The kidnapper sounded polite, even deferential, when she called on a Tuesday afternoon last May. Melida Lemus and Alfredo Godoy had left their clapboard house in Trenton, New Jersey, to pick up their two daughters from school.
Godoy, who works in construction, was late to meet a client for whom he was building a home extension, and his family accompanied him to the project site.
Melida and the girls—Kathryn, twelve, and Jennifer, seventeen—waited in the client’s living room, snacking on cookies and checking Instagram, while Alfredo walked through the house, taking specs: how much Sheetrock he’d need, how much spackle, how many two-by-fours.
In the middle of the tour, his cell phone rang. The call came from a Texas area code.
“Are you the father of two boys?” a woman asked.
“Yes,” Godoy replied. “Is everything O.K.?”
“I have them here at my house,” she said.
The Godoys’ younger son, Brayan, had just turned fourteen. Small for his age, he was greatly impressed by icons of the strength he hoped someday to possess: the Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Stone Cold Steve Austin.
Robinson, a year older, was reflective and soft-spoken, a soccer player and aspiring mechanic. They had grown up in Guatemala, raised by their grandparents.
In the mid-nineties, Alfredo had been working as a security guard at Exclusivas, an upscale supermarket in Guatemala City that sold name-brand U.S. goods, when he met and courted Melida, a round-faced cashier of eighteen.
Jennifer was born in 1996, and Robinson followed, in 1998. Both Alfredo and Melida dreamed of heading north, to seek out decent-paying work that would fund their children’s education.
The prospect of leaving the kids behind was anguishing, but they’d be well cared for until Alfredo and Melida returned with a nest egg, a few years later.
In 2000, the couple agreed that Alfredo would embark first on the journey to Trenton, where he had a relative who could find him a job. Melida was pregnant with Brayan; she’d wait to give birth before joining Alfredo, the next year. “That’s what we decided,” Alfredo told me, “with all the pain in our hearts.” Continue reading
Sources
- The New Yorker
- Image: The Guardian
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