TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/093091/0930106.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.6 KB | 117 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 34

THE URBAN JUNGLE

At the End of Their Tether


Arrested for chaining up their wayward daughter, a Bronx couple
win sympathy for trying to beat the mean streets

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by David Seideman/New York


    In New York City parents are usually arrested for trying
to kill their children, not for trying to save them. So when
police were tipped off that a couple in the 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.

    None of 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 it.

    They wound up in a courtroom that has seen parents who
threw their children out windows, dipped them in boiling water,
beat them with electrical cords. The Marreros, who had never
had any trouble with the law, were accused of unlawful
imprisonment and endangering the welfare of a child. There was
a special irony in that charge, since it was being leveled at
parents who had been driven to despair watching as their
daughter was seduced by the ghetto's most beguiling drug. "We
are not criminals," said Maria. "There was nothing else to do."

    As the 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.

    To hear her story, they may not have been far wrong. She
dropped out of school in sixth grade after throwing a teacher
down the stairs, and started selling crack at 13. In 1989 she
was placed in a home for troubled girls but fled after the first
day. So her parents sent her to live with her grandfather in
Puerto Rico. But when she returned to New York, she began
staying out all night with a dangerous crowd. One time she
disappeared for three weeks and was returned, bruised and
beaten, by two gun-toting drug dealers demanding money that they
said she owed them.

    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 say I was cruel?"

    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."

    After two nights in jail, Maria and Eliezer returned home
as heroes. Linda, meanwhile, had left the foster-care center
and turned up in a local crack house. She said she had not been
doing drugs -- she just went to see her friends, dance, listen
to music, as though this were a natural place for a teenage
girl's pajama party. "I'm desperate now," her father told the
Daily News after he tracked her down. "I'm going to the
hardware store to buy another chain."

    By this time the drama had become New York's latest epic
tale of urban tragedy. Talk-show producers swooped down to book
the family for television, thereby ensuring that their private
lives would not be the same until the lights had dimmed. When
a photographer arrived at the tiny apartment, Linda, who still
drinks from a baby bottle, was lying on the floor of her room
under a dirty blue comforter, sucking her thumb. She refused to
pose for pictures until her father cajoled her with hugs and
soothing promises. "We haven't slept for days," Maria said, as
camera crews from the local stations camped outside.

    But Eliezer saw value in all the attention. By the end of
the week his family's anonymity in this most anonymous city was
gone, and city agencies were vying with one another to see
which would do the most to help the family. The judge reduced
the parents' felony charges to a misdemeanor. "It's good for
us," said Eliezer, instructing his family to hug for the
camera. Linda just lay down on her mother's lap. "Estoy cansada.
Quiero dormir. Dejame quieta" -- I'm tired. I want to sleep.
Leave me alone.