Love Me or I'll Kill You

by Lee Butcher

  Paula said Chino thought she would marry him after she became pregnant. “He used the pregnancy to try to get me to marry him,” she said. “‘Now that you’re pregnant, we’re going to have a baby, we have to get married.”

  Paula refused. Marrying Chino, she said, would just make him more controlling. He would expect her to be even more obedient. Maher believed that Chino became angry whenever anyone challenged or contradicted him. If Paula wanted to be with other people, Chino became furious. Should Paula criticize him in any way, Chino hit the ceiling.

  “He thought he was this big macho guy,” she said, “and anything that didn’t go along with that would set him off or upset him.”

  They argued in the Bronx, where he worked as an air-conditioning technician, that he wasn’t a good provider for his wife and daughter. In response, Chino started to shoplift clothes for Paula and Ashley. Paula said she wanted him to stop, to earn money legitimately. She wanted to go back to school or to work, but Chino didn’t want that. Paula said he had such a short fuse that she “walked on eggs” around him. “Things kept getting out of hand,” she said.

  He told her, “If you let go, baby, I’ll hit you.”

  Following Ashley’s birth, Paula didn’t want to have sex, but she “went along with Chino to avoid trouble.” When she moved to Florida in December 1999, she said she was miserable.

  “I felt lonely and isolated. I cried a lot and I felt trapped, like there was no way out,” she said. “I had a baby and Chino was the father, I felt like I was stuck with him forever, even though I wasn’t married to him. I just decided to make the best of things and do whatever I could to make things okay.”

  At that time Ashley was the only positive thing in her life. She wondered what the future would be like for the baby, but put it out of her mind. She tried to focus on the present, hoping that Chino would change, become more mature, and they would have a normal life.

  Paula told Maher about the fight they had after visiting the beach when her family was visiting. The fight went on for several days, she said, and she hit her head when Chino shoved her to the floor. He grabbed her by the throat and said, “I’m going to kill you.”

  Paula said she gave up all hope of Chino changing. She felt more discouraged, frightened, anxious, and had headaches and constant stomach pain. After Ashley was born, Paula had hoped things would be better with Chino. Now she felt more hopeless and trapped: she couldn’t just leave because she had to take care of Ashley.

  Paula sought refuge in marijuana. She mellowed out when she smoked and could sleep. But not for long. Chino got angry over nothing. He punched holes in the wall when he became angry with her. Melba, her mother, tried to convince Paula to leave Chino and come home. Paula said he grabbed Ashley and yanked her out of her seat: “You’ll never take her away from me.” Then he left, taking Ashley with him.

  Paula said that she called the police. After police officers arrived, she told them what had happened, but they couldn’t do anything because no crime was committed. He was the father, they told her, and he had a right to pick his baby up and take her.

  Paula said she fled to New York several times. She hated their life together, but didn’t hate Chino. If she could only change, she said, everything would be okay. If she could just do what Chino expected and be the person he wanted her to be, things would be okay.

  Paula told Maher that she went to New York several times in 2000 because she was depressed and wanted to see her family. The visits were for two or three weeks at a time. Early 2001, Paula said, she felt so depressed and hopeless that it was difficult to take care of Ashley. Paula did the best she could, but still didn’t feel good about herself.

  During the first part of 2001, Paula believed, Chino was cheating on her. He stayed out late and tried to make connections with other women. Paula found that he had pornography from the Internet. Chino didn’t approach her for sex as often. After discovering the pornography, Paula thought he might have another woman. Paula said their fighting intensified, and Chino started to include Ashley in his threats. “You’ll never leave with Ashley,” he said. “I’ll never let you have Ashley. You’ll never take her away from me.”

  Paula told Maher that Chino hit her harder and more frequently. “I never knew what would set him off,” she said. “I tried so hard not to. I tried so hard to avoid this, but you could just never tell what he was going to do. Things were bad then and everything might have set him off.”

  Paula seemed confused at times. She said she lost interest in sex. Then Paula said Chino didn’t approach her for sex. She contradicted herself by saying he approached often, and although she wasn’t interested, she always gave in. All the while, Paula continued to blame herself for their problems. Her emotions were in turmoil.

  Paula had not been worried about Chino hurting Ashley, but in early 2001, she feared that he would. Paula said she couldn’t get away from Chino and couldn’t protect herself from him. How could she behave so that he wouldn’t beat her? Paula didn’t understand why he would beat her in the first place, since she wasn’t doing anything wrong.

  Paula said the robberies occurred because Chino lost his job for stealing a check. They were broke, had bills to pay, and no food for themselves or the baby. Paula said she was scared when Chino told her to get in the car—they were going to get some money. Since she had known him, Chino had talked about getting money through criminal activity. Chino bragged to her, “I can get money whenever I want it.” Paula believed Chino was planning to rob a drug dealer.

  Paula knew that Chino was a shoplifter, but she liked the things he got for Ashley and the house. She made no comment about the things Chino stole for her. But maybe there was more to what he did than shoplifting, she thought.

  Paula described the flower shop robbery, and indicated that she was an unwilling participant. She said it surprised her when he threatened the saleslady. Did she think of not participating? Maher asked. “No, he told me I had to be there and I felt I had to stay there with him.”

  Paula’s auditory hallucinations continued to haunt her in spite of the psychotropic medicines that she took. In addition, she heard Chino tell her he was sorry, and then she heard him laugh at her. The bed shook, she said, and the entire room turned green.

  The medical staff at the jail reported that she suffered from “major depression.”

  Maher saw Paula again on August 1, 2001. “Patient interviewed briefly in her cell,” he noted. “Crying uncontrollably. Some of her speech is garbled secondary to crying. She makes eye contact and then asked the interviewer his name. Alert, oriented, and extremely anxious.” The symptoms Paula experienced, Maher said, “go beyond normal feelings of being in jail.”

  On the day of the bank robbery, Paula said, she didn’t know what was going on; she just did what Chino told her to do.

  Maher asked, “Were you going to threaten people or hold the gun on people or that kind of thing?”

  “Pretty much. I don’t know. I don’t remember. He told me I was going to hold the gun, so I held the gun.”

  She didn’t think about refusing. “I just did what he told me to do. I wasn’t thinking about anything. I wasn’t thinking about that. I wasn’t thinking about what I could do. He said I needed to hold the gun and go in the bank, so that’s what I did.”

  Maher noted that people who are experiencing great fear have a sense of numbness and indifference to their environment. He believed that was Paula’s situation throughout the day of the bank robbery, and probably for a few weeks before that.

  “She was scared all the time,” he said. “She was afraid of what he was going to do next. She was afraid of being hit or other violent acts against her. It was a culmination of all the things he had done before, smacking her, hitting her, pushing her, beating her up in some way or another. She was terrified because he was angry about the dye pack exploding. She was doing everything she could to keep it from getting worse.”

  Paula was able to give only fuzzy details of
the robberies and the shootings. Maher said it was because she was in a “disassociative state of mind. Disassociative state is a condition where some aspects of the brain function are either disconnected from other elements of brain functioning,” Maher continued, “or are in some way put on hold and don’t work at all. A person in a disassociative state may be able to process information of an emotionally meaningful character, but not have any idea what their feelings are about it. Alternatively, they may experience overwhelming feelings that they can only describe in the most primary and basic terms without saying why or what it is related to [in] the events that caused them to have those feelings.”

  Maher was “very certain” that Paula was suffering from a memory disturbance. Paula suffered from “overwhelming duress” because of psychological and emotional effects of BSS during both robberies and the shooting, he said. Paula displayed classic symptoms of this psychological disorder. Paula wasn’t malingering—pretending that she was mentally unstable—or the jail’s doctor would not have prescribed the antidepressant Trilafon.

  Maher found that Paula’s psychological condition had “deteriorated significantly” when he interviewed her again, on July 30. He said that Paula was “agitated and distressed.” Paula’s voice sounded as if she were on the verge of hysteria, and her body language was that of a frightened person. The chanting, music, and voices were constant. She couldn’t understand what the voices said, but it was frightening.

  “It just seems like there’s a bad spirit, something bad, something evil that’s connected to all of this,” she said. Everything that had happened seemed to crash in on her. “I’m sorry for what happened,” she said. “I’m sorry that Chino died and sorry the police officer died. I’m thinking about this all of the time. In spite of everything, I still love Chino.”

  Paula’s feelings for Chino weren’t unusual, Maher noted. A battered spouse often mourned the loss of a relationship, even though they were abused.

  Paula talked for the first time about how the abuse had been a part of sex with Chino. “He forced me to have sex,” she said. “It aroused him when I cried. Sometimes he would strangle me for his sexual pleasure. He told me that I liked it. I kept telling him I didn’t, but he said I did. After a while, I stopped thinking about it and just heard him telling me that I liked it.”

  Paula said she was in the bedroom crying after Chino beat her. “He would come with a hard-on and just do it,” she said. “He would strangle me until all I could see was like tunnel vision. He would do it until I passed out.”

  Paula told Maher that Chino forced her to have sex with him. Maher said Paula didn’t realize that she was being raped. “It was very clear she didn’t want to have sex with him,” Maher said. “She thought it would have been clear to him because she was crying and upset. She thought that her crying was sexually stimulating to him.”

  Five months after Paula was arrested, Maher noticed a marked change in her.

  “Most people look worse after being in jail,” he said. “Paula looked better. She had gained weight, she made eye contact more often, and even smiled once when she was talking about Ashley. It was from living in a safe environment without abuse.”

  The voices had stopped by then, but Paula continued to hear “scary sounds.” But they weren’t as frightening as before.

  Paula was concerned that Chino was being presented in a bad light. “We’re always saying these bad things about Chino,” she said. “Deep down, he was a good person. He did a lot of positive things.”

  In the next breath Paula told Maher that Chino threatened to kill her and her parents. Her ambivalence showed in other ways. “I stayed with him because I was afraid to leave,” she said. “But when I did leave, I came back because I thought I loved him and could help him change.”

  Maher said Paula’s contradictions were consistent with BSS. The psychological duress she lived with, the psychiatrist said, made it impossible for her to think like a reasonable person. Paula had been conditioned to take everything Chino wanted as an order, Maher said.

  Chapter 16

  The facts for Paula’s prosecution were indisputable: she held a gun while the Bank of America was robbed; was with Chino when Flowers By Patricia was robbed; she was present when Chino shot and killed Officer Lois Marrero; she was with Chino when Isaac Davis was taken hostage.

  Even though these facts seemed obvious, the state still had to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. Ober and Pruner also had to anticipate how to counter the defense. What the defense wanted was to show that Paula was not guilty because she was under duress from BSS and that Lois was killed after the felony ended.

  As Pruner said previously, a person who helps commit a felony is guilty of murder if murder is committed during the felony. The law is a little tricky. It states that if a person committing a felony has found a “temporary safe haven,” even momentarily, then the felony is over. Whether or not Paula had reached a safe haven before Lois was killed was a major point for both the defense and prosecution.

  The defense contended that Paula had reached a safe haven when Lissette dropped her and Chino off at their apartment in the Crossings. They had showered, changed clothes, and Paula thought it was finished. The state would try to prove that the pursuit of the robbers began while the robbery was in progress and was ongoing when Lois was killed.

  A timeline for both the defense and prosecution would be critical to their cases.

  Using BSS as a defense was problematic. Prosecutors often call it the “he didn’t deserve to live” defense. In most successful BSS defenses, the battered spouse killed the person who battered her. Paula didn’t do that, but the defense wanted to show how the emotional and psychological duress she suffered prevented her from defying Chino.

  The state also intended to show that Paula was not a meek or passive participant in the crimes with which she was charged. Ober and Pruner believed that Paula was fully aware of what she did, and that she had actually goaded Chino into committing the crimes. They wanted to show her as greedy, a liar, and a manipulator.

  While depositions were being taken, a blizzard of paper was flying to the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit Court, where the trial would be presided over by Judge Rogers Padgett. A motion was made for a change of venue to move the trial outside Tampa. The defense argued that emotions were inflamed, there had been too much media coverage, and that Paula could not receive a fair trial. The motion was denied.

  A gag order, to keep court officers from speaking to the press about the case, was struck down after a challenge by several newspapers and television stations.

  Sometimes depositions taken by the state seemed to help the defense, while defense depositions sometimes bolstered the prosecution. Lissette Santiago, Chino’s mother, was deposed by Athan, with Pruner conducting the cross-examination.

  Santiago presented Chino as being headstrong, always wanting his own way, and that she was afraid of him. On the other hand, she indicated that it was Paula who tried to isolate Chino, not the other way around.

  “Chino, Paula, and Ashley pretty much kept to themselves,” Santiago said. “At the beginning, when they came down here, Chino was okay, you know. Then Paula came down with the baby.”

  In the beginning, Santiago said, Paula tried to isolate her from Chino and Ashley. “I couldn’t spend time with Ashley because Paula didn’t want me to,” Santiago said.

  “What did Chino have to say about it?” Athan asked.

  “Chino used to say, ‘Ma, Paula doesn’t want you in the apartment.’”

  Paula stayed home to take care of Ashley most of the time, until Lissette helped Chino buy a new Xterra SUV because Paula wanted to get out of the house. Rather than being ordered to stay in the house, Santiago said, Paula went regularly to a health club after Chino bought her a membership. Chino was almost “obsessive,” she said, about keeping the Xterra clean for Paula.

  Neither was Chino as poor a provider as Paula claimed, Santiago said. She noted that he made $30,000 in 2000
, a good income for Tampa; furthermore, she said, he didn’t have to pay rent.

  Despite the fact the Lissette provided the apartment Paula lived in free of charge, Santiago said Paula tried to keep her from visiting.

  “I couldn’t spend time with Ashley because Paula didn’t want me to,” Santiago said. Chino deferred to Paula, Pruner noted, contrary to her contention that Chino dominated her. Paula had convinced Chino, Santiago said, that she wasn’t to be trusted to take care of Ashley.

  “I got to see Ashley, but I had to see her when they were here,” she said. “Like, if I wanted to take her out, they wouldn’t let me. They wouldn’t leave her with me if they went out, they took Ashley. I said, ‘Leave the baby with me.’ They wouldn’t. She didn’t trust me. She told me, ‘I don’t trust you with my baby.’”

  The theme that dominated was that Paula was in control, not Chino. She was the one who determined what they did, not him. This was strengthened as Santiago’s deposition continued. Santiago said that once they got the Xterra, Paula wanted her to take care of Ashley.

  Santiago picked Ashley up in the morning and kept her almost all day. The little girl walked with her around the four properties where Santiago worked. Santiago loved having her granddaughter with her as she went from job to job.

  It seemed from Santiago’s deposition that Paula tried to separate Chino and his mother as soon as she arrived in Tampa. “I saw my son every day because he worked for me,” Santiago said. “Paula didn’t like me very much because I was close to Chino. Paula was very unfriendly. She didn’t speak to me.”

  Paula’s contention that Chino made her avoid speaking and making eye contact with anyone was also challenged. “She didn’t talk to nobody,” Lissette said. “She looked around, but was quiet. Paula’s been that way since I’ve known her.”

  Santiago also maintained that it was Paula who went into jealous rages, not Chino, even though he was possessive, too. “He came to me one day with a twelve-pack and he said to me, ‘Ma, let’s drink. We’ve got to talk.’ I said, ‘Fine.’”