Tracks Lead to Tragedy for Ecuadorean Immigrant, 4 Children

They followed their mother everywhere: to the Laundromat, to church, to America. They followed her down the railroad tracks and into the path of Amtrak’s Twilight Shoreliner as it tore through the night.

Pedro, 3; Angel, 6; Jose, 10; and Carlos, 11. Their friends say they followed their mother to heaven.

Julia Toledo was a tiny woman with a bright smile whose children charmed the neighborhood. The Pied Piper, some neighbors called her as they watched the happy brood, the boys dressed up in dark suits when they marched to church on Sundays.

But the 47-year-old mother’s cheerful front hid problems. She had no money or health insurance. Her marriage had collapsed, and her husband had returned to Ecuador. She spoke little English.

Toledo worried about her children’s safety. She worried about keeping her family together. In America, she was told, the state can take your children if you are not a good mother.

She didn’t wait to find out. Early on the morning of May 25, Toledo packed up her boys and her Bible and crept out of the homeless shelter where they had spent their last few nights. Their bodies were found shortly after 2 a.m. on a railway trestle, surrounded by schoolbooks and sneakers and Sesame Street figurines. The conductor tried to stop, but at 71 mph he didn’t stand a chance.

“As soon as I heard the news, I knew it was a peasant woman from the Andes that was walking down the tracks,” said the Rev. Gustavo Falla of St. Charles church, where Toledo and the boys attended Mass. The tracks would have represented the most direct route to another town, he said, and Toledo might have felt safer there than walking through the dark streets of a dangerous city, so different from the mountain farming village she had left behind.

“I think she was very brave, leading them out of whatever trouble they were in and looking for a future for herself.”

From Remote Village to Urban Slum

Toledo’s search for a better future began 18 months earlier, when she left Ecuador to come to America. She had little more than a blind faith in her sister’s promise that it was a better place. Maria Toledo had emigrated years earlier. Other siblings had emigrated, too. They owned houses. They spoke English. How good America had been to them.

There wasn’t much to hold Toledo to her homeland. In the lush green fields of the southern Andes, her husband, Carlos Urgiles, had scraped a living as a farm laborer. Their remote village of Cojitambo, 160 miles southwest of Quito, isn’t even marked on a map.

Life was poor, simple and hard. But the streets of Bridgeport proved harder.

The city’s East Side is a warren of cracked pavements, burned-out buildings and crumbling multifamily homes. It’s a place where neighbors look out for one another and strangers are viewed with suspicion. A place where police prowl in cruisers looking for drugs and guns. And kids grow up fast.

“This place makes you bitter,” said Erik Young, a 14-year-old neighbor who looks 18 and talks with the disillusionment of someone older. “It’s no place to raise kids.”

He sat with his father on a rickety, litter-strewn stoop on Shelton Street. A few houses down, the Toledo boys had blossomed.

Polite, immaculately dressed and groomed, they would walk with their mother to the Luis Munoz Marin Elementary School a few blocks away. After school, they would play on the street or help neighbor Angel Rivera plant tomatoes or feed his rabbit.

“She was an excellent mother,” said Rebia Ebron, a retired factory worker who lives across the street. “I don’t care where she went, she never went without the kids. And she never let them out past dark.”

A Crisis No One Foresaw

Carlos, the oldest, set high standards, winning a young author’s prize for his essay on a rain forest. Happy-go-lucky Angel was the family joker, while little Pedro could charm quarters from neighbors with his huge brown eyes and adorable smile.

But Jose is the child the neighbors talk about most. For two days, the 10-year-old clung to life after the train severed his leg and shattered his head. Everyone said it was better when he finally slipped away.

With him slipped answers: about his mother, about their life, about what had driven her out of the house owned by her sister and onto the tracks.

His death also brought more questions, especially at school, where classmates had been busy drawing get-well cards for him.

“What do you tell the children?” asks school principal Milagros Vizcarrondo. “How do you explain that Julia was a good mother trying to give her family a better life? How can anyone understand the hardships facing a single mother who is poor and uneducated and so far away from home?”

School officials knew Julia Toledo. She felt comfortable asking them for advice about where to get food and clothing. They knew she had moved into a shelter, although they didn’t know why. Neighbors spoke of a growing rift with her sister. Her estranged husband, speaking in a television interview in Ecuador, blamed it on religion.

In poor neighborhoods like Bridgeport’s East Side, there are often holy wars for an immigrant family’s soul.

Maria Toledo, who would not talk with reporters, is an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Trumbull, and Julia had gone there too. Church elders visited in their homes.

But according to Falla, Julia Toledo hadn’t relinquished her Roman Catholic faith. She still attended Mass at St. Charles. She was seen at other local churches, too.

“I think she was searching for spirituality,” said Sister Brenda Lynch of the Caroline House, a neighborhood educational center for immigrant women. “Or maybe she was just looking for help.”

But none of the places she turned to sensed a crisis.

A school social worker was scheduled to meet with Julia and Maria Toledo on May 25, the day the younger sister died on the tracks. Shelter officials had arranged the meeting after Maria Toledo called looking for Julia.

Was Julia afraid of the outcome, afraid that with no place to live, her children would be taken from her?

Was she fleeing to another shelter, or to another part of America where she could hold on to her children, and maybe her dreams?

At Caroline House, she listed her occupation as “cortar pelo”--hairdresser. She proudly hung a beautician’s certificate from Ecuador in her apartment. But she knew she needed English to work as a beautician, to earn anything more than her wages as a janitor at Fairfield University. She studied English diligently at Caroline House in morning classes, before heading to work the 4 p.m. shift.

“She refused to speak Spanish. She wanted to grasp English. She knew how important that was,” said assistant history professor Walter Petry, who specializes in Latin America and who would readily have spoken Spanish. They would greet each other every day, exchanging pleasantries, as she started her shift in Canisius Hall.

Like others, Petry talks with anguish at how ignorant he was about Julia Toledo’s plight. She quit her job about a week before the accident, and though Petry noticed her absence, he said he never asked where she had gone.

“One professor came into my office in tears, saying we should have done more,” he said.

So many people are saying the same thing.

Outside the Shelton Street house, neighbors come in a steady stream to place flowers on the porch. A candle flickers on a plastic chair. Nearby, Pedro’s toy dump truck is filled with daisies. New memorial services are announced daily by neighborhood groups, schools, churches.

At the university, some faculty members are going further, crafting a proposal to grant the children of janitors free tuition once their parents work there for several years. They want to help others’ children follow in a direction Julia Toledo hoped to lead her boys.

“We have to do something,” Petry said, “to make sure she didn’t die in vain.”