Seeking salvation

Alexis Padilla and her boyfriend, Cody Murguia, are foster youth who have aged out of care. They met through the extended foster youth program last year (Photo courtesy of Alexis Padilla).

As adrenaline and panic coursed through her veins, Alexis Padilla ran down the hall.

Just minutes before, she was helpless, pinned down, as her dad wrapped his powerful hands around her neck in a rage.

The 16-year-old had lived with abuse and neglect for 10 years. Lived with her father, Mark Padilla, getting drunk on Jim Beam and Cokes and forcing her to play Cinderella, forcing her to scrub the house clean to appease his O.C.D.

But she couldn’t live at all if he was trying to kill her.

Mere seconds separated her from her father, who angrily and drunkenly chased her down the hallway.

“Where is my dog? I want to get my dog!” she thought, as her eyes scanned the apartment for any signs of her pet.

With no dog in sight, Padilla instead reached for the door, desperate to escape. She ran out of the complex, the wind rapidly drying the red blood that was smeared across her face like a gruesome painting. She ran parallel to a creek that was behind the apartment complex. Finally, out of sight of her father, she collapsed.

Her pounding heart slowed and sporadic breathing calmed as she knelt beside the water, surrounded by utter darkness. Her shoeless feet rested atop the brown dirt. With an aching hand, she reached into her bra to pull out her phone, dialing help. On the other side of the line was Alan Velarosa — a person she called her “uncle,” but who was actually her half-brother’s biological father.

“I need help,” she whimpered. “I can’t move my hand, I need help.”

Her uncle told her to call the police, and again she was left in silence. As she wandered down the dirt path that led to El Camino Road, she took note of her shocking appearance.

“I must look crazy,” she thought, as her feet trudged forward down the darkened path. Her tattered shirt permitted a cooling breeze to touch her skin. Tears slipped from her watering eyes. A painful sob broke the silence of the seemingly deserted night, then, from a police car ahead, she heard an exclamation of, “What happened?”

The arrival of help simultaneously paralyzed her with fear. She pleaded with the officers: “Please don’t take me back to him, please don’t take me back to him.”

Padilla, now 19, would not fully recall the sequence of events that night until a week later, when she began to piece everything together in painful realizations. Attempts to reach Mark Padilla were unsuccessful.

Padilla said she traded the toxicity of her father’s house for the prison-like conditions of a group home. But for her, foster care was her salvation.

***

Early childhood

Padilla doesn’t have a lot of happy memories from her childhood — just vague images from her first five years with her mother, and a sense that her father wasn’t initially the abusive alcoholic who dominated her life. Padilla said that at first, her father was a wonderful father who took her to see horses and treated her with love. But negative memories dominate her mind’s eye.

“I can write down all my memories, and it’s not enough to fill up a whole page,” Padilla said. “But the things I do remember are crystal clear. I don’t remember ever having a birthday party, ever having friends over, I don’t even remember my dad buying me a Christmas gift once in my life. I remember a lot of the bad stuff that’s happened.”

Padilla was born in Gardena, California, where she lived until she was 5 years old. She lived with her mother, Lisa Morales, who had nine kids — and all but two from different fathers. The middle child of all of her siblings, Padilla said she hasn’t lived with any of them since she was 5.

“There was a time that I lived with my mom,” Padilla said. “It felt like a week that I was living with her, because I remember I was sitting in the room for the few days that I was living with her. I remember that day we went to the park and we went to the pool, and that night after the pool I was sitting in the room watching ‘Tom and Jerry.’ I saw a light and I looked over and it was a police officer and he took my mom to jail, and he was talking about how she flushed drugs down the toilet and I was just sitting there watching the whole scene.”

With Morales in and out of jail for drug use, Padilla said she had to stay with her mother’s friends multiple times and even the apartment manager for a period, although she is not sure how long.

“She was the devil,” Padilla said. “I stayed with her for a while, I couldn’t tell you how long, then after her, that’s when my dad came and got me. I didn’t see my mom for a long time.”

When she was living with the apartment manager, Padilla wanted to sleep in the bed with one of her younger half-sisters, but the manager would not let her. She forced Padilla to sleep on the floor, she said.

“She wanted the youngest to sleep on the bed,” Padilla said. “I got in the bed in the middle of the night anyways, and she threw me in the closet.”

Mark Padilla gained custody when Padilla was a little over 5 years old and moved her to Sacramento. Alexis Padilla said she remembers when he went to court to get custody of her.

“He went to court to try to take me,” Alexis Padilla said. “He said, ‘Her mom is in jail right now, she can’t take care of her.’ At first I wouldn’t call him dad, I would call him Mark. He wouldn’t let me see my mom.”

Alexis Padilla said that after over a year, her father finally took her to see Morales.

“She said that I couldn’t come home, and I said, ‘I don’t want to be with him, I want to be here,’” Alexis Padilla said. “My dad was already being mean to me at that point and I was already so afraid of him. After that, I didn’t see my mom for six or seven years. I think she called me one time when I was 11 on Christmas, which was really nice, but I didn’t have a way of contacting her.”

Her father’s alcoholism started just a year or two later. His marriage had ended because his wife didn’t like how much time he spent with his daughter.

“I remember the conversations distinctly, and just thinking, ‘What the heck, I’m just a little kid,’” Padilla said.

They divorced, and Padilla said her father transformed into a different person, in what felt like overnight.

Isolation in Carlsbad: Her teenage years

They moved to Carlsbad, San Diego when she was 11, to be closer to her paternal grandfather, Mario Padilla, but her extended family didn’t help. Her father acted one way with her, and another way with everyone else, like living with Mr. Hyde when everyone else knew Dr. Jekyll.

She said her extended family, including her grandfather, knew that her father was an alcoholic, since he had had an alcohol problem since he was 16 years old. The family still insisted he was a good father. The abuse was particularly hard for her family to believe.

“When my dad was in public, he wasn’t drunk,” Alexis Padilla said. “He was sober and he was like a different person. When I would tell people about him, it’s almost like they thought I was lying and that they couldn’t believe me. Especially my family, they were like, ‘What, I don’t believe that.’ He was an alcoholic and he abused me. There’s nothing to lie about that. People would say, ‘You’re dad is a good dad, he loved you so much,’ and I was like ‘Yeah, when he was sober, but how often was he sober?’”

Alexis Padilla said they were extremely isolated in Carlsbad, and her father tried to keep her away from others. Padilla said she had never had real friends because of her father’s abuse.

“My dad scared me a lot and he made me feel like I couldn’t have friends,” she said. “I remember in middle school I had this friend, and I never asked her to come to my house, because I was afraid that my dad would be drinking or he would start to drink or he would hit me or something. There was one time that I asked a girl to come over. Her name was Camara. I had to be 10, and my dad started drinking. He threw a lighter at me and I ducked, but my friend was right behind me. It hit her in her eye and she started bleeding from her eye. After that, I never had any other friends over again.”

She never wanted to let anyone see what she had to go through.

“I didn’t want anyone to see that I have to take care of this alcoholic man who hits me and drags me around,” she said. “The friends I did have, I was never really able to talk to them or tell them anything about my life. I had to miss school a lot. Since my dad hit me, I would have black eyes and busted lips, so I couldn’t go to class or anything. I would miss so much school because of it. A lot of my friends didn’t know I was missing school because my dad was beating me, they thought I was missing school because I just didn’t care.”

When Padilla was 12 years old, her father tried to become sober, and went to a sober living place.

“During that time, we went to the park every day,” Padilla said. “That didn’t last for long. After a while, he just gave up. He never really took me out or did anything with me.”

She tried to commit suicide at 13.

“I ended up waking up in the bathtub and I had cut my arm to sh-t — I have so many scars,” Padilla said. “I remember thinking, ‘My dad had to have found me like this at one point in time, because it’s been two hours since I’ve been in here.’ I was cold and stuff and my arms were purple, and I remember thinking, ‘Why the f-ck am I alive still?’ I went into the living room and my dad was still passed out on the couch. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know why I’m still alive, he wouldn’t care if I died, he wouldn’t wake up.’ I was so sad and depressed for so long, I have so much anxiety because of all of it.”

Mark Padilla went to culinary school and had worked at the Radisson hotel as a chef when Alexis Padilla was younger, then stopped working, Alexis Padilla said. They lived off of food stamps, disability checks — as her father was legally blind— and money from child support.

“He didn’t like to work,” Padilla said. “For the most part, his disability didn’t keep him from doing everyday things, though. He only wanted me because he wanted the check.”

By her teenage years, Padilla’s father was drinking tall glasses of Jim Beam and Coke every day, starting at 8 a.m., essentially cradling the bottle until he would go to bed at four or five the next morning.

“He drank every day,” Padilla said. “He would go on binges, go maybe two days without drinking, but that was always so terrible. When he went without drinking, he would sometimes get the shakes and cold sweats, and we would have to take him to the hospital.”

The run

The night he choked her, the night Padilla ran away, he was drinking excessively — beyond even his daily overindulgence.

“I think his regular was about three to four bottles,” she said. “When he was drinking four or five, that’s when he just didn’t give a f-ck.”

He was already belligerent when she got home from school. She found him lying on the coach, aggressively swearing. Knowing that he would yell at her if she didn’t begin cleaning immediately, Padilla hurriedly went to work in the apartment. Her father demanded pristine cleanliness — especially when he was drunk — and forced her to be the one to do it.

“Let’s play Cinderella,” he said, as he called her into his room.

This cruel game of servitude was his favorite.

“This would basically mean that I would have to get on my hands and knees and scrub the floors,” Padilla said. “I would come home from school and have to clean all of the glass dishes and everything everyday.”

That fateful night, Padilla missed the bathroom, leading to an uproar from her father.

“What the hell, are you going to f-cking clean this? Are you going to do this?” he bellowed.

Padilla said she was shocked, thinking, “I’m cleaning your room right now, I’ll do it after.”

She said his anger turned to rage.

“What the f-ck are you good for, you’re not good for anything,” he said.

Padilla went back into her room, crying from the vicious attacks. Although she said hearing his harsh words never got easier, she was used to the abuse. She continued to clean.

“I have a lot of confidence issues and insecurities,” Padilla said. “He would call me ‘tree trunk legs,’ ‘you fat c-nt,’ ‘f-cking whore,’ and just really rude names. Since he was my father, growing up, I thought it was normal. I would just say, ‘Sorry dad, it’s OK dad.’”

Upset by her pace and seeming lack of urgency, her father followed her into the bathroom, she said.

“He was running after me,” Padilla said. “I was like, ‘What’s wrong?’ and he grabbed me by my hair and twisted it around his hand and started hitting me in my face.”

Padilla said she escaped his grip and ran into her room, but he was following close behind. He grabbed her neck, and pulled her into his room, throwing her on the bed and pinning her down.

Reminded of the times the apartment manager would lock her in the closet, Padilla began to panic.

“I have claustrophobia now and I get really scared, and he knew that,” she said.

Padilla said she felt like she couldn’t breathe, as all of his weight pressed down on her body. As she began to scream for help, he started to choke her.

“I remember the way he was, the way he positioned himself,” she said. “His arm was right in front of me, so I bit his arm, and then he grabbed my hand and bit my finger. He drew blood from my hand.”

And that’s when she ran.

Audio recording of Padilla’s account: 17:55-21:45

Entering foster care

It was hearing the police talking that helped Padilla realize the extent of her abuse.

“When I got to the station, I heard them talking,” Padilla said. “They said, ‘We’re going to get him on child endangerment, child neglect,’ and all this stuff.”

The police officers told Padilla to call her father.

“I don’t know why they made me do it, but they made me talk to him on the phone in the police station. He said, ‘This is all your fault, I hope you know this.’ In the beginning I really thought it was my fault and that I should go back to him, but as I started to think about it — I never had friends or anything so I didn’t know what a family was — but my dad shouldn’t be yelling at me, shouldn’t be calling me names, shouldn’t be hitting me, shouldn’t be dragging me by my hair.”

Padilla listened as one police officer, shocked at what had happened to her, called to check in on his own family.

“One of them called his wife and was checking on his kids, and the way they were talking, I started thinking, ‘Wait a minute, if that’s how people should be, then I shouldn’t be with him. I shouldn’t be with this person who is abusing me, neglecting me, and trying to kill me,’ so I started realizing that everything that happened to me wasn’t my fault. I was only 16. I wasn’t supposed to be an adult at 16, I shouldn’t be expected to take care of everything.”

Her father, who already had a warrant out for his arrest, was not arrested that night, she said. When the officers arrived at the apartment, they opened the unlocked door, and walked in. As her father saw the police entering the apartment, he ran down the hallway, slammed his door shut, locked it and barricaded himself in, Padilla said.

Padilla is not sure what, ultimately, he got charged with. Attempts to find police or courts records have been unsuccessful. Senior Projects Manager Paula Crewse with the Carlsbad Police Department claimed the arrest record wasn’t public record, citing legislation that lets police departments withhold documents in pending investigations.

Entering foster care

Padilla was sent to the Polinsky Children’s Center, which is a San Diego County-run shelter that provides emergency housing for males and females, from infancy to 18, where she stayed for the next month. This marked the end of her abuse and the beginning of her struggles in foster care.

“They had doctors on site,” Padilla said. “They examined me and stuff, and they looked at my hand. Where he bit, they said he punctured the skin. I couldn’t move my finger because it hurt so bad. They thought he bit so deep that he cut into one of my tendons and I was going to need surgery.”

Padilla said that in the moment, she had not realized all of the injuries she had incurred from the night’s events. As the doctors inspected her, they noticed that her whole side was bruised from where he kicked her.

“The doctors were like, ‘Did he kick you?’ and I was just trying to remember everything,” she said. “I was like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t remember.’ When they were asking me, all I could remember was that he choked me.”

It was not until the following week that the night’s events started to become more clear, Padilla said.

“I was thinking about it, and I was like, ‘No, he f-cking bit me, he kicked me, he did all this sh-t to me,’” she said.

Padilla said she later asked her therapist why she couldn’t remember what had happened that night. Her therapist told her that people may block things from their memories in cases of extreme trauma.

“I didn’t like that,” Padilla said. “It made me wonder what else I have blocked out.”

Padilla said she did not enjoy Polinsky, because she felt like she did not have any rights.

“I couldn’t use the restroom without telling them — every time,” she said. “We had no locks on the doors, because there were a lot of different people who had experienced a lot more and their mentality wasn’t all there. It was like hell.”

From the moment she arrived, Padilla said she was required to wear the center’s provided sweatsuit, and was not even allowed to wear her bra with underwire because the center was cautious of tempting the male residents.

“If you needed to eat, they had eating times,” she said. “The earliest eating time was six, and if you missed it, you missed it. It was like prison. I like to eat food, and I couldn’t eat anything.”

Although Padilla said she felt controlled at Polinsky, she still preferred it to the dangerous toxicity of her home environment. At Polinsky, she was safe.

The group home

After Padilla left the Polinsky Center, she said she stayed at a boarding group home that had a school attached to it from 16 years old to 18 years old. The boarding group home, San Pasqual Academy, was in Escondido, California, and their mission was to provide foster youth with a stable environment while equipping them with education and skills for independent living, according to the official website. She said the group home was in a rural area with nothing significant surrounding it.

“Let me tell you, we were in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “I loved it, I was thinking we are in the middle of nowhere, my dad can’t find me. But then I realized that once I was in foster care, I had a restraining order against him. I was like, ‘No matter where I go, my dad can’t touch me,’ so I was like, ‘This sucks now, I don’t want to be here.’”

The group home, on over 230 acres of land, had its own health clinic, cafe, fire station, farm and orange grove, Padilla said.

“We had everything, there was no reason to leave,” she said. “We even had these people volunteer as grandparents for us.”

Padilla had a roommate and lived in a house with seven other girls. She said she lived with a 19-year-old, a 12-year-old, a 13-year-old, a 17-year-old and three 16-year-olds. There was female and male housing, and youth could stay at the group home from as young as 11 to as old as 18. Padilla said she had many unique experiences from the moment she arrived at the group home. She said she had to request a new roommate because her initial roommate watched her sleep at night.

Many of the youth in the group homes had been through traumatic experiences, so some were harder to get along with than others.

“I remember this girl Ricky tried to beat up a 12 year old,” Padilla said. “That was the first night I was there. I remember thinking, ‘This is crazy, like can I go to the office?’ I was in the crazy house.”

Padilla said even after she got a new roommate, she still had concerns.

“My second roommate, she was crazier,” Padilla said. “I literally found her sleeping on my bed one day, and I was like, ‘Why are you on my bed?’ There was no reason for that.”

Residents stayed in homes that had either staff or house parents, as some of the homes were honor houses and the remainder were regular houses.

“For us, we had staff 24/7, so we had three sets of staff,” Padilla said. “We had a staff that came in from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., then another one from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., and then the overnight staff from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.”

The honor houses had house parents, which meant that a husband and a wife lived in part of the house, Padilla said. The honor house parents had the main shifts from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., but from Monday to Thursday, students in the honor house had no parents and no staff watching them, so many residents would sneak into the honor house and throw parties or bring their boyfriends, Padilla said.

“It was really nice, I always wanted house parents,” Padilla said. “I never got any. I always had staff.”

Padilla said she hated going to school at the group home because she did not like her teachers. Once, one of her teachers and a group of students accused her of not fulfilling her duties as senior class president, which upset her greatly, she said. The group home would not listen to her complaints about authority figures, however, Padilla said.

“That was the only bad thing about it,” she said. “When you tried to tell them about how another adult was acting, they didn’t want to believe you.”

Leaving foster care

Padilla said she left foster care on Nov. 18 when she was 18 years old, and has been living in her apartment for about a year. She left foster care after graduating from high school at San Pasqual Academy.

“It was cool, because when you transition out, they (county workers) help you apply for all of the forms, FAFSAs, and the colleges you’re going to and all of that,” she said. “I applied for AB-12 before I even left, and they helped me find an apartment because I needed a place when I was going to Palomar instead of staying in the dorms. I was so happy when I got an apartment.”

California AB-12 is a bill that created the option to extend foster care from 18 years old to 21 years old for youth who were eligible, and took effect in 2012, according to a fact sheet about the bill.

Padilla pays a discounted rent — $400 instead of over $1,000 — and shares her apartment with a roommate who also pays $400, she said. Federal and state student financial aid covers her tuition, but she is required to pay for her books for classes at Palomar College, a community college in San Diego.

“There are programs,” she said. “If you don’t know about the programs, you pay out of your pocket. A lot of the foster youth that don’t go through homes and stuff, but just through foster families, don’t learn about a lot of the applications that they can sign up for.”

She said her paternal grandfather has helped her in terms of getting a car and helping her learn how to budget her money. Padilla said other foster youth don’t have that same help, which makes their futures more complicated.

Out of all of her extended family, Padilla said she talks to her grandfather the most. She said sometimes she gets overwhelmed, and stops reaching out to him or returning his calls. Padilla said she also talks to her mother occasionally, who now lives in the Mojave Desert.

“The problem I see in foster care, is it’s hard for them,” she said. “A lot of the group homes and foster parents don’t teach them basic things like how to do laundry, or they don’t learn how to drive a car. A lot of them don’t know basic things like cooking and cleaning. In foster care, they really teach you how to advocate for yourself, and they teach you what you did wasn’t your fault, but they forget to teach you all of the basic things. It’s like, ‘Yeah, now I’m in a good state of mind, and I know nothing is my fault, but sh-t, how do I cook this turkey for Thanksgiving?’ They don’t teach you that. It’s really bad for the youth that grow up in foster care younger, they’re at an age range where they don’t have their parents, and they don’t have people to teach them, so when they transition out, they are like, ‘F-ck, I don’t know what I’m doing.’”

Padilla said the ease of the transition out of care depends on many factors. While she has had the help of her grandfather and the funding from AB-12, she said she has experienced disappointment from the system as well.

“I transitioned out right before Thanksgiving,” she said. “The people at the group home told me, ‘If you need anything, call us.’ I called them on Thanksgiving because I had nowhere to go, and they said, ‘We’ll be there,’ and they never came. I was crying. It was the same thing for Christmas.”

The group home was supposed to help Padilla with things such as finding a job, helping her during the holidays or giving her a means of transportation through their after care program, she said.

“They didn’t help me at all when I transitioned out,” Padilla said. “The only thing that I can say is that when I was in the group home, they helped me with applying for applications. When I transitioned out, that’s when my grandpa became my best friend. My social worker didn’t even tell me that she stopped being my social worker until I called needing help on an application, and they were like, ‘She didn’t tell you? She stopped being your social worker like two months ago?’ I was like, ‘No, she didn’t tell me sh-t.’ It was really hard, I had nobody and so when I transitioned out, they were not a good help.”

San Pasqual Academy’s after care program for graduated foster youth includes: “support to transition from academy to college residence, staff available year-round to provide support to alumni in college experiencing crisis or needing help with transition planning, alumni housing and employment available at the academy during college breaks, and college scholarships for individual students and graduating classes,” according to a fact sheet Esther Broers, a Child Welfare Services policy analyst at the group home, provided in an email. Broers did not have specific insights into why a foster youth would have felt that help had been limited.

The future

While under her father’s thumb, Padilla said she lived without hope.

“Every time I got up in the morning, it was not because I had all of this courage, but it was because I thought that if I didn’t, he was going to hurt me,” she said. “I didn’t want to be vulnerable so he could do something to me. I honestly didn’t think there was going to be hope for me. I didn’t even know there was this thing called foster care. In all honesty, I felt like his mother. It was hard, it was really hard.”

Now, she’s planning her future. She’s mused over being a nurse and working in foster care herself, but ultimately, she seeks a lighter career path, one that will still do some good in the world. She’s taking general education classes at Palomar and eyeing cosmetology school with a longer term-goal of working in cosmetics.

“I want to be a cosmetologist and open up my own business,” Padilla said. “I want to specialize in darker skin tones. Everyone should be able to match their skin tone — I would love to make a line of cosmetics for darker skin tones. They don’t have a lot of options for darker girls.”

Padilla said she is mostly thankful for foster care, as she owes much of her life to the opportunities she had while in care.

“I love foster care,” she said. “Honestly, I wouldn’t have graduated high school and gone to college if it wasn’t for foster care. Just being in an environment where I knew that no one was going to hurt me and no one was going to hit me, it was everything. I felt like I couldn’t call the cops on my dad, but with them, I knew that they were working for me. They were like my family — I caught up in school, I graduated on time and I got the highest grades in almost all of my classes. There were other kids there that hated it, but for me, I was like, ‘I’m so happy, I have saviors, I don’t have to worry about anything.’”

Alli Burnison completed this story in Dr. Christina Littlefield’s fall 2016 Jour 590, investigative and narrative reporting class.