A note came over the patio wall of a crumbling, fortress-like stone house on Mexico City's Avenue of the Insurgents. "Mr. Judge," it read, "please take us with you.'' A delivery boy picked it up and puzzled over the strange message. His boss took it to a police station. Soon two detectives knocked at the iron front door.
"Are you from Mr. Judge's office?" asked a girl's voice from within.
"In a way," said the detectives.
"My father went out. If he comes back and sees you here, he will kill us."
The detectives parked their squad car up against the patio wall, climbed on the roof, .jumped over the wall. When they came out, they reported: "What we have seen is not of the 20th century."
A One-Room World. What the police saw was something out of the Dark Ages: a family imprisoned for more than 15 years, a woman and six children whose entire world was a large, dark room surrounded by gutters filled with filthy green water. The mother had only two clay pots for cooking, a few plates, no silverware. Candles were the only light at night; the bathroom was a hole in one wall. Wooden tables were used as beds, stacked one atop the other like double-decker berths. The man who kept his family thus imprisoned was Rafael Perez Hernandez, 54, husband and father, by profession a purveyor of homemade rat poison.
When Perez came home, the police were waiting. At headquarters, the full, incredible story came out. A bitter, unbalanced man who had lost his left arm in a train accident, Rafael Perez did not believe in God, or doctors, or much of anything else. His first child was named Son of the Sun, and when the baby fell sick with dysentery, Rafael told his wife: "Nature will cure the baby." Son of the Sun died. A year later, Evolution of the World was born—to die soon after for lack of medical attention. When the next child, a girl named Untamed, contracted pneumonia, Wife Sonia begged again. "Here is your doctor," shouted Rafael, waving a .38 revolver in a gesture that marked the beginning of the long imprisonment. The baby Untamed (now 17) survived, as have Free, 15; Sovereign, 14; Conqueror, 12; Good Life, 10; and Evolution of Liberal Thought, who was born just eight weeks ago.
Curses & Scars. As the children grew up, their view of the outside world—except on extremely rare occasions—was through a hole in the iron door less than an inch in diameter. All day the family worked to help father make poison—from 5 a.m. to dusk. The youngsters got no schooling; their vocabularies were not more than 300 words, and they cursed as a matter of course. Their necks were dotted with small scars where their father had pressed his. knife a bit too hard instilling discipline: no whimpering for more food, no asking to go out in the sunlight to play.