Word: elisa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...night neighbors heard dishes, pots and pans crashing against walls. In January 1992, a month after Awilda gave birth to his second child, Carlos stabbed her 17 times with a pocketknife, putting her in the hospital for three days. According to a neighbor, the attack occurred in front of Elisa, during a weekend visit. Carlos served two months in jail and then, neighbors say, resumed beating his wife--and his visiting stepdaughter...
...Elisa's life became an excruciating alternation of happiness and horror. The four-year-old took the Friends School's screening examination and passed. But according to Montessori teacher Barbara Simmons, she also began telling people that her mother had locked her in a closet. On one occasion she volunteered, "Awilda hits me. I don't want to go to Awilda." Montessori principal Bryce says she reported suspected abuse to both the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Services and a child-abuse hot line--the CWA's second warning about Elisa. In response, Bryce has said, child-welfare workers made several...
Izquierdo apparently knew about the mistreatment. A neighbor told the New York Times that Elisa would wake up screaming in the night, that although toilet trained, she had begun to urinate and defecate uncontrollably and that there were cuts and bruises on her vagina. In 1992 Izquierdo petitioned the family court to deny Awilda custodial rights, but fate intervened before the court could act on his request. By late 1993, already ill with cancer, he was planning to take Elisa to Cuba, and perhaps hoping to leave her there permanently. Tickets were bought, but he became too ill to travel...
AWILDA IMMEDIATELY FILED FOR permanent custody. A cousin of Izquierdo's, Elsa Canizares, challenged the petition, alleging that Lopez was insane and abused the child. Bryce wrote in a letter to family court judge Phoebe Greenbaum that "Elisa was emotionally and physically abused during the weekend visitations with her mom . Teachers' observation notes are available." Bryce also enlisted the help of Prince Michael, who added his own letter...
Canizares arrived for the June 1994 custody hearing alone. Awilda, by contrast, brought a small army. Her lawyer that day was from the Legal Aid Society, which maintained that its caseworkers had visited the Lopezes and found that "Elisa expressed a strong desire to live with her mother" and her siblings. Also backing Awilda was the CWA, which Judge Greenbaum has indicated had been monitoring the family for more than a year--the agency's third contact with Elisa. Finally there was Project Chance, a federally funded parenting program for the poor run by a man named Bart O'Connor...