Ruidoso News (NM) – Friday, September 30, 2011
Author/Byline: Dianne Stallings dstallings@ruidosonews.com
Section: News
This is the final part of a four-part series on domestic violence .
Although her brutal abuser may still be out there, Celina De La Garza has moved on with her life.
“Sometimes you have to face fear. By me living in fear, it’s him controlling me again and I refused to be controlled like that, especially by him,” she said during an interview at the Nest domestic violence shelter. “It doesn’t matter if I speak out or I don’t speak out. If he wants to look for me, he will look for me. If it’s going to help someone, why not.”
De La Garza was not at the shelter seeking refuge, she was attending a meeting connected with Help End Abuse for Life and the Sweet Charity Boutique that she manages for the organization.
She’s a survivor of severe domestic violence that involved beatings, near fatal encounters and drugs. Recounting her treatment over the years at the hands of her ex-husband, De La Garza, now remarried, several times broke down as the memories dredged up old feelings.
Originally from Carls_bad, she was living in Roswell when her daughter’s father came back into town.
In the beginning
“We sort of ended up together,” she said. “The last time I had seen him, I was 18 years old. At first (when he returned), he was real nice and gentle and excited to meet his daughter. She was in her early 20s then.”
Her ex-husband found a job in California and the couple moved there. For a while, everything seemed fine.
“All of a sudden he started really being aggressive and ugly and it started from there,” De La Garza said. “He was verbally abusive and pushing and it just got worse. He was a truck driver and that was one of his ways of keeping me isolated from everyone. We were back and forth from the East to the West coasts and there was a lot of abuse during that time.”
Two incidents occurred in Colorado. In the first, some truckers saw him hitting and kicking her, and reported him. He ended up injuring a female officer, she said. The second time, a police officer witnessed the abuse and arrested him, but he was released.
“I didn’t want to press charges. I was wavering,” De La Garza said. “To this day I don’t know what happened in a lot of the Colorado issues, because I came back to Roswell to stay with my daughter. Then he moved to California back with his parents and he got a job and he seemed to be doing really well, so I went back, which was a dumb mistake.
“He was being very apologetic and telling me how much he loved me, how much he was wanting to change. He was employed by a really nice company with benefits and he had bought a vehicle. There were some signs he was changing and he started going to church. He had all the right words to say. He used the Bible and stuff. I did see a change in him. I honestly believe there was a change.”
Return to abuse
But then the abuse escalated.
“One of the setbacks there, he ended going back to old friends,” she said. “He was into gang activity when he was younger, so that brought him back to drugs and the gang life and it went downhill from there.
“Drugs is not an excuse for a man to hit a women, but I did see that it escalated even worse. I was hoping it would be different. It was very, very heartbreaking. I was working for Robinson & May as a bridal consultant and he literally pulled me by my hair out of (the store). And I worked on the second floor. And you know, not one person stopped to help me, not one at all. So I had to leave that job. I found another job and he pulled a knife there and the police got involved.”
She moved to a shelter and prepared to leave the area. But her brother didn’t want her to fly because he thought her abuser would check and be at the airport.
“So they decided to put me on a bus,” De La Garza said. “What’s really weird about this part, is that they didn’t escort me to the bus station and stay with me. They just dropped me off and he was there and I ended up having to go with him. I didn’t have a choice. You know, he would just give you that look.
“For two weeks my family didn’t know what had happened to me. There was no contact.”
After that, the drug use increased. He knew she wanted to leave, De La Garza said. He decided to come back to New Mexico because he thought if he got away from California and the old life, he could change, she said.
“In-between Colorado and California, we had been in New Mexico and there were two incidents in Alamogordo,” she said. “A cop again saw (him) hit me and he went to court and nothing happened. All three court systems. I don’t know. They should be harsher.
“I know I didn’t know which way was up, and I think I needed someone to intervene and say, ‘This is enough.'”
Finding shelter
It was during that period, she stayed at a shelter provided by COPE, the Center of Protective Environment in Otero County.
“I stayed there about five days and then went back home to Roswell with my daughter,” she said. “But then I went back with him.”
When her ex-husband was doing drugs, he would coerce her into joining him as a way of keeping her to himself, she said.
“If I didn’t, it was worse,” she said. “It was easier just to do the drugs. What was so sad was I found myself wanting the drugs just to get away from the situation. I thank God after the last incident, I was able to walk away from the drugs and not look back.
“I know for a lot of women that’s hard, because you get addicted to the drugs. But I knew that I didn’t want that kind of life. I was tired of that life. So I think in some ways it was easier for me to go forward and not look back.”
When the couple moved to Ruidoso, De La Garza was hired as a waitress at a local restaurant.
“We needed some kind of income, even though his mom would literally send us money all the time so he didn’t have to do anything,” she said. “To keep his hands on whatever I zwas doing, he decided to get a job there too.”
During this time, “(He) was very, very abusive,” she said.
An angel
One evening, her ex-husband invited a fellow worker and another friend to a cookout at their place.
“(He) started getting ugly and abusive and talking ugly to (the co-worker),” De La Garza said. “I tried to intervene, which was a big mistake. He started trying to hit me with a 2×4, so (the co-worker) got involved in it. (The co-worker) was stabbed that night and that was my way out. I call him my angel because if it hadn’t been for that situation, I don’t know what would have happened. One of his friends kept telling the cops ‘You need to get her away from him, because he’s going to kill her.'”
De La Garza said as in most of the other incidents involving police in different towns and states, she was never called to testify or informed of court dates. This time she was willing to press charges, but still has no idea what happened to the case or her former husband.
“To this day, I don’t know if he’s in or out of jail,” she said. “I was so shaken up and in shock, it’s taken me a long time to overcome the shock of it.
“The drugs that I used, your body goes through a lot when you’re on drugs and when you come off of it, there are a lot of things I didn’t know then that I do now. I had a lot to overcome, the drug abuse, the domestic violence , nowhere to go, no home, I had nothing.
“Even today, there still are some struggles, saying you can when all you heard was that you can’t. That’s one of the ways they take over. They isolate you and make you feel you are worth nothing and that you can’t do it and nobody would ever want you. He used to say he would ruin me and in some ways he did.”
Scared and lonely
Back then, the Nest domestic violence shelter didn’t exist and there was no local program. One of the restaurant managers let De La Garza stay at her house.
“They knew I was pretty shaken up,” she said. “I didn’t even want to call my family. I didn’t know how to deal with everything. Here was a man begging for his life. (Her ex-husband) was aiming for his heart and if this man hadn’t of slid off the chair, who knows if he would still be alive. If the hole could have gotten any bigger, I thought I was in there. I remember that night I didn’t know what to do. And I couldn’t even cry anymore. I felt really numb. Scared. Lonely.”
She stayed with manager for about one week, By that time, her mother-in-law was calling and blaming her. She called her mother and daughter, who said to come and stay with her in Roswell. After a year, she returned to Ruidoso.
“It was very healing for me in Ruidoso,” she said. “There just was a lot of healing. Even now, I can’t leave Ruidoso, because it’s been such a healing place for me.”
Gene De La Garza was a roommate with the injured co-worker, and she would check on his progress.
“We became really good friends and attended church together,” she said. “I started going to Gateway Church (of Christ) with him and to fellowship at the Alto Cafe.”
They eventually married.
“One of the things about getting off drugs, you have really bad side effects as far as anxiety and panic attacks, all of that stuff which I didn’t know anything about and Gene was able to help me through all of that. Even though I didn’t know what was going on with me. We’ve had a lot of struggles, but we’ve accomplished so much and become so much stronger, even though I don’t always see the strength in myself.”
Getting stronger
She still has to tell herself that she can do it, De La Garza said.
“But I do know I’m stronger and I’m gaining strength everyday,” she said “I’m trying to get my life not back to what it used to be, but better. One of my desires is giving back and helping women who are in what was my situation, helping them overcome their fear and letting them know they can do it, too.
“I’m telling my story because there is a need for the Nest. There has to be a place where women can go, even if they go back to their abusers, they still are here for a while and hopefully, they get a little more strength than they had yesterday. To finally just break that cycle and leave and not go back, has to start somewhere. Women have to gain strength and know they can do it and there is help for them. I didn’t have a place to go. Thank God, I didn’t have a small child. It would have been that much harder to leave. There’s a great need for the Nest and for COPE (in Otero County).
De La Garza became manager of the Sweet Charity Boutique that helps support the shelter through an encounter over an old Beetle Volkswagen her husband purchased.
“It needed to be repaired and I couldn’t understand why he bought it,” she said. “We decided to sell it and parked it in front of C & L Lumber (now Sweet Charity) and Debbie (Haines-Nix, past president of Help End Abuse for Life) was just fixing up the store to open. We had hundreds of calls for the Volkswagen and Debbie was one of them. My husband Gene saw her one day and apologized for parking it there.”
Moving forward
They began talking and Gene told Haines-Nix about what had happened to his wife. He said he needed to tell his wife about the boutique and shelter, that she might want to donate the car or help in some other way. De La Garza volunteered at the boutique a few times, but soon Haines-Nix called with a job offer and De La Garza was hired as manager at the store that opened in May 2010.
“It’s been really great,” she said. “It’s given me that much more strength, and getting back into a work environment and using my mind again and making decisions. All that’s been really good for me getting past the issues I’ve had to deal with. My husband and I always say you can’t live in past. Look to future. It’s not that the past doesn’t matter, because it’s been a learning experience for both of us. But your life is what you make it and the choices you make.
“The advice I give my daughter is make sure you know who he is, not just for a partner, but in general, for any women. I think women need to teach their daughters to make sure you know who he is. I’ve changed so much, and for the good, I think. It’s still overcoming and taking baby steps. That’s how I was able to get out and not look back, by taking the baby steps everyday and not looking back, and by saying I can. You look yourself in the mirror and say, ‘I am beautiful and I can do this. I can, I can,’ even when you think you can’t.”
Editor’s note: According to a report in the Alamogordo Daily News, De La Garza’s abuser/ex-husband was found dead in his cell in the Otero County Detention Center in Alamogordo on Sept. 6. He had been charged with first-degree murder, along with his son by another marriage. His current wife has been charged with tampering with evidence in the same incident. He was alone in his cell at the time of his death. His body was sent to the Office of the Medical Investigator to determine the cause of death. The results of that examination are not yet available.
courtesy of the Ruidoso News