Breaking Free (14 page)

Maria didn’t know who or what to believe anymore. She was still having those visions of the old man coming to get her. She couldn’t focus, and she got more and more confused every time someone came in to question her.

Her sister came to visit and told her the police were working on her case. Maria nodded silently. Then her sister came back and said the police wouldn’t help because there were no reports of abuse from that house. Maria nodded silently again.

“
Please tell them what happened!” her sister pleaded.

Maria sat with her lawyer again and tried to describe the house with the altar, the guesthouse, the bloodied plank of wood. Whether she spoke in Spanish or tried in English, her lawyer still didn’t get it.

She found out later that her attorney was watching the security cameras instead of looking at her because he had recently been caught selling drugs. He’d also been disbarred and was using someone else’s identity to fight her case. But by the time Maria learned all this, it didn’t matter. The judge and jury never heard about how she’d been tortured and raped. They just saw the plank of wood and the nervously pacing lawyer and decided she was guilty.

Maria was convicted of conspiracy to murder. She was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. Another door bolted shut. Maria nodded silently. There was nothing else to say.

“If I’m dreaming about this tunnel with the light far, far away, how am I gonna be able to reach the light if I’m this bitter, dark, helpless person? I need to bring myself back.”

~ Maria Suarez

Tunnel Vision

Where are you? I’ve been calling you over and over! Where are you?

This was Maria’s prayer night after night. She knelt on the floor and wept. She honestly felt like God had forgotten about her.

How could you leave me with him?

Maria had been raised Catholic and she knew all the psalms by heart, but she didn’t know what she believed in anymore. She felt bitter and abandoned, haunted by this old man who still took over her thoughts. She didn’t know if she was hot or cold, hungry or thirsty. Her senses had disappeared. Fear was the only thing she had left.

Maria’s mother and sister told her the only way she could be released was to pray. Her mom insisted there was a special saint who could help her, but only if Maria forgave the old man for everything he’d done. Maria felt like forgiving him was impossible after what he’d done to her. She muttered the prayers over and over again, calling on the saint to come save her. She didn’t know how it could work, but she was willing to try anything.

Then, Maria’s dreams got even darker. Now she saw a narrow tunnel with a dot of light at the far end. It was long and cold and she was struggling to get to that light. She tried walking, running, crawling, scraping her body along the ground. The light kept moving farther away. As she pulled herself toward it, the old man was next to her, ready to pounce.

“
Keep praying,” her mother implored.

One day, Maria woke up from the tunnel dream choking on huge sobs. She felt like all the tears and pain she’d been storing up and pushing away for the past several years were erupting. She imagined her past as a thick, knotted rope that someone was pulling out of her inch by inch.

She lay on her cot and cried for hours and hours, the bottomless well of hurt and fear coming up and out of her. She couldn’t hide from her demons or rush down cold tunnels anymore. She raged and shouted until her throat felt raw and until her brain was blissfully empty.

Then Maria looked around her cell and, for the first time in what felt like forever, she could breathe again.

She glanced up at the ceiling and wondered if God had finally heard her. Or maybe it was the special saint. She didn’t need an answer. She just knew in her heart that she had been released.

And now it was time to fight for her freedom.

“In prison, I felt free.”

~ Maria Suarez

Finding Momentum

Maria had only one thing on her mind now. She was determined to go back to school. There were university courses being offered in the state prison and she signed herself up for English first. She wanted to read, write, and speak the language fluently so she could tell her story.

Every time Maria opened one of her textbooks, she saw the letters like stepping stones, leading her out of captivity. She filled up notebook after notebook, memorizing new words and ideas. Her brain felt energized and hungry. She soon signed up for classes in computer science and social work, too, and she started collecting the credits she needed to earn her General Educational Development (GED) degree.

Maria also started working with a doctor in the prison who counseled emotionally troubled prisoners. These were the people who either had emotional difficulties before they got there, or who just couldn’t accept that their life was now behind bars. Maria went to some of the doctor’s group sessions and held anyone’s hand who needed extra compassion as they tried to piece together their thoughts. For the older prisoners, Maria read books or listened to them talk about what they’d been through.

Maria never knew why her fellow inmates had been sentenced, and she didn’t feel like she needed to know. Innocent or guilty, young or old, they all had one thing in common: They all were grieving for the lives they’d lost outside of the prison walls. Maria felt that loss, too, and offering a hand or an ear was the most important thing she could think to do. She knew prison would never feel like home, but at least studying and working with that doctor gave her some sort of momentum. It was the most purposeful she’d felt since she was a little girl, carrying in tomatoes off the vine.

Maria’s family was in contact with her constantly. Her sister visited her all the time. The two of them tried to keep the visits cheerful, sharing stories and vending machine snacks. Maria wrote letters back and forth with her family in Mexico, too—in Spanish and in English. Even if they couldn’t fathom what it was like for her in prison or read this new language she was learning, they could tell she was motivated. They could feel how hard she was working to make each day a new beginning.

They celebrated each and every victory with her. They read her letters out loud and cheered as she described her GED test. They also sadly shared the news that Maria’s father was dying, and that he sent his love to her, always.

And, of course, in each letter, call, or visit, Maria and her family counted the days until her next parole review.

FICTION:

Nobody knows how to stop human trafficking. It’s every (wo)man for him or herself.

FACT:

It will definitely be tough to do, but there are incredibly talented and compassionate people working to end human trafficking on a global level. There is now a Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network, where countries all over the globe share information about who has been caught and where, as well as provide protection to victims and survivors wherever they are found.

The Dream Team

It took twenty years before the Board of Prison Terms (BPT) recommended that Maria be released. They called her case “one of the most egregious instances of battered woman syndrome that [the BPT has] ever investigated.” The renter from the guesthouse came forward and admitted that Maria had nothing to do with her trafficker’s murder.

On December 16, 2003, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger granted Maria parole.

But instead of walking out of the prison gates and dancing into freedom, two days later she was sent to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services detention center in San Pedro. The law had changed while she was in prison. Anyone who was in the United States with a green card and convicted of a crime had to be deported, even if they were later found innocent. The state prison had taken away her green card as soon as she was arrested. Schwarzenegger refused to give her a pardon and let her stay in America, where her family now lived.

Maria’s family was feeling desperate and furious, particularly her niece, Patricia. For almost all of Patricia’s life, she’d watched her Aunt Maria studying and counseling in prison. Maria was always the one cheering up Patricia at their visits, telling the young girl to keep hoping and believing. Patricia admired her aunt so much, she wished there were something she could do to challenge this unfair sentence.

Patricia found a lawyer named Jessica Dominguez. Jessica was an immigrant, too, and had just started her own law offices in Los Angeles with a desk she bought at a Salvation Army store and a passion for helping people she thought were mistreated by the American justice system. When Patricia told her Maria’s story, Jessica was horrified and said she would take the case
pro bono
(for free).

Jessica enlisted Charles Song from Los Angeles-based CAST (the Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking). Jessica and Charles were the first lawyers who listened to Maria’s whole story and treated her like a human being instead of a crazed murderer. They added two more lawyer friends to the dream team: Andres Bustamante and Brigit Alvarez. The four of them worked for months and months to get testimony from other people who knew Maria when she was enslaved and even in prison, to show what an honest, hardworking, and forgiving person she was.

Jessica also started organizing rallies and letter-writing campaigns for Maria’s cause as an immigrant. Jessica called every elected official she knew. U.S. Representative Hilda Solis, a Democrat from California who would go on to serve as the U.S. Secretary of Labor under President Barack Obama, and Marta Sahagún de Fox, who at the time was the first lady of Mexico, promised they would join the fight to free Maria and keep her in the United States.

Solis helped write a letter to U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge and Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Security Asa Hutchinson. It stated:

The United States is a beacon of light around the world because of its commitment to human rights. Our government should honor this commitment by recognizing the extreme sexual abuse and violence suffered by Maria Suarez in this country and allow Maria to remain in the U. S. with her family. This is a clear humanitarian case that deserves justice
.

Thirty-one members of the U.S. Congress signed it, too.

Maria didn’t know how to thank the growing circle of supporters and fighters. She teared up every time Patricia, Jessica, or Charles came to meet with her. It was the first time she knew she could trust again. She had no idea what was going to happen to her next, but she knew she was no longer alone.