ELISA IZQUIERDO LIKED TO DANCE, WHICH IS ALMOST TOO perfect. Fairy tales, especially those featuring princesses, often include dancing, although perhaps not Elisa's favorite merengue. Fairy-tale princesses are born humble. Elisa fit that bill: she was conceived in a homeless shelter in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn and born addicted to crack. That Elisa nevertheless had a special, enchanted aura is something the whole city of New York now knows. "Radiant," says one of her preschool teachers, remembering a brilliant smile and flashing black eyes. "People loved her," adds another. "Everybody loved her." And, unlikely as it may seem, there was even a prince in Elisa's life: a real scion of Greece's old royalty named Prince Michael, who was a patron of the little girl's preschool. He made a promise to finance her full private-school education up to college, which is about as happily ever after as this age permits.
Fairy-tale princesses, however, are not bludgeoned to death by their mothers. They are not violated with a toothbrush and a hairbrush, and the neighbors do not hear them moaning and pleading at night. Last week, two months before her seventh birthday, Elisa Izquierdo lay in her casket, wearing a crown of flowers. The casket was open, which was an anguished protest on someone's part; no exertion of the undertaker's art could conceal all Elisa's wounds. Before she smashed her daughter's head against a cement wall, Awilda Lopez told police, she had made her eat her own feces and used her head to mop the floor. All this over a period of weeks, or maybe months. The fairy tale was ended.
America dotes on fairy tales and likes to think it takes action on nightmares. When the story of Elisa's death hit the news last week, New Yorkers and people across the country remembered the Kitty Genovese murder in 1964, and took to task all the neighbors who had known too much and said nothing. But, it turned out, many others had not been silent: Elisa's slow, tortured demise had been reported repeatedly. Over the six years of her life, city authorities had been notified at least eight times. And so outrage focused on the child-welfare system. How did it happen, the public wondered angrily, that Elisa's case was known to the system, and yet the system so shamefully failed her?
The Child Welfare Administration, which handles cases of abuse in New York City, first heard of Elisa on Feb. 11, 1989, the day of her birth. Her mother was a crack addict whose addiction was indirectly responsible for her pregnancy: she had lost her apartment, and in Brooklyn's Auburn Place homeless shelter she began a romance with Gustavo Izquierdo, who worked at the shelter as a cook. As her pregnancy progressed, Awilda was so lost in the pipe that relatives managed to wrest custody of her first two children, Rubencito and Kasey, from her. The social workers at Woodhull Hospital took one look at Elisa's tiny, crack-addicted body and immediately assigned custody to the father. Following standard procedure, they also alerted the CWA.