Word: elisa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...Queens child-protective-services unit. Claims Gail Nayowith, executive director of the Citizens' Committee for Children: "Case loads are rising. Investigations take longer, and some very important programs don't exist . This child and her family should have got services. With appropriate interventions, services and follow-up, [Elisa] would be alive...
...alive. At her funeral, the Rev. Gianni Agostinelli told mourners that "Elisa was not killed only by the hand of a sick individual, but by the impotence of silence of many, by the neglect of child-welfare institutions and the moral mediocrity that has intoxicated our neighborhoods." Later, Elisa was laid to rest in the Cypress Hills Cemetery in Queens. There had been discussion about her body: the Izquierdo side of her family wanted to determine its fate, but so did the Lopez side. And it seems that mortuaries, like city bureaucracies, have rules for such situations. Regardless...
...outrank them in the child-welfare hierarchy, yet their views carry the greatest weight. Only they "walk up the drug-filled staircase, sit on the dirty couch and talk to the teenage mother," says Marc Parent, who spent four years as a caseworker in New York City. As the Elisa Izquierdo case demonstrates, "if you get a caseworker who goes to somebody's home and says it's fine, then it's fine," notes Parent. "That's how important their voice is." They get no public recognition when that voice is right and they help mend a broken home...