A Secret Is Their Shroud : Teen-Age Couple Lived Lives Shaped by Abuse and Neglect; Some Say It Was Suicide When They Walked in Front of a Commuter Train

Flor Zelaya and Droops Ballin were good at keeping secrets.

Flor hid the fact that her stepfather had been tying her to a chair, and raping and sodomizing her since she was a kindergartner.

Droops concealed the pain his drug-addicted parents caused him, instead angrily scrawling his moniker on walls and disrupting classes whenever he bothered to attend school. Only Flor saw something appealing behind his defiant mask.

But the two took their biggest secret to the grave.

Did the teen-age lovers commit suicide by walking in front of a commuter train on the morning of March 5? Or did they simply not hear the 45-second wail of the train whistle as they strolled hand-in-hand between the tracks in Sylmar?

“They didn’t turn around,” said witness Carol Hicks, who saw the couple walking with their backs to the oncoming train. “They didn’t look back or anything.”

At the last split second, Flor jumped. But the 262-ton locomotive dealt her a glancing blow, lifting her out of her black boots and hurling her 200 feet.

“Oh, why did they have to die?” sobbed a teen-age girl outside the crowded mortuary where Flor, 15, lay in a pink brocade-lined coffin five days after her death.

The same question haunted other mourners who filed by the coffin to pay their last respects to the pretty, black-haired girl with the heart-shaped face.

After a brief investigation, detectives ruled out suicide because of the couple’s devotion to each other and the possibility that noise from a nearby commercial area drowned out the engineer’s warning signal.

That satisfied relatives, who said that even if the youngsters heard the whistle, they may have assumed it was a freight train, which moves much slower through the area than the 50 m.p.h. commuter express.

“Suicide was the first thing that crossed my mind, but he cared too much, especially about himself,” said Droops’ mother, a former PCP addict who lost custody of the slightly built youth when he was 7 years old.

But others aren’t so sure the deaths were accidental.

Some likened Droops, 16, whose real name was Marc Charles, and Flor to a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, saying that suicide seems consistent with their unhappy lives.

“He used to say he had a lot of problems and wanted to escape from everything,” said a 15-year-old boy who identified himself only as Tony. “This was the only way they felt they could both be happily together.”

They may not even have had a suicide pact, experts say. Flor and Droops could have put themselves in the path of the train because unconsciously they no longer wanted to live--something experts call victim-precipitated homicide.

Flor’s life was star-crossed from the beginning.

The child of an illicit union between an evangelical minister and a naive, 21-year-old woman from a large, poor family, she was raised by her grandmother in El Salvador until she was 5.

Flor appears cheerful in early photographs, with sparkling eyes and dimpled cheeks. But it is a much grimmer little girl who stares out of pictures taken after she arrived in the United States to live with her mother and stepfather.

Three months after Flor’s birth in 1977, her mother, Rosa Zelaya, a stocky woman whose round face made her look younger than her age, crept across the U.S.-Mexico border in the middle of the night to work for an American family as a housekeeper and baby-sitter.

As Rosa tells it, she had the misfortune to fall into the clutches of Juan Francisco Carpio, the brother of the coyote who led her over the mountains near Tijuana. Carpio offered to share a studio apartment in Canoga Park with Rosa, who needed a place to stay on weekends.

The couple married, had two children and sent for Flor and her grandmother, who were living in poverty in San Salvador with Rosa’s five brothers and sisters.

But Rosa did not tell her relatives that Carpio ruled the family like a tyrant. He took her paycheck, prohibited her from wearing skirts above the knee, and regularly beat her and the children with the flat of a knife, his fists and the hose of a vacuum cleaner.

Shortly after Flor arrived, Carpio kicked out her grandmother, the woman she regarded as her mother, after an argument over his brutal treatment of the family. Flor found herself left behind with virtual strangers, prohibited from even visiting “Mami.”

Her stepfather immediately began to molest her, eventually raping and sodomizing her regularly, according to court documents.

“She cried, we all did,” said Rosa. “But then she got used to it. She had to, there wasn’t any choice.”

Flor’s terrible secret finally surfaced eight years later on June 8, 1991, when her 7-year-old stepsister told Flor that Carpio had molested her too.

Horrified that the shy youngster would also be raped, Flor, by this time 13, went to school the next day and begged her favorite teacher to put an end to her ordeal.

She, her stepsister and brother were immediately removed from their one-room Canoga Park apartment and put in a foster home in San Fernando.

But Flor continued to suffer.

“She’d have these nightmares, be screaming, and it would take 15 minutes just to wake her up,” said her foster mother, Cherie Espinosa, 36, a large, freckled woman who has taken in abused and neglected children for more than 10 years.

“She needed 24-hour care.”

The nightmares continued even after Carpio pleaded guilty to child sexual abuse and was sentenced in August, 1991, to 15 years in state prison under a plea bargain agreement. He could be released in half that time if he behaves in prison, prosecutors said.

Flor began going to therapy, but she also started neglecting her schoolwork, drinking and cutting classes. She tattooed her hand with three small black dots, a symbol that felons use to mark time spent in prison. The insignia also means “This Crazy Life,” she told relatives.

Freedom from tyranny was intoxicating to Flor, who “was like a little kid in a candy store. She had to have it all, do it all because she’d been deprived of so much,” her foster mother said.

But one thing Flor didn’t want to do was go home to Rosa, whom she blamed for allowing the abuse. The two younger children, now 9 and 11, chose to return.

Rosa denies that Flor told her about the sexual assaults.

“I didn’t even suspect because he would go to church,” Rosa said. “But now I want to get a message across to all the mothers. Don’t trust the man, trust the children.”

It wasn’t love at first sight for Flor and Droops, who met in June when Droops was placed in the same foster home.

“Dear Mama Bear Cherie,” Flor wrote to her foster mother shortly after Droops moved in. “I’ve been feeling kind of jealous since Mark came to live with us. I feel someone is tearing us apart, Cherie. . . .

“Remember that time when I told you I always wanted a good mom who will love me and care for me and show me things and just to be together. Well, you know I think I’ve found that special mom I used to dream of and wish to a star to give me . . . since I’ve been with you.”

But Flor soon began to feel sorry for Droops, who had been shuttled at least eight times among relatives, group homes and foster care since he was 7.

Droops’ mother, who was 16 when she had the first of six children, began smoking PCP in the early 1980s at night after tucking the children in. So Droops and his younger brother moved to San Bernardino and then Sepulveda to be with their father. He lost custody of them in 1989 when the younger brother showed up at school with a belt mark he said his father inflicted.

The boys eventually returned home, where they stayed until their father failed a drug test administered by Los Angeles County authorities. The boys’ mother, who had kicked her habit nine years earlier, took them back briefly in 1990, but “I couldn’t handle them,” she said. “Between getting called into school every day and him staying out all night, I just told the social worker, ‘I can’t deal with it no more.’ ” Only Flor saw Droops’ unsmiling countenance, wisecracking mouth and penchant for graffiti as plaintive cries for help. “You just don’t understand him,” she told her foster mother after Droops revealed in December that the two had struck up a romance.

But her words fell on deaf ears.

“I’m sorry but I just cannot allow you to see him,” Cherie wrote Flor in a letter dated Feb. 28, just five days before Flor and Droops died. “He is poison . . . he lies, sneaks, steals, smokes, drinks, cheats on you, etc. . . . he won’t go to school, he tags, he wants to join a gang, he steals a car, he keeps AWOLing from everywhere.”

In January, Cherie sent Droops to another foster home and packed Flor off on a two-week vacation with friends in an effort to end the romance.

But Droops ran away and enticed Flor to cut school and stay out all night with him. Cherie found them the next morning in a pizza parlor after a frantic, all-night search.

Flor promised never to do it again.

But Droops showed up at the front gate of her school on March 5, and she died with him 30 minutes later.