Word: lindas
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...Bronx were keeping their daughter chained to a radiator, they moved in, figuring that they would be rescuing the girl and preventing a tragedy. Maria and Eliezer Marrero were hauled off in handcuffs; bail was set at $100,000, a sum fit for a murderer; and their daughter Linda, 15, landed in a foster-care center in Queens...
...this would be especially remarkable, except that by the end of the week fewer people were praising the courts for saving the child than were defending the natural rights of parents to lash their children to radiators. As the Marreros tell it, they had tried everything to keep Linda in school, off drugs and out of the local crack house. When all else failed, Eliezer, a building superintendent, went down to the local hardware store and bought a 15-ft. chain. If the Marreros could not drive drugs from their door, they could at least lock their daughter behind...
...story unfolded in the tabloids, it forced other parents to wonder whether, given the same choices, they might not have done the same thing. Friends and neighbors were accustomed to seeing Linda in chains -- including, the girl claims, the police themselves. Linda and her brother told reporters that she had called the police back in the summer and that when officers came to investigate, they found her locked up. Their response was to tell her mother, "Good job. Just keep her away from the phones." "They told me I was a lost case," Linda recalls...
Maria and Eliezer say they had petitioned the city for help. They called the welfare agencies and urged the courts to intervene. City officials admit that children like Linda fall through the cracks. "We really haven't faced this before," said Marjorie Valleau, spokeswoman for the Child Welfare Administration. "I'd be hard pressed to name a specific program that specializes in the children." Which left the parents to their own meager resources. "They said what I did was cruelty," said Maria. "But when I begged them for help, they denied it to me. How can they...
Last week Linda seemed to have reached the same conclusion. "My mother preferred seeing me here, chained, than dead in an alley," she said, lending a whole new meaning to the notion that parents need to set limits for their children. She even said she would be willing to be chained again. "As long as I'm with them, I wouldn't mind...