Neubarth
At the Ballpark July 30th
When I hit fifty six years of age Diane (my wife) told me that she was finally burned out on taking care of younger to early teenage children. The ones that the Christian Agency had been sending to us for long term care were becoming more and more difficult to handle from a standpoint of threats from drunken or drugged parents to the children trying to sneak out of the house to try to connect to druggies for an opportunity to get high, just like their parents.
I was beginning to think that the Biblical passage about the sins of the father being visited onto the subsequent generations was a reference to inherited DNA proclivity to commit crime, and that we were no longer making a difference in their lives. As long as we felt that we were giving the child an opportunity to grow up in a strong Christian atmosphere with an example of Christian parents as opposed to their own parents' lifestyles, we had a sense of accomplishment. That is what we set out to do when we signed up at our church to take in these kids.
Diane had heard that Rancho Jireh (From Jehovah Jireh, one of the names of God) was considering taking in older teens (older than 13 or 14) who had babies. Diane thought she would like the idea of having a baby in the house. Besides, Teenaged girls with the responsibility of raising a child might be more open to guidance towards good standards. Well, I had my reservations about most of the teenagers we had seen recently, but Diane thought it was a good idea, so we signed up for the program. Within a week, we had the opportunity to take in Janet M^^^^^, a Mexican American 15 year old teenager from the Catholic Charities facility close to Sharp Hospital (That is the Linda Vista area of San Diego.).
She came to us for a weekend on a trial basis. If she thought we were too religious or too different she could refuse the placement. She seemed to like us, and I immediately took to her little boy and was eager to have him in the house. I love kids and am a better father than most mothers are mothers. Kids just need to be loved, and I love showing them that they are loved. I am good at that, having raised a bunch of sons and daughters from infancy. I'm a great tummy and chest bubble blower. The under two crowd love it.
Janet was beautiful. She could have been a Miss Escondido or Miss National City if she had not had the baby. She stood about five feet six, had excellent complexion, a beautiful figure, great posture and she appeared to be very intelligent. Knowing that sometimes these girls who get in trouble have low self esteem, I usually try to give them positive comments, and I told her, "Janet, you are absolutely beautiful. You should be a model."
To that she quickly replied, "I've already done that. I don't think I want to do that anymore."
Not knowing if there was some sort of painful experience in her life, I did not comment further.
She had her sixteenth birthday just before coming to live with us.
Janet had finally agreed to come to live with us on a permanent basis and we welcomed her. For two months we were told that she was to stay in the house and only leave for school or shopping trips. Since I was retired, I drove her to and from school to make certain that she was safe. Her little boy was one and a half and was all over the house. It made me feel good to have the little guy with us.
After Janet had been with us several weeks, she started to talk about her previous life. She mentioned that her father Jose M^^^^ was the head of the Mexican Mafia in San Diego County. (The foster agency never gives us much background on the girls they place, so we won't be frightened away from the idea of trying to help her.) That Mexican Mafia information was called to Rancho Jireh immediately because we are supposed to report any disclosures that are of importance.
I had read a lot about the Mexican Mafia and had listened to enough radio programs about crime in America to know that they are the most ruthless of criminal gangs in the country. They are more deadly than the Mafia or the Russian Mafia. The Mexican Mafia (Or "La Eme" as it is called by them.) is totally without any moral restraint. Any illegal activity that can generate money can and usually is run by them in many parts of the country. They control most of the prisons in the western part of the United States. The Blacks who outnumber them in prison inmate numbers are scared to death of them and will not stand up to Mexican Mafia leadership. Not showing "respect" to the leadership of La Eme always results in death in prison. There are no exceptions. Getting sent to prison is a badge of honor for all Mexican Mafia members because they can run their enterprise in prison and be safe doing it because of their own protection system in prison.
I asked Janet where her father was now and she said "At home in prison for life."
He had three strikes on him and was in for life.
Janet's mother lived in Escondido. When restrictions on what Janet could do were gradually lifted, she was still prohibited from seeing her mother up there. This only told me that there was something wrong at her mother's place (Perhaps a live in boyfriend I thought. - I was wrong).
I was allowed by Rancho Jireh to let Janet visit with her friends (the other unwed mothers at the Catholic Charities Facility where she had been living prior to coming to live with us), so I took her down there one day. On the way, she told me that before her father went to prison for life he beat her up seriously when he heard that she was pregnant at age 14. She said he had tried to beat the baby out of her and she had bruises on her stomach for months after the incident.
I was flabbergasted. He was going to be a grandfather and he wanted to kill his grandchild before the baby was born. Well, it is difficult to understand, but the type of men who were in the Mexican Mafia that could be a possibility.
When I had married Diane years earlier, I had quit the Navy because of her miscarriages. I could not put my wife through the stress of Navy separation again, but I did have to find a job, and did not feel that I had to continue living in San Diego, so went on a job hunting journey through the western states. On a delayed honeymoon, we had toured the same states and fell in love with the small towns in southern central and western Colorado so I went back there to find a job.
The economy was bad at the time (1983) in that region. Even the mines in the mining towns had shut down. On the way back, I drove down to western New Mexico and toured the old (still Spanish speaking) towns in that state and noted that the Spanish was not like Mexican Spanish (but that is another story). I cut through eastern central Arizona on the way back and was listening to an educational radio station that was broadcasting from either Tucson or Phoenix. I think it was the former. That station was keeping me company as I drove through some beautiful forested land.
A former member of La Eme(The Mexican Mafia) was being interviewed, and he was telling the listening audience that the Mexican Mafia taught a new (but supposedly ancient) religion that believed in an Aztec God. That God honored blood killings and honored women who worked as prostitutes. He said that the Mexican Mafia members would even put their twelve and thirteen year old daughters in whorehouses to support the gang activities. It was all about making money for the cause. The Mexican Mafia members would never marry their women. They would take as "wives" the prettiest girls from their home villages in Mexico or in the United States and set them up in an apartment with the understanding that they had to work in the local Mexican Mafia whore house to make money for La Eme. The men would usually add a whore a year to their harem until they had about six or seven women.
The speaker went into the finances: If a whore turns ten tricks a night at fifty dollars a trick, that is $500 to the "husband." If he has seven "wives" that is $3,500 a night in profit. As long as the "husband is out of prison all that money goes to him. From that, he pays for their seven apartments and buys them cars and clothes and puts food on the table. The excess money is used to finance drug running and distribution in the local area and fund the whore house. The Mexican Mafia controls the Heroin trade in the western United States. Anybody who tries to compete with them ends up dead.
The speaker went on to tell the audience that the "Mexican Mafia "pimps". That is what they really are, will insist that their women only have children with them. If they want to have a child, they still have to work with their pregnancy up to the point where the men will not buy their services because they are too pregnant and then they get to finally stay at home, give birth and become a mother and raise their baby for six months. But then they have to go back to work. They have to make money to pay for that apartment and the gang activities."
Then the blockbuster statement, "If the children are girls, the father will put them to work in the whore houses along side their mothers when they are old enough."
That was too much for me to believe, and I turned the program off and drove in silence for a while. I was convinced that no father would ever turn his daughter into a whore. There was no way!
The memory of that radio program came back to me as I dropped Janet off at Catholic Charities to spend time with her friends. I drove home and mentioned my memory of what I had heard to Diane and she did not believe it either. I came back six hours later to pick her up. The last girl she was visiting with was a pretty Mexican-American girl who had turned 17 and went by the nick name of Yolanda. She had two children but no husband. I remembered the name she gave me because it was the name that was used in the Godfather II where the Italian Mafia guys are in Havana watching a porn show and one of the men (the Senator from Nevada) comments that "They are all Yolandas."
I didn't say anything about that, but I asked Janet if Yolanda's father was in the Mexican Mafia.
Her response, "All the girls here have fathers in the Mexican Mafia."
I was starting to wake up to a new reality.
When I arrived home, I talked at length with Diane about all the girls at the Catholic Charities facility being daughters of Mexican Mafia members. I asked her if she thought I should inform Catholic Charities. Diane did not think it was necessary.
“After all, she said, most Mexicans are Catholic so it would stand to reason that here in southern California most of the girls in a facility like that would be of Mexican descent.”
She was right, of course, but I still asked her to ask the Christian foster agency to provide us any information about Janet’s childhood and past five years of life that might be germane to her disclosure about the Mexican Mafia. I was beginning to not feel comfortable with the placement. There were stories of the Mexican Mafia killing whole families that had displeased La Eme leadership. The orders go out in prison and are carried out by professional killers or young men trying to work their way up to that status. For every leader in La Eme, there are thousands of Mexican American kids and young men who dream of being in that exalted position of power.
Well, the weeks went by. Janet’s mother was allowed to visit her daughter in our house. We had reported to the Christian foster agency that the visits were uneventful. The mother was a scrub lady for an Indian gaming casino on the Indian reservation east of Escondido. The mother, tough showing her age, had proud features and could easily have been a very beautiful girl in her youth. She was still slender with a very trim but shapely figure. She was still a very attractive middle aged woman and I was surprised that she did not have a better position in life.
Knowing that language might be the reason for her low paying job, I spoke to her in English. She did not understand me. Since I spoke some Mexican Spanish, I talked to her in her native tongue. She had no difficulty in comprehending me and communicated in quite intelligent fashion. She was at least average in intelligence. It was obvious to me that her life had been so isolated from the English language that she had no need to learn it and that was holding her back in seeking better employment situations.
After her mother left, I asked Janet about her mother. Janet was willing to talk at length about her mother and then added information that I did not know. Her mother was one of five or six wives that her father had kept in various parts of National City, Escondido and Riverside. Janet said that she had lived most of her childhood with her mother in National
City but had been taken away from her mother when she was ten. She had been a ward of the State of California for the six years that followed.
I asked her, “When your father beat you when you were fourteen, how did he get to visit you and get away with it?”
Janet answered that she was living with her father and his sixth wife up in Riverside at the time. There was an obvious inconsistency in her story, but I felt that it might be best to not ask her about that for the time being. I still had not asked her about the modeling that she had done that she “did not want to do anymore.” I knew that those two issues would best be untouched if I were to get more disclosure from Janet.
Since she was talking about her mother, I asked if she had any brothers or sisters. She eagerly told me about her beautiful older sister and about a twelve year old younger sister who was going to be the most beautiful of all three girls. “She was going to look as beautiful as her mother in a year or two.”
I asked Janet to have her two sisters come to our house to visit. A week later, her mother, the older sister and younger sister visited our house. The older sister was almost as pretty as Janet, but showed indication of aging faster than normal for a nineteen year old. She looked a far bit too skinny. The older sister brought a two and a half year old daughter with her that had been born without benefit of marriage. Subtracting the baby’s age, I calculated that the older girl had become pregnant at late fifteen or early sixteen years of age.
Janet was absolutely correct, the younger sister was going to be a future beauty queen. She was almost thirteen and was already nearly fully developed as a woman. If I did not know her age in advance I would have guessed that the twelve year old was at least fifteen.
After they had left, I asked Janet why her sisters did not come earlier, she said that her older sister worked with her mother at the casino and the younger sister was in a group foster home in a community east of San Diego. The two younger daughters had been removed from her mother’s home, and the older sister had to be present if the mother was to pick up the youngest sister if they were to visit with Janet.
There were more inconsistencies that caught my attention. If the older sister was also a scrub lady at the casino, it was not because of a language barrier. The girl spoke excellent English as did the two younger sisters. It appeared that the mother could not pick up the younger sister alone, or an “out of facility” visit with her younger daughter was limited in time duration, but the older sister could take the youngest girl away for a longer time period. What was wrong with the mother that her visitation was restricted?
Again, I did not ask Janet. There were lots of pieces to the puzzle and I needed more information if I were to put the whole puzzle together. Information from the Christian foster agency was still not forthcoming. All I knew was that Janet was taken out of her mother’s home at the age of ten, but she was living with her Mexican Mafia father at a home in Riverside at the age of fourteen. Her younger sister had also been taken away, but Janet did not offer up information about what age the girl had been separated from her mother. What was so bad about the mother that she was being denied custody of her two younger daughters? I wondered if the older sister had been taken away too?
I asked about the older sister a day later, and Janet confirmed that she was out of the house for “a while, but she was living with her mother from the age of eighteen when she was emancipated. When I reflect on that conversation, I did not ask specifically ask if the older sister was in foster care. To this day, I do not know if that was the case. I just assumed it at that time. If she had to be emancipated to return to her mother that would seem to indicate that she was a ward of the state. She could have been living with another relative and decided to live with her mother when she was considered old enough under California law. Still, the term emancipated seemed to indicate court action was necessary.
I was growing as fond of Janet as I was of her soon to be two year old son. I could see that she had a lot of potential. I was developing hope that I could continue to raise her like a younger daughter and steer her to college and some professional career that would be well paying. I asked her what she wanted to do with her life. In reply she mentioned that she would like to be a police officer or a social worker working with troubled teens. The second position required a college degree and a police officer with a college education usually is quickly advanced. I mentioned this to her and she acknowledged that she understood that already.
Well, now that Janet was well past her sixteenth birthday, she was given permission to visit with her mother on weekends. I drove her up to Escondido several times, and left her at her mother’s apartment in the center of town. The second time that I drove her up, she mentioned to me that she was fond of men who were overweight. I was overweight, but fairly good looking for my age.
I took that as a type of teenage compliment but figured because of her youth she did not know how to say politely that she liked me as a father figure but brought up my one feature that I was a little bit uncomfortable about. I had been starving myself with diets in order to lose twenty pounds so I could look like I did in my thirties. That had been my goal since my late forties when my pants waist size had started to increase by about a quarter of an inch per year. I had spoken to Janet about my dieting in order to elicit more information about her older sister who was way too slender in my opinion.
We were almost at her mother’s apartment, so I continued the conversation by mentioning my endless dieting. I then asked, “How does your sister managed to stay so slender.” I’d like to use whatever she uses because it looks like it works.
Janet mentioned that I might not want to use “that,” as it was a strong weight control drug.
I agreed, saying, “Yep, I do not like to use chemicals.” I could not remember if I had mentioned my dislike for diet drugs and assumed that I had, and she was just bringing up that fact. But then, I had a flashback to a comment from that radio program that I listened to twenty one years earlier in Arizona when I was 35 years old. The former Mexican Mafia member had said that La Eme used Mexican heroin to keep the prostitutes skinny as it removes their appetite. “Slender prostitutes bring in more money.” he said.
Just on a whim, with a big smile on my face, I turned to her and said, “I suppose I could forget the diet pills and try some brown heroin, as I hear that it really works.”
Janet did not bat an eye and said that she was on heroin at the age of fourteen when she was living with her father. She was selling and using at the same time while up in Riverside.
“Selling?” I said.
“Sure!” she said. “Fourteen year old girls do not go to jail for selling drugs. My baby’s father and I were both selling drugs. He is in prison now, but that is because he was 18 when he was arrested.”
We pulled into the driveway of the apartment complex. Her son was asleep in a child seat behind us, so I offered to carry him into the apartment while still strapped into the seat.
Janet carried her personal stuff and the baby’s diaper bag and went to open the apartment door. She called back to me and told me to walk right on into the apartment. She would leave the door open.
I fumbled with the car seat belt, trying to get it separated from the car seat. It took me a minute or two, but I finally got the seat free and started to carry it into the apartment. Along the way, I barked the skin off of two knuckles on a branch from a bush that was extending out into the walkway. I put the seat down for a few seconds and applied pressure to the injury site to stop the bleeding as I did not want to drip blood on her mother’s carpet. The bleeding stopped, and again I picked up the baby seat complete with sleeping baby and proceeded to the two bedroom apartment. When I entered the front room, Janet was in her sister’s bedroom, so I placed the baby seat on the floor next to the couch. I did not want to place it on the couch because he might wake up and cause the seat to fall to the floor. When I turned around, Janet had come out of the bedroom, and had changed to white shorts and a tank top and was not wearing a bra. I could plainly see her very well proportioned breasts as the tank top was not doing a good job of covering up her feminine charms.
She immediately hugged me and thanked me for driving her up to her mother’s place, but the hug was a few seconds too long. I was convinced that she was coming-on to me, and backed away. Could the comment about liking overweight men have been a come-on? I was not going to find out. I mentioned that I had scraped my fingers on the branch, and that I needed to go home right away to clean the scrape with hydrogen peroxide and put a bandage on it. That was the only excuse that I could think of to run, as I retreated through the front door.
I had embraced fundamental Christianity at the age of 26 while a student in college. Though I had had one weak period in my faith, my faith was now strong, and I knew that the Bible tells believers to “Flee!” from one specific sin and that was sexual sin outside of marriage. True to my faith, I was fleeing, just like Joseph did in the Old Testament.
It could be that Janet was just unwise in her attire and aggressive in her willingness to thank me, but I did not want to be caught in any temptation issue. If you flee, you are free from temptation. That was all I needed to know, and that was all I needed to do.
I drove home afraid of what I was thinking. Could Janet’s older sister and mother be users of Mexican Brown Tar Heroin? They both were slender, with the sister overly so.
Was I putting the girl I wanted to raise as a daughter at risk? Had I failed her?
When I returned to my house, I wrote an email to the Christian foster agency expressing my worry about the mother’s home situation and the risk of possible exposure to heroin for Janet. I did not mention the possible come-on to me by Janet, as I was not absolutely certain that was what Janet intended. I did know that I was not going to drive her up to her mother’s in the future. I would find a way to talk my wife into doing that.
About five days later, Janet asked me to drive her to the Trolley station by the new baseball park south of downtown San Diego as she wanted to meet an old friend there. Our new rules from the foster agency allowed me to do that. When I dropped her off, she asked me to wait for a few minutes as she wanted to introduce me to her friend. I waited as asked and she came back to the car and introduced me to the father of her child. He was just out of prison and situated in a half way house a few blocks away. As she requested, I came back to pick her up about four hours later. When I did, she kissed him good bye and we drove away. She looked at the baseball stadium and said, “That place shut down a lot of businesses because of renovation in the area.
The next week, Janet wanted to take her son to a Denny’s Restaurant in National City south of San Diego where she was going to celebrate his second birthday with all of the girls from the Catholic Charities facility. I asked her why she had to go to a Denny’s in National City when there was one far closer to the Catholic Charities facility in the northern part of San Diego. She replied that there was a special offer at that Denny’s that was not available at the other Denny’s in San Diego. I did not even know where the Denny’s was located in National City, so asked her. She said that it was “East of the Naval Station. You know, where all the sailors are.”
I knew “where all the sailors were” very well, as I had been an enlisted sailor for a half dozen years when I was far younger. I had been a good sinful womanizing sailor in my youth, but that was before my religious conversion.
I wondered if there was a remote chance that some of the girls who were going to the birthday party had worked at the old Mexican Mafia whorehouse that stood where the Thirteenth Street trolley station now stood in southern San Diego close to the city boundary with National City. It had been torn down with recent renovation in the area because it was close to the new baseball park.
Though I had never visited that house of ill repute, I knew enough sailors who had. To me, paying a woman to satisfy my youthful strong sex drive seemed wrong even before I had accepted my faith in my mid twenties. To me, way back in my early sinful twenties, you did not pay for women if you could pick them up in bars. Paying for a woman was an admission that you were not man enough to pick up a woman in a bar. With hindsight, it all seems so foolish to me now, but there was a dignity code associated with that kind of behavior.
Some of the guys just did not want to play that game and went to “the money up front places.” They maintained that it was cheaper than trying to get lucky with a woman in some bar. They talked about the beautiful woman that were always there on Thirteenth Street. To each his own. I knew why prostitution was the world’s “Oldest Profession.” It would continue to remain a fully staffed profession as long as young men had strong sex drives, and older men were not satisfied by their wives.
On the day for the birthday party I was driving Janet to the trolley station downtown when she asked me to detour to the unwed mother’s facility to see if any of the girls had missed the bus. There was one girl, an overweight Hispanic girl of twelve or thirteen who was sitting on a bus route bench. We stopped and Janet called to the girl and asked if she wanted a ride with us. She ran over and jumped right in. She looked too young to me to be a mother, so I asked her if she had a child, thinking that maybe she looked overweight because she was pregnant.
She told me that she had a one year old son but he was in day care back at the facility. I told her that she was too young to have a baby. She laughed and said that she had just celebrated her thirteenth birthday.
The math was easy. The girl had become pregnant at the age of eleven. “Why wasn’t she back with her father and mother?” I wondered. Then I remembered that Janet had said that “ALL” of the girls at the facility had fathers in the Mexican Mafia. I did not ask any further questions, but I wondered if that eleven year old had been a “working girl” just like that man on the broadcast had said so many years earlier. Could it really be true that the men would use their young daughters to make money for La Eme?
My wife had instructed Janet that she had to be back by ten at night because she had her two year old infant son with her. We had given her my cell phone so she could call us if anything was wrong. She promised that she would return on time, but when ten came, she was not back. We did receive a phone call a few minutes later. The transit bus had not arrived on time at the station in National City, so she was delayed. She was on a bus and almost home. She arrived about thirty minutes later and we did not admonish her. She had at least tried and she notified us of her difficulty.
She was trying. I was now becoming more and more convinced that the radio broadcast was true. Janet had admitted to heroin use while with her father. Had he put her on heroin to get her to work in a whore house in Riverside? Did he want her slender so she could command a higher price? Had her mother and older sister worked at the 13th Street location?
When I asked Janet where she lived in National City when she was ten, she gave me the location. Her house was just half a block from the Trolley that ran up to San Diego. Her mother and older sister just had to jump on the trolley to go to work every day if that was the reality. I still had trouble accepting all of that. I had never heard the sailors talk about eleven or twelve year old girls working at the 13th Street facility. They had always used the word “women” when describing the prostitutes.
Well, the day after the birthday party, Janet came out to the fireplace room where I was logged on to the computer. She asked if she could look up the pedophiles in the local area where we lived. I didn’t even know that was possible, but she typed in some word into a search engine, and a map showing where the houses were that had pedophiles in them appeared.
I asked her why she was interested in that, and she replied that she was just curious. I wondered how she knew how to look that information up so well.
That night, I woke up about one in the morning when I heard her in her bedroom talking on my cellphone to her sister. She usually did not use the phone in the house in her bedroom, but since she still had my cellphone she decided to use it.
Between my bedroom and hers there is a sliding door closet that has a very thin backing. That thin backing allowed her voice to resound in my bedroom as if she was right in the room with me. In the quiet of the night, I could hear everything she was saying. I initially pulled my pillow over my head so I could get back to sleep. Regardless, I overheard the following one side of the conversation as spoken by my sixteen year old foster daughter:
“When I came into the room, there were two guys there. One was really good looking……..
Yea, you would never think that he would need to go to a place like that……
The other guy? He was so small he looked like a midget, like a little f—king midget…… No, he did not have a big butt like a midget. He was just short, maybe five feet tall……..
The first guy? Yea, I f—ked him……
He gave me the fifty, but when he was through, he called me “a puta” What’s a puta? ……….. ………
A whore? A Whore! I’m no f—king whore. That fifty dollars says I am no damn whore! ……………….
Yeah, the little guy was still there and I took care of him too. …. He says he likes me. …..
La Eme……. …… ……
OK, Good night.”
I cried for her that night with my head buried in my pillow. What she had described was a whorehouse where she was a working girl. At least that is what it seemed when she mentioned that there were guys waiting and sitting down in a room until she came to take them to satisfy their desires. She, as a sixteen year old, was accommodating pedophiles.
Well, at least I had the answer and I finally knew what was going on.
Without informing her that I had overheard her conversation, I know felt that I knew what she had modeled for. It was more than likely porn, and more than likely happened when she was with her father. I still wondered how Child Protective Services let her stay with her father.
I knew that if reported what I heard of if I confronted her with it, she would deny the conversation. If I could find the evidence of her modeling and presented that to her, she might cave in and admit what she was doing. All I wanted her to do was stop, and straighten out her life. If her parents pushed her into that life style, God could help her turn her life around. She had to be confronted.
I looked on the Internet, and foolishly typed her name in on the search engines. I tried Janet and the word Porn and looked at all of the sites that were presented. After you have seen enough pictures of naked women, you get rather immune to the effects of the photographs. Of course, it could be that I was just beginning to feel my nearly 57 years of age. At any rate, I found it was easy to just look for faces.
Janet and porn did not work, so I tried Arcelia and porn. Again, no hits. I tried to limit my search by putting in “teen model” in place of “porn.” After a few searches, I had a hit. There was Janet on a teaser ad page for a site called Teen Stars Magazine.Com. She looked like a fourteen year old, but was no longer called Janet. Her name in the magazine was Yolanda. Now, where had I heard that name before?
I typed in “Yolanda Teen Model” and eventually found hundreds of photos. All of them were in advertisements for several porn sites, but mostly Teen Stars Magazine.Com. Nothing was hard core. It was all soft core porn.
When Janet came home from school that afternoon, I confronted her with the words that I heard from late night phone call and informed her that I was going to take the information to my wife. I did not initially tell her about the photos. I had hope that she would plead with me to give her a chance to straighten out her life.
Instead she tried to deny everything. She said I must have misunderstood what she had said to her sister.
I mentioned the “puta” exclamation in her conversation. She did not deny it, but tried to explain it away as trying to get her sister to translate something that a Filipino had told her. Supposedly she asked her sister that, “Because she wanted to know if it was the same word as in Spanish.” When I mentioned the “fifty dollars” and she was “not a whore” statements, she started crying, but continued to deny that she was working as a prostitute. She went to her room and called her mother on my cellular phone that she still had on her bed stand.
I went into my room to see what her conversation would be.
Her first words to her mother were, “Mom, he knows. He is a real Christian.”
When my wife came home, I explained the whole story to her, including the “Mom, he knows.”
Diane wanted to see the photos, so I showed her the links to the pages. She was not absolutely convinced that the 14 year old girl in the photos was 16 year old Janet. I poined out a very distinctive double dimple to her left cheek that was in a photo of her in her bedroom and on several of the Yolanda photos. In addition there was a mole on her shoulder in the same photos. Then I pointed out three photos were there were deep bruises on the stomach of the 14 year old girl. Diane was finally convinced.
I sent an email to the Christian Agency to let them know what was happening. They ordered that she be placed in a different placement until an investigation was conducted.
Once the investigation was completed, Janet was free to return to our house. I wrote to her and explained that we would expect her to totally change her lifestyle if she returned to our house. Sadly, she did not want to agree to that and asked for another placement. Her request had to be honored. She was placed in a home close to the group home that her younger sister was located.
Meanwhile, I wanted to bust the Teen Stars Magazine site for putting up photos of underage 14 year old girls. I met with the FBI and the San Diego Police official who was responsible for crimes against children. Using a copy of Janet’s photo and the photos on the internet I convinced them after I pointed out all the distinguishing marks on the photos.
About two weeks later the FBI went out to her new foster home and informed her that they wanted her to cooperate with them to shut down the internet port site and to shut down the whorehouse that hired minors to service their clients. If she did not agree to cooperate with them, they told her that they would take her son away from her because she would be considered an unfit mother. They gave her a week to consider their offer.
Janet split after one day along with her son. She turned herself in to the Polinski Center in San Diego but no longer had her son with her.
Meanwhile, Diane told me that we had to return all the paperwork that we had on Janet. It turns out that some time during the preceding month, the Christian Agency had left some of her background with us. The following items stuck out.
Little seven year-old Arcelia had reported to her First grade teacher in National City that her father had been touching her privates and hurt her.
The first grade teacher had made a report to Child protective Services and Arcelia was taken out of the home and placed in a group home. Her mother who was not implicated came to visit her and after that visit, Arcelia retracted her accusation. She was returned to her parents.
In second grade little eight year-old Arcelia had reported that her father’s best friend had touched her privates and hurt her even more than her father did the year earlier. Again, she was taken out of the home and again her mother came to visit her; and, again, she retracted her accusation and was quickly returned to her family.
There was one good thing that came from the last incident. Social workers were assigned to keep in touch with her on a quarterly basis. By the age of ten, the social workers had determined that she was fully sexually active having frequent sexual intercourse with teenage boys or young men and she was removed from the home and placed in a group home in central San Diego. Her mother was still allowed to visit with her and after the first visit, Arcelia started threatening to commit suicide. She was referred to a psychiatric hospital and was institutionalized for over a month.
At the age of eleven she was placed in a foster home, but ran away only to turn herself in to Child Protective Services a month later. When she was thirteen she was placed in another foster home but ran away again and returned several weeks later. She was placed in the brand new Polinski Center and had the distinction of being the first girl to ever escape from the facility. Ironically, I remember reading about that escape at the time it happened. I did not know who the girl was.
She was gone for over a year. It was during this period that she posed for the photos, sold drugs, used drugs, probably was working as a prostitute in a Riverside area whorehouse for her father and managed to get pregnant by her boyfriend.
The girl was too brainwashed by La Eme to ever turn away from her lifestyle. Janet was probably working as a street walker in Escondido or in a whorehouse in San Marcos when she was spending weekends with her mother. Since her conversation with her older sister was so candid, I strongly suspect that they were working together. More than likely, the younger sister had been converted to the profession before she was removed from her mother’s house.
What a horrible shame this entire episode was.
I was beginning to think that the Biblical passage about the sins of the father being visited onto the subsequent generations was a reference to inherited DNA proclivity to commit crime, and that we were no longer making a difference in their lives. As long as we felt that we were giving the child an opportunity to grow up in a strong Christian atmosphere with an example of Christian parents as opposed to their own parents' lifestyles, we had a sense of accomplishment. That is what we set out to do when we signed up at our church to take in these kids.
Diane had heard that Rancho Jireh (From Jehovah Jireh, one of the names of God) was considering taking in older teens (older than 13 or 14) who had babies. Diane thought she would like the idea of having a baby in the house. Besides, Teenaged girls with the responsibility of raising a child might be more open to guidance towards good standards. Well, I had my reservations about most of the teenagers we had seen recently, but Diane thought it was a good idea, so we signed up for the program. Within a week, we had the opportunity to take in Janet M^^^^^, a Mexican American 15 year old teenager from the Catholic Charities facility close to Sharp Hospital (That is the Linda Vista area of San Diego.).
She came to us for a weekend on a trial basis. If she thought we were too religious or too different she could refuse the placement. She seemed to like us, and I immediately took to her little boy and was eager to have him in the house. I love kids and am a better father than most mothers are mothers. Kids just need to be loved, and I love showing them that they are loved. I am good at that, having raised a bunch of sons and daughters from infancy. I'm a great tummy and chest bubble blower. The under two crowd love it.
Janet was beautiful. She could have been a Miss Escondido or Miss National City if she had not had the baby. She stood about five feet six, had excellent complexion, a beautiful figure, great posture and she appeared to be very intelligent. Knowing that sometimes these girls who get in trouble have low self esteem, I usually try to give them positive comments, and I told her, "Janet, you are absolutely beautiful. You should be a model."
To that she quickly replied, "I've already done that. I don't think I want to do that anymore."
Not knowing if there was some sort of painful experience in her life, I did not comment further.
She had her sixteenth birthday just before coming to live with us.
Janet had finally agreed to come to live with us on a permanent basis and we welcomed her. For two months we were told that she was to stay in the house and only leave for school or shopping trips. Since I was retired, I drove her to and from school to make certain that she was safe. Her little boy was one and a half and was all over the house. It made me feel good to have the little guy with us.
After Janet had been with us several weeks, she started to talk about her previous life. She mentioned that her father Jose M^^^^ was the head of the Mexican Mafia in San Diego County. (The foster agency never gives us much background on the girls they place, so we won't be frightened away from the idea of trying to help her.) That Mexican Mafia information was called to Rancho Jireh immediately because we are supposed to report any disclosures that are of importance.
I had read a lot about the Mexican Mafia and had listened to enough radio programs about crime in America to know that they are the most ruthless of criminal gangs in the country. They are more deadly than the Mafia or the Russian Mafia. The Mexican Mafia (Or "La Eme" as it is called by them.) is totally without any moral restraint. Any illegal activity that can generate money can and usually is run by them in many parts of the country. They control most of the prisons in the western part of the United States. The Blacks who outnumber them in prison inmate numbers are scared to death of them and will not stand up to Mexican Mafia leadership. Not showing "respect" to the leadership of La Eme always results in death in prison. There are no exceptions. Getting sent to prison is a badge of honor for all Mexican Mafia members because they can run their enterprise in prison and be safe doing it because of their own protection system in prison.
I asked Janet where her father was now and she said "At home in prison for life."
He had three strikes on him and was in for life.
Janet's mother lived in Escondido. When restrictions on what Janet could do were gradually lifted, she was still prohibited from seeing her mother up there. This only told me that there was something wrong at her mother's place (Perhaps a live in boyfriend I thought. - I was wrong).
I was allowed by Rancho Jireh to let Janet visit with her friends (the other unwed mothers at the Catholic Charities Facility where she had been living prior to coming to live with us), so I took her down there one day. On the way, she told me that before her father went to prison for life he beat her up seriously when he heard that she was pregnant at age 14. She said he had tried to beat the baby out of her and she had bruises on her stomach for months after the incident.
I was flabbergasted. He was going to be a grandfather and he wanted to kill his grandchild before the baby was born. Well, it is difficult to understand, but the type of men who were in the Mexican Mafia that could be a possibility.
When I had married Diane years earlier, I had quit the Navy because of her miscarriages. I could not put my wife through the stress of Navy separation again, but I did have to find a job, and did not feel that I had to continue living in San Diego, so went on a job hunting journey through the western states. On a delayed honeymoon, we had toured the same states and fell in love with the small towns in southern central and western Colorado so I went back there to find a job.
The economy was bad at the time (1983) in that region. Even the mines in the mining towns had shut down. On the way back, I drove down to western New Mexico and toured the old (still Spanish speaking) towns in that state and noted that the Spanish was not like Mexican Spanish (but that is another story). I cut through eastern central Arizona on the way back and was listening to an educational radio station that was broadcasting from either Tucson or Phoenix. I think it was the former. That station was keeping me company as I drove through some beautiful forested land.
A former member of La Eme(The Mexican Mafia) was being interviewed, and he was telling the listening audience that the Mexican Mafia taught a new (but supposedly ancient) religion that believed in an Aztec God. That God honored blood killings and honored women who worked as prostitutes. He said that the Mexican Mafia members would even put their twelve and thirteen year old daughters in whorehouses to support the gang activities. It was all about making money for the cause. The Mexican Mafia members would never marry their women. They would take as "wives" the prettiest girls from their home villages in Mexico or in the United States and set them up in an apartment with the understanding that they had to work in the local Mexican Mafia whore house to make money for La Eme. The men would usually add a whore a year to their harem until they had about six or seven women.
The speaker went into the finances: If a whore turns ten tricks a night at fifty dollars a trick, that is $500 to the "husband." If he has seven "wives" that is $3,500 a night in profit. As long as the "husband is out of prison all that money goes to him. From that, he pays for their seven apartments and buys them cars and clothes and puts food on the table. The excess money is used to finance drug running and distribution in the local area and fund the whore house. The Mexican Mafia controls the Heroin trade in the western United States. Anybody who tries to compete with them ends up dead.
The speaker went on to tell the audience that the "Mexican Mafia "pimps". That is what they really are, will insist that their women only have children with them. If they want to have a child, they still have to work with their pregnancy up to the point where the men will not buy their services because they are too pregnant and then they get to finally stay at home, give birth and become a mother and raise their baby for six months. But then they have to go back to work. They have to make money to pay for that apartment and the gang activities."
Then the blockbuster statement, "If the children are girls, the father will put them to work in the whore houses along side their mothers when they are old enough."
That was too much for me to believe, and I turned the program off and drove in silence for a while. I was convinced that no father would ever turn his daughter into a whore. There was no way!
The memory of that radio program came back to me as I dropped Janet off at Catholic Charities to spend time with her friends. I drove home and mentioned my memory of what I had heard to Diane and she did not believe it either. I came back six hours later to pick her up. The last girl she was visiting with was a pretty Mexican-American girl who had turned 17 and went by the nick name of Yolanda. She had two children but no husband. I remembered the name she gave me because it was the name that was used in the Godfather II where the Italian Mafia guys are in Havana watching a porn show and one of the men (the Senator from Nevada) comments that "They are all Yolandas."
I didn't say anything about that, but I asked Janet if Yolanda's father was in the Mexican Mafia.
Her response, "All the girls here have fathers in the Mexican Mafia."
I was starting to wake up to a new reality.
When I arrived home, I talked at length with Diane about all the girls at the Catholic Charities facility being daughters of Mexican Mafia members. I asked her if she thought I should inform Catholic Charities. Diane did not think it was necessary.
“After all, she said, most Mexicans are Catholic so it would stand to reason that here in southern California most of the girls in a facility like that would be of Mexican descent.”
She was right, of course, but I still asked her to ask the Christian foster agency to provide us any information about Janet’s childhood and past five years of life that might be germane to her disclosure about the Mexican Mafia. I was beginning to not feel comfortable with the placement. There were stories of the Mexican Mafia killing whole families that had displeased La Eme leadership. The orders go out in prison and are carried out by professional killers or young men trying to work their way up to that status. For every leader in La Eme, there are thousands of Mexican American kids and young men who dream of being in that exalted position of power.
Well, the weeks went by. Janet’s mother was allowed to visit her daughter in our house. We had reported to the Christian foster agency that the visits were uneventful. The mother was a scrub lady for an Indian gaming casino on the Indian reservation east of Escondido. The mother, tough showing her age, had proud features and could easily have been a very beautiful girl in her youth. She was still slender with a very trim but shapely figure. She was still a very attractive middle aged woman and I was surprised that she did not have a better position in life.
Knowing that language might be the reason for her low paying job, I spoke to her in English. She did not understand me. Since I spoke some Mexican Spanish, I talked to her in her native tongue. She had no difficulty in comprehending me and communicated in quite intelligent fashion. She was at least average in intelligence. It was obvious to me that her life had been so isolated from the English language that she had no need to learn it and that was holding her back in seeking better employment situations.
After her mother left, I asked Janet about her mother. Janet was willing to talk at length about her mother and then added information that I did not know. Her mother was one of five or six wives that her father had kept in various parts of National City, Escondido and Riverside. Janet said that she had lived most of her childhood with her mother in National
City but had been taken away from her mother when she was ten. She had been a ward of the State of California for the six years that followed.
I asked her, “When your father beat you when you were fourteen, how did he get to visit you and get away with it?”
Janet answered that she was living with her father and his sixth wife up in Riverside at the time. There was an obvious inconsistency in her story, but I felt that it might be best to not ask her about that for the time being. I still had not asked her about the modeling that she had done that she “did not want to do anymore.” I knew that those two issues would best be untouched if I were to get more disclosure from Janet.
Since she was talking about her mother, I asked if she had any brothers or sisters. She eagerly told me about her beautiful older sister and about a twelve year old younger sister who was going to be the most beautiful of all three girls. “She was going to look as beautiful as her mother in a year or two.”
I asked Janet to have her two sisters come to our house to visit. A week later, her mother, the older sister and younger sister visited our house. The older sister was almost as pretty as Janet, but showed indication of aging faster than normal for a nineteen year old. She looked a far bit too skinny. The older sister brought a two and a half year old daughter with her that had been born without benefit of marriage. Subtracting the baby’s age, I calculated that the older girl had become pregnant at late fifteen or early sixteen years of age.
Janet was absolutely correct, the younger sister was going to be a future beauty queen. She was almost thirteen and was already nearly fully developed as a woman. If I did not know her age in advance I would have guessed that the twelve year old was at least fifteen.
After they had left, I asked Janet why her sisters did not come earlier, she said that her older sister worked with her mother at the casino and the younger sister was in a group foster home in a community east of San Diego. The two younger daughters had been removed from her mother’s home, and the older sister had to be present if the mother was to pick up the youngest sister if they were to visit with Janet.
There were more inconsistencies that caught my attention. If the older sister was also a scrub lady at the casino, it was not because of a language barrier. The girl spoke excellent English as did the two younger sisters. It appeared that the mother could not pick up the younger sister alone, or an “out of facility” visit with her younger daughter was limited in time duration, but the older sister could take the youngest girl away for a longer time period. What was wrong with the mother that her visitation was restricted?
Again, I did not ask Janet. There were lots of pieces to the puzzle and I needed more information if I were to put the whole puzzle together. Information from the Christian foster agency was still not forthcoming. All I knew was that Janet was taken out of her mother’s home at the age of ten, but she was living with her Mexican Mafia father at a home in Riverside at the age of fourteen. Her younger sister had also been taken away, but Janet did not offer up information about what age the girl had been separated from her mother. What was so bad about the mother that she was being denied custody of her two younger daughters? I wondered if the older sister had been taken away too?
I asked about the older sister a day later, and Janet confirmed that she was out of the house for “a while, but she was living with her mother from the age of eighteen when she was emancipated. When I reflect on that conversation, I did not ask specifically ask if the older sister was in foster care. To this day, I do not know if that was the case. I just assumed it at that time. If she had to be emancipated to return to her mother that would seem to indicate that she was a ward of the state. She could have been living with another relative and decided to live with her mother when she was considered old enough under California law. Still, the term emancipated seemed to indicate court action was necessary.
I was growing as fond of Janet as I was of her soon to be two year old son. I could see that she had a lot of potential. I was developing hope that I could continue to raise her like a younger daughter and steer her to college and some professional career that would be well paying. I asked her what she wanted to do with her life. In reply she mentioned that she would like to be a police officer or a social worker working with troubled teens. The second position required a college degree and a police officer with a college education usually is quickly advanced. I mentioned this to her and she acknowledged that she understood that already.
Well, now that Janet was well past her sixteenth birthday, she was given permission to visit with her mother on weekends. I drove her up to Escondido several times, and left her at her mother’s apartment in the center of town. The second time that I drove her up, she mentioned to me that she was fond of men who were overweight. I was overweight, but fairly good looking for my age.
I took that as a type of teenage compliment but figured because of her youth she did not know how to say politely that she liked me as a father figure but brought up my one feature that I was a little bit uncomfortable about. I had been starving myself with diets in order to lose twenty pounds so I could look like I did in my thirties. That had been my goal since my late forties when my pants waist size had started to increase by about a quarter of an inch per year. I had spoken to Janet about my dieting in order to elicit more information about her older sister who was way too slender in my opinion.
We were almost at her mother’s apartment, so I continued the conversation by mentioning my endless dieting. I then asked, “How does your sister managed to stay so slender.” I’d like to use whatever she uses because it looks like it works.
Janet mentioned that I might not want to use “that,” as it was a strong weight control drug.
I agreed, saying, “Yep, I do not like to use chemicals.” I could not remember if I had mentioned my dislike for diet drugs and assumed that I had, and she was just bringing up that fact. But then, I had a flashback to a comment from that radio program that I listened to twenty one years earlier in Arizona when I was 35 years old. The former Mexican Mafia member had said that La Eme used Mexican heroin to keep the prostitutes skinny as it removes their appetite. “Slender prostitutes bring in more money.” he said.
Just on a whim, with a big smile on my face, I turned to her and said, “I suppose I could forget the diet pills and try some brown heroin, as I hear that it really works.”
Janet did not bat an eye and said that she was on heroin at the age of fourteen when she was living with her father. She was selling and using at the same time while up in Riverside.
“Selling?” I said.
“Sure!” she said. “Fourteen year old girls do not go to jail for selling drugs. My baby’s father and I were both selling drugs. He is in prison now, but that is because he was 18 when he was arrested.”
We pulled into the driveway of the apartment complex. Her son was asleep in a child seat behind us, so I offered to carry him into the apartment while still strapped into the seat.
Janet carried her personal stuff and the baby’s diaper bag and went to open the apartment door. She called back to me and told me to walk right on into the apartment. She would leave the door open.
I fumbled with the car seat belt, trying to get it separated from the car seat. It took me a minute or two, but I finally got the seat free and started to carry it into the apartment. Along the way, I barked the skin off of two knuckles on a branch from a bush that was extending out into the walkway. I put the seat down for a few seconds and applied pressure to the injury site to stop the bleeding as I did not want to drip blood on her mother’s carpet. The bleeding stopped, and again I picked up the baby seat complete with sleeping baby and proceeded to the two bedroom apartment. When I entered the front room, Janet was in her sister’s bedroom, so I placed the baby seat on the floor next to the couch. I did not want to place it on the couch because he might wake up and cause the seat to fall to the floor. When I turned around, Janet had come out of the bedroom, and had changed to white shorts and a tank top and was not wearing a bra. I could plainly see her very well proportioned breasts as the tank top was not doing a good job of covering up her feminine charms.
She immediately hugged me and thanked me for driving her up to her mother’s place, but the hug was a few seconds too long. I was convinced that she was coming-on to me, and backed away. Could the comment about liking overweight men have been a come-on? I was not going to find out. I mentioned that I had scraped my fingers on the branch, and that I needed to go home right away to clean the scrape with hydrogen peroxide and put a bandage on it. That was the only excuse that I could think of to run, as I retreated through the front door.
I had embraced fundamental Christianity at the age of 26 while a student in college. Though I had had one weak period in my faith, my faith was now strong, and I knew that the Bible tells believers to “Flee!” from one specific sin and that was sexual sin outside of marriage. True to my faith, I was fleeing, just like Joseph did in the Old Testament.
It could be that Janet was just unwise in her attire and aggressive in her willingness to thank me, but I did not want to be caught in any temptation issue. If you flee, you are free from temptation. That was all I needed to know, and that was all I needed to do.
I drove home afraid of what I was thinking. Could Janet’s older sister and mother be users of Mexican Brown Tar Heroin? They both were slender, with the sister overly so.
Was I putting the girl I wanted to raise as a daughter at risk? Had I failed her?
When I returned to my house, I wrote an email to the Christian foster agency expressing my worry about the mother’s home situation and the risk of possible exposure to heroin for Janet. I did not mention the possible come-on to me by Janet, as I was not absolutely certain that was what Janet intended. I did know that I was not going to drive her up to her mother’s in the future. I would find a way to talk my wife into doing that.
About five days later, Janet asked me to drive her to the Trolley station by the new baseball park south of downtown San Diego as she wanted to meet an old friend there. Our new rules from the foster agency allowed me to do that. When I dropped her off, she asked me to wait for a few minutes as she wanted to introduce me to her friend. I waited as asked and she came back to the car and introduced me to the father of her child. He was just out of prison and situated in a half way house a few blocks away. As she requested, I came back to pick her up about four hours later. When I did, she kissed him good bye and we drove away. She looked at the baseball stadium and said, “That place shut down a lot of businesses because of renovation in the area.
The next week, Janet wanted to take her son to a Denny’s Restaurant in National City south of San Diego where she was going to celebrate his second birthday with all of the girls from the Catholic Charities facility. I asked her why she had to go to a Denny’s in National City when there was one far closer to the Catholic Charities facility in the northern part of San Diego. She replied that there was a special offer at that Denny’s that was not available at the other Denny’s in San Diego. I did not even know where the Denny’s was located in National City, so asked her. She said that it was “East of the Naval Station. You know, where all the sailors are.”
I knew “where all the sailors were” very well, as I had been an enlisted sailor for a half dozen years when I was far younger. I had been a good sinful womanizing sailor in my youth, but that was before my religious conversion.
I wondered if there was a remote chance that some of the girls who were going to the birthday party had worked at the old Mexican Mafia whorehouse that stood where the Thirteenth Street trolley station now stood in southern San Diego close to the city boundary with National City. It had been torn down with recent renovation in the area because it was close to the new baseball park.
Though I had never visited that house of ill repute, I knew enough sailors who had. To me, paying a woman to satisfy my youthful strong sex drive seemed wrong even before I had accepted my faith in my mid twenties. To me, way back in my early sinful twenties, you did not pay for women if you could pick them up in bars. Paying for a woman was an admission that you were not man enough to pick up a woman in a bar. With hindsight, it all seems so foolish to me now, but there was a dignity code associated with that kind of behavior.
Some of the guys just did not want to play that game and went to “the money up front places.” They maintained that it was cheaper than trying to get lucky with a woman in some bar. They talked about the beautiful woman that were always there on Thirteenth Street. To each his own. I knew why prostitution was the world’s “Oldest Profession.” It would continue to remain a fully staffed profession as long as young men had strong sex drives, and older men were not satisfied by their wives.
On the day for the birthday party I was driving Janet to the trolley station downtown when she asked me to detour to the unwed mother’s facility to see if any of the girls had missed the bus. There was one girl, an overweight Hispanic girl of twelve or thirteen who was sitting on a bus route bench. We stopped and Janet called to the girl and asked if she wanted a ride with us. She ran over and jumped right in. She looked too young to me to be a mother, so I asked her if she had a child, thinking that maybe she looked overweight because she was pregnant.
She told me that she had a one year old son but he was in day care back at the facility. I told her that she was too young to have a baby. She laughed and said that she had just celebrated her thirteenth birthday.
The math was easy. The girl had become pregnant at the age of eleven. “Why wasn’t she back with her father and mother?” I wondered. Then I remembered that Janet had said that “ALL” of the girls at the facility had fathers in the Mexican Mafia. I did not ask any further questions, but I wondered if that eleven year old had been a “working girl” just like that man on the broadcast had said so many years earlier. Could it really be true that the men would use their young daughters to make money for La Eme?
My wife had instructed Janet that she had to be back by ten at night because she had her two year old infant son with her. We had given her my cell phone so she could call us if anything was wrong. She promised that she would return on time, but when ten came, she was not back. We did receive a phone call a few minutes later. The transit bus had not arrived on time at the station in National City, so she was delayed. She was on a bus and almost home. She arrived about thirty minutes later and we did not admonish her. She had at least tried and she notified us of her difficulty.
She was trying. I was now becoming more and more convinced that the radio broadcast was true. Janet had admitted to heroin use while with her father. Had he put her on heroin to get her to work in a whore house in Riverside? Did he want her slender so she could command a higher price? Had her mother and older sister worked at the 13th Street location?
When I asked Janet where she lived in National City when she was ten, she gave me the location. Her house was just half a block from the Trolley that ran up to San Diego. Her mother and older sister just had to jump on the trolley to go to work every day if that was the reality. I still had trouble accepting all of that. I had never heard the sailors talk about eleven or twelve year old girls working at the 13th Street facility. They had always used the word “women” when describing the prostitutes.
Well, the day after the birthday party, Janet came out to the fireplace room where I was logged on to the computer. She asked if she could look up the pedophiles in the local area where we lived. I didn’t even know that was possible, but she typed in some word into a search engine, and a map showing where the houses were that had pedophiles in them appeared.
I asked her why she was interested in that, and she replied that she was just curious. I wondered how she knew how to look that information up so well.
That night, I woke up about one in the morning when I heard her in her bedroom talking on my cellphone to her sister. She usually did not use the phone in the house in her bedroom, but since she still had my cellphone she decided to use it.
Between my bedroom and hers there is a sliding door closet that has a very thin backing. That thin backing allowed her voice to resound in my bedroom as if she was right in the room with me. In the quiet of the night, I could hear everything she was saying. I initially pulled my pillow over my head so I could get back to sleep. Regardless, I overheard the following one side of the conversation as spoken by my sixteen year old foster daughter:
“When I came into the room, there were two guys there. One was really good looking……..
Yea, you would never think that he would need to go to a place like that……
The other guy? He was so small he looked like a midget, like a little f—king midget…… No, he did not have a big butt like a midget. He was just short, maybe five feet tall……..
The first guy? Yea, I f—ked him……
He gave me the fifty, but when he was through, he called me “a puta” What’s a puta? ……….. ………
A whore? A Whore! I’m no f—king whore. That fifty dollars says I am no damn whore! ……………….
Yeah, the little guy was still there and I took care of him too. …. He says he likes me. …..
La Eme……. …… ……
OK, Good night.”
I cried for her that night with my head buried in my pillow. What she had described was a whorehouse where she was a working girl. At least that is what it seemed when she mentioned that there were guys waiting and sitting down in a room until she came to take them to satisfy their desires. She, as a sixteen year old, was accommodating pedophiles.
Well, at least I had the answer and I finally knew what was going on.
Without informing her that I had overheard her conversation, I know felt that I knew what she had modeled for. It was more than likely porn, and more than likely happened when she was with her father. I still wondered how Child Protective Services let her stay with her father.
I knew that if reported what I heard of if I confronted her with it, she would deny the conversation. If I could find the evidence of her modeling and presented that to her, she might cave in and admit what she was doing. All I wanted her to do was stop, and straighten out her life. If her parents pushed her into that life style, God could help her turn her life around. She had to be confronted.
I looked on the Internet, and foolishly typed her name in on the search engines. I tried Janet and the word Porn and looked at all of the sites that were presented. After you have seen enough pictures of naked women, you get rather immune to the effects of the photographs. Of course, it could be that I was just beginning to feel my nearly 57 years of age. At any rate, I found it was easy to just look for faces.
Janet and porn did not work, so I tried Arcelia and porn. Again, no hits. I tried to limit my search by putting in “teen model” in place of “porn.” After a few searches, I had a hit. There was Janet on a teaser ad page for a site called Teen Stars Magazine.Com. She looked like a fourteen year old, but was no longer called Janet. Her name in the magazine was Yolanda. Now, where had I heard that name before?
I typed in “Yolanda Teen Model” and eventually found hundreds of photos. All of them were in advertisements for several porn sites, but mostly Teen Stars Magazine.Com. Nothing was hard core. It was all soft core porn.
When Janet came home from school that afternoon, I confronted her with the words that I heard from late night phone call and informed her that I was going to take the information to my wife. I did not initially tell her about the photos. I had hope that she would plead with me to give her a chance to straighten out her life.
Instead she tried to deny everything. She said I must have misunderstood what she had said to her sister.
I mentioned the “puta” exclamation in her conversation. She did not deny it, but tried to explain it away as trying to get her sister to translate something that a Filipino had told her. Supposedly she asked her sister that, “Because she wanted to know if it was the same word as in Spanish.” When I mentioned the “fifty dollars” and she was “not a whore” statements, she started crying, but continued to deny that she was working as a prostitute. She went to her room and called her mother on my cellular phone that she still had on her bed stand.
I went into my room to see what her conversation would be.
Her first words to her mother were, “Mom, he knows. He is a real Christian.”
When my wife came home, I explained the whole story to her, including the “Mom, he knows.”
Diane wanted to see the photos, so I showed her the links to the pages. She was not absolutely convinced that the 14 year old girl in the photos was 16 year old Janet. I poined out a very distinctive double dimple to her left cheek that was in a photo of her in her bedroom and on several of the Yolanda photos. In addition there was a mole on her shoulder in the same photos. Then I pointed out three photos were there were deep bruises on the stomach of the 14 year old girl. Diane was finally convinced.
I sent an email to the Christian Agency to let them know what was happening. They ordered that she be placed in a different placement until an investigation was conducted.
Once the investigation was completed, Janet was free to return to our house. I wrote to her and explained that we would expect her to totally change her lifestyle if she returned to our house. Sadly, she did not want to agree to that and asked for another placement. Her request had to be honored. She was placed in a home close to the group home that her younger sister was located.
Meanwhile, I wanted to bust the Teen Stars Magazine site for putting up photos of underage 14 year old girls. I met with the FBI and the San Diego Police official who was responsible for crimes against children. Using a copy of Janet’s photo and the photos on the internet I convinced them after I pointed out all the distinguishing marks on the photos.
About two weeks later the FBI went out to her new foster home and informed her that they wanted her to cooperate with them to shut down the internet port site and to shut down the whorehouse that hired minors to service their clients. If she did not agree to cooperate with them, they told her that they would take her son away from her because she would be considered an unfit mother. They gave her a week to consider their offer.
Janet split after one day along with her son. She turned herself in to the Polinski Center in San Diego but no longer had her son with her.
Meanwhile, Diane told me that we had to return all the paperwork that we had on Janet. It turns out that some time during the preceding month, the Christian Agency had left some of her background with us. The following items stuck out.
Little seven year-old Arcelia had reported to her First grade teacher in National City that her father had been touching her privates and hurt her.
The first grade teacher had made a report to Child protective Services and Arcelia was taken out of the home and placed in a group home. Her mother who was not implicated came to visit her and after that visit, Arcelia retracted her accusation. She was returned to her parents.
In second grade little eight year-old Arcelia had reported that her father’s best friend had touched her privates and hurt her even more than her father did the year earlier. Again, she was taken out of the home and again her mother came to visit her; and, again, she retracted her accusation and was quickly returned to her family.
There was one good thing that came from the last incident. Social workers were assigned to keep in touch with her on a quarterly basis. By the age of ten, the social workers had determined that she was fully sexually active having frequent sexual intercourse with teenage boys or young men and she was removed from the home and placed in a group home in central San Diego. Her mother was still allowed to visit with her and after the first visit, Arcelia started threatening to commit suicide. She was referred to a psychiatric hospital and was institutionalized for over a month.
At the age of eleven she was placed in a foster home, but ran away only to turn herself in to Child Protective Services a month later. When she was thirteen she was placed in another foster home but ran away again and returned several weeks later. She was placed in the brand new Polinski Center and had the distinction of being the first girl to ever escape from the facility. Ironically, I remember reading about that escape at the time it happened. I did not know who the girl was.
She was gone for over a year. It was during this period that she posed for the photos, sold drugs, used drugs, probably was working as a prostitute in a Riverside area whorehouse for her father and managed to get pregnant by her boyfriend.
The girl was too brainwashed by La Eme to ever turn away from her lifestyle. Janet was probably working as a street walker in Escondido or in a whorehouse in San Marcos when she was spending weekends with her mother. Since her conversation with her older sister was so candid, I strongly suspect that they were working together. More than likely, the younger sister had been converted to the profession before she was removed from her mother’s house.
What a horrible shame this entire episode was.
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