Witness Faces a Long-Ago Horror

For two days last week, a 25-year-old woman told a jury in clinical detail how she had been fondled and sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend while her mother was in another room of their West Los Angeles apartment.

There was little to differentiate the story from a thousand other sad tales of mothers and boyfriends and daughters, except for how long ago it happened: 1982, when the victim, identified in court only as Alana, was 7 years old.

Now, to the young woman’s shock, the law had finally caught up with her mother’s boyfriend and had given her a painful choice: Live the nightmare again by testifying, or keep it buried.

Alana did not waver. “It’s something I’ve waited for, for a long, long time,” she said during a break in the proceedings.

On the stand in Los Angeles Airport Court, she broke down several times as she told her story, weeping into her open hands, lifting her fingers to a heart necklace given by her father. The ex-boyfriend, Jose Antonio Santa Cruz, 46, who pleaded not guilty to five counts of child molestation, sat motionless as her words were translated into Spanish through earphones.

“He told me not to tell her,” Alana told the jury. “It was one secret to keep from Mommy.”

Her mother, Leslie (whose last name is withheld from this story to protect Alana’s identity), testified that she met Santa Cruz in 1980 while he was staying with an uncle across the street. Leslie--separated from Alana’s father, whom she never married--was immediately attracted to Santa Cruz, then 29, who moved into her two-bedroom apartment in the Mar Vista district, agreeing to help pay the rent.

“I never thought that he would hurt her,” Leslie said outside the courtroom.

The three became a makeshift family. Alana giggled girlishly during her testimony as she described their “salsa Sundays,” when Santa Cruz would dance to Cuban music in the kitchen and mash bananas on a paper bag to fry for her.

Her voice became lifeless when she recounted how her relationship with Santa Cruz changed.

Dozens of times over the course of about a year, before and after dinner, while her mother was cooking or cleaning, Santa Cruz fondled the girl and had her perform oral sex in the master bedroom and living room, Alana testified. Against the hum of football and Spanish TV, he would stroke her leg, she said, her face twisting at the memory.

“His whole hand was as big as my thigh,” she said.

Santa Cruz’s attorney, Carol Whyte, challenged Alana’s testimony, saying it did not match the more graphic images she had recounted for police as a child. Alana responded that time had eroded her memory.

She testified that she thought she was getting special attention from Santa Cruz, and that it made her think she was more mature than most girls.

She told of bragging to a friend at elementary school, and of attending a school presentation where the concept of “good touch” and “bad touch” was described--a revelation that made her decide to tell her mother.

Mother and daughter cried in each other’s arms, she said. “I felt like I was telling on a friend. I thought he was just being a friend.” Several weeks later, Leslie took the girl to police, and then to counseling.

Santa Cruz later contended on the witness stand that those were weeks during which a vengeful Leslie improperly coached her daughter. He said that he had a good relationship with Alana, but that Leslie grew frosty after he could no longer contribute financially.

He decided to leave for New York. He volunteered to the jury that a few weeks before he moved, Leslie prohibited Alana from going into the master bedroom, but he said he didn’t know why.

“I did not molest her,” Santa Cruz said through the translator.

Defense attorney Whyte suggested in her closing argument that “the mother forced Alana to make the [police] report,” and that the daughter was incapable now of admitting that the report was false: “How do you turn around 18 years later and say ‘I was lying?’ ”

However, child abuse experts said in interviews that the mother’s delay in going to the police was typical. Mothers often hesitate to make their children relive the experience by talking to authorities and being examined by doctors.

The fact that Alana did not undergo an immediate physical examination weakened the district attorney’s case against Santa Cruz.

Alana testified that when she finally began counseling at 8, she first drew colorful pictures of herself, Leslie and Santa Cruz as a happy family. Then one day, she unexpectedly drew a single, graphic image of a part of Santa Cruz’s anatomy, covering an entire sheet of yellow paper.

By that time, prosecutors had filed charges against Santa Cruz and police were looking for him, combing nearby Cuban restaurants and markets. Leslie said in an interview that she also strapped Alana into the car and conducted her own searches.

Santa Cruz testified that by then he was in New York, was unaware of the charges and would have returned to deny them.

Only in 1999, after Santa Cruz was arrested and convicted in New York for the attempted sale of drugs, was his identity forwarded to Los Angeles police. In November, while in custody in New York, he was extradited.

Leslie, now 51, came home last fall from work to find a district attorney’s investigator’s card stuck in her door. She called Alana, who had recently moved to Las Vegas to find work.

Alana was “absolutely shocked, happy and scared. . . . It’s not something I really wanted to have to face,” she told the jury near the end of her testimony. “This is the first time I’ve had to deal with this since I was 15 and in therapy.”

In response to questions by Deputy Dist. Atty. Gina Satriano, Alana said she is still assaulted by familiar images and sensations of the molestation. Something as subtle as her posture in bed--sleeping with her back turned to her boyfriend, unable to see him--makes her uncomfortable. “It’s made certain things not enjoyable.”

As she told her story, her father, George Ferguson, sat outside the courtroom at his daughter’s request. He and Leslie (who, as a witness, was not permitted to watch) sat side by side for hours like statues on a marble bench, reliving long-buried feelings of guilt, helplessness and blame. An argument broke out, ending with Leslie in tears.

Delivering a Death Threat

Ferguson, 54, a store manager, is still bitter that Leslie didn’t tell him about Alana’s allegations until several months after Alana told her. Leslie said in an interview that she was afraid of what Ferguson would do.

“The first time I met Jose,” Ferguson said, “I shook his hand really hard and said, ‘If you touch my daughter, I’ll kill you.’ He grimaced, flashing a gold tooth. “If I had shot him, I would’ve been out of jail by now and we wouldn’t have to be going through this.”

Last week, Alana, her testimony completed, walked out of the courtroom, shaking her fists and squealing to her parents: “I did it!”

Then they waited while the jury heard the rest of the testimony and began deliberating Wednesday. On Thursday, the bailiff in Judge Antonio Barreto Jr.’s court assured the family that they could go home for the day; the jury would not finish until at least Friday.

He was wrong.

The jury agreed on a guilty verdict on two counts while Leslie was driving home. Her car phone rang, telling her that jurors were coming back to the courtroom. She turned around and headed back, bursting through the doors to see Barreto thanking the jurors for their service and dismissing them.

Her two-decade dream of seeing the look on Santa Cruz’s face when the verdict was read crumbled. Alana had already flown home to Las Vegas, willing to wait for the news by phone.

“I’m very angry,” the mother, a secretary who still lives in West Los Angeles, said Friday. “I should be happy, but don’t feel any happiness. At this point the anger and hurt overshadow the little bit of satisfaction that I could have had. It would have given some closure for me to hear the verdict.”

Barreto said Friday that the bailiff gave the family bad advice. Jurors were motivated to return a verdict because Thursday was their 10th day of service--the maximum that most employers will pay for.

Asked why he did not delay the reading of the verdict until the mother could return, the judge said: “I did not know how long it was going to take her to get back. . . . Every minute you wait is a minute in which some intervening act may occur, and if so the case has to be retried.”

Alana, who plans to return to court for sentencing April 18, when Santa Cruz faces as much as eight years in prison, said Friday that she was elated, having already regained “the sense of peace” she needed from facing him in court.

“I’m so happy he got charged. If I went there and he wasn’t convicted on any of the charges, I would have been satisfied just facing him. It’s made me a stronger person. Bringing it all back was really hard.”