on the refrigerator...
...Connor claims he called Elisa's CWA caseworker, who told him he was "too busy" to come by. Moreover, O'Connor says the caseworker never responded to this fifth appeal to CWA, despite repeated subsequent calls. O'Connor took the Lopezes to a city hospital for psychiatric counseling, and Awilda seemed to calm down somewhat. To O'Connor's dismay, however, she repeatedly avoided signing a release that would allow him to send his observations to the city agency. By last July she had dropped out of touch entirely...
There was a reason for that. "Drugs, drugs, drugs--that's all she was interested in," says neighbor Doris Sepulveda, who watched the Lopezes trying to sell a child's tricycle outside their building. Another neighbor, Eric Latorre, recalls seeing the whole family out at 2 a.m. as Awilda sought crack. Awilda had reportedly come to believe that Elisa, whom she called a mongoloid and filthy little whore, had been put under a spell by her father--a spell that had to be beaten out of the child. Neighbors, some of whom say they called the authorities, later told...
Elisa stopped attending school, and neighbors say they saw less and less of her. On Nov. 15, Carlos Lopez was jailed again for violating his parole agreement. And on Nov. 22, the day before Thanksgiving, all that was twisted in Awilda apparently snapped. One of her sisters, quoted in the New York Times, reported a chilling phone conversation with her that night: "She told me that Elisa was like retarded on the bed, not eating or drinking or going to the bathroom. I said, 'Take her to the hospital, and I'll take care of your other kids.' She said...
...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...