Christmas In The Garden Of Good And Evil

                                                         

Phoenix, Arizona
She was fourteen years old, had lots of friends, very popular, a good student and enjoying her first year of high school.  She drew funny figures on her book covers, giggled with her friends over something said on Facebook and excited about attending her first Christmas dance.  Last Tuesday morning she left home for school and would never be seen alive again.

There were already dark clouds hovering over Claudia Ann Lucero as she departed for school last week.  During that very week she had been molested by her mother's 31 year old boyfriend.  He had touched her inappropriately and forced her to touch his genitals.   She told her friends about it and had also discussed it with her mother.   Her mother's boyfriend had also texted her over a hundred times in the previous days, the texts alternating between sexual innuendo and physical threats.

Last Friday morning two ladies who lived in the same apartment complex were dumpster diving for cans to recycle.  They found the body of little Claudia wrapped in an old car rug, her school books gathered around her battered corpse.

It wasn't hard for police to solve the crime.  They found she had been wrapped in the trunk liner of the car belonging to the mother's boyfriend.  An autopsy revealed the little girl had been violently beaten and raped and his DNA matched semen samples taken from the victim's body.

Little Claudia would have been about ten years old when the Justice system began dealing with Alex Andrew Madrid, age 31, about the time little Claudia would have learned the truth about Santa Claus.   Between 2009 and 2012 Madrid had 11 felony convictions under his belt, including car theft, burglary, assault,  domestic violence and sexual assault on other women.  Even during his prison time he was sending threatening letters to his previous victims.  Several of Madrid's case assessments said he was a high risk probation candidate and would likely commit similar offenses.

                                                     

In Madrid's long history of crime and sexual violence, he had always violently resisted arrest, and, for those eleven felony convictions, the judge saw fit for him to serve only 15 months in prison.  It boggles the mind how our justice system could grant parole to a man as mean and evil as we are likely to hear of.

Claudia Ann Lucero will not make her freshman Christmas dance.  No need to shop for that special dress.  No more giggles over teenage "sillies".  She will no longer have a need for schoolbooks, for she has learned of the world's evil in the most frightening manner imaginable.  There are probably Christmas cards already addressed with her name on them, perhaps a present wrapped and placed beneath the Christmas tree.  And in the coming years her loved ones will ponder a time when she would have walked up to the podium to receive her diploma, or a day in June when she would walk down the aisle in the arms of her loved one; the one she was meant to spend her life with.

Instead, little Claudia will wear the bruises and broken bones of a violent assault, of death by strangulation, her innocence having been spoiled by a monster set free to roam and plunder the lives of those who wandered into his sphere. She will have been thrown into a dumpster like so much garbage, her life's worth discarded and forgotten.

I truly hope the trial judges who gave such lenient sentences to a true monster have a quiet moment or two, perhaps on Christmas night.  And I would hope they are forced to sit and contemplate their own blame for the tragic death of a little girl at Christmas in the garden of good and evil.