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Elisa stopped attending school, and neighbors say they saw less and less of her. On Nov. 15, Carlos Lopez was jailed again for violating his parole agreement. And on Nov. 22, the day before Thanksgiving, all that was twisted in Awilda apparently snapped. One of her sisters, quoted in the New York Times, reported a chilling phone conversation with her that night: "She told me that Elisa was like retarded on the bed, not eating or drinking or going to the bathroom. I said, 'Take her to the hospital, and I'll take care of your other kids.' She said she would think about it after she finished the dishes."
The next morning Awilda called Francisco Santana, a downstairs neighbor. "She was crying, 'I can't believe it, tell me it's not true,'" he says. When he arrived at her apartment, she showed him Elisa's motionless body. He put his hand to the child's cold forehead, pronounced her dead and spent the next two hours pleading with Awilda to call the police. When he finally called himself, he says, she ran to the apartment roof and had to be restrained from jumping. When the police arrived, she confessed to killing Elisa by throwing her against a concrete wall. She confessed that she had made Elisa eat her own feces and that she had mopped the floor with her head. The police told reporters that there was no part of the six-year-old's body that was not cut or bruised. Thirty circular marks that at first appeared to be cigarette burns turned out to be impressions left by the stone in someone's ring. "In my 22 years," said Lieut. Luis Gonzalez, "this is the worst case of child abuse I have ever seen."
O'Connor sits in his Brooklyn office and fields calls from the media. "We made a mistake," he says grimly. "We will try to make sure this never happens again." Looking back, he says, "I should have thrown bombs in the CWA's doorway." The initials themselves infuriate him. At least, he says, "we will say our mea culpa. We're not going to run behind confidentiality laws and not admit we've made a mistake."
He is referring to an aspect of the tragedy's aftermath that has dumbfounded the city. The people of New York could do nothing about Awilda's drug-induced delusions or her timid neighbors. But they wanted an accounting from the CWA. Instead, Executive Deputy Commissioner Kathryn Croft has steadfastly maintained that state confidentiality laws designed to protect complainants prevent her from revealing any details of a case. Thus the public may never know how many cries for help the agency actually recorded or what it did about them. It may never know whether the CWA really made an extended effort to observe Awilda before making a recommendation to Judge Greenbaum--or whether a caseworker was really "too busy" to return a call.