6 year old singled out by her own mother as her neighbors listened – The Story of Elisa Izquierdo

Warning: The video you’re about to watch contains details of abuse. Viewer discretion is advised. Last year, doctors never examined four-year-old J.C. Eubanks’ cuts and bruises. Child welfare workers failed to report six-year-old Julissia Batties’ black eye to authorities. Four-year-old Ayden Emerson Gonzalez’s case was closed despite his swollen eye and a lump on his head. All three of those children that I just mentioned would be beaten to death before the end of summer 2021. The young continue to suffer in a city that time and time again promises to keep our children safe. We keep being told that things will change, but we keep seeing the same thing year after year, decade after decade. So that begs the question: how many children have to suffer before the people in charge decide that it’s time to keep their word? Elisa Izquierdo was a bright, loving child who brought joy to everyone who came into contact with her. Her life was cut short at the hands of her own mother, and the City of New York was also to blame. Today on Evil Intentions: the story of Elisa Izquierdo.

Elisa Izquierdo was born on February 11th, 1989, in the Manhattan section of New York City. She was born to a Cuban native, Gustavo Izquierdo, and Awilda Lopez, a Puerto Rican woman from Brooklyn, New York. Gustavo and Awilda met at a homeless shelter in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York. Gustavo was a community aide at the shelter, working as a cook. He had dreams of coming to this country to teach dance. Awilda had an ongoing drug problem and was a resident of the shelter. When they met in 1987, they got to know each other and began a relationship. Two years later, they were welcoming a baby girl into the world. But Elisa’s first few moments of life would show obvious signs that the baby was born addicted to cocaine due to her mother’s heavy drug abuse. Custody was immediately given to her father, who suddenly found himself feeling like a fish out of water. He had a brand new baby girl and didn’t know the first thing about how to be a father.

Gustavo wanted to be the greatest father he could be and put all his efforts into the task. If baby Elisa was in distress, Gustavo was there to make sure she was okay. If she was teething or running a fever, he would make phone calls to people like his coworker Cynthia Null, who would advise him of the best steps to take. Gustavo had a lot of questions, but the people around him had no problem assisting. “We helped him with formula, we showed him how to change diapers, comb her hair. He caught on fine. He loved that little girl.” Gustavo took parenting classes at the YWCA and began to settle into his new role as a dad, and he loved every minute of it. He worked long hours at the shelter, earning nearly $1,700 a month to take care of Elisa. While working, he would leave Elisa with close friends he trusted, or sometimes he brought her to work with him.

When Elisa turned one, Gustavo enrolled her at the YWCA’s Montessori preschool. He made it his mission to send Elisa to school dressed well and with her hair always neatly parted and braided. He would iron her new dresses every morning and send her off to school, where she was truly adored. Everyone from the teachers to the principal found themselves drawn to her radiant aura. Elisa was treated like a princess, and nobody had an issue with that. The beautiful little girl was the center of attention and her father’s entire world. While raising Elisa, Gustavo wanted to spoil her, and they had a long list of great times they shared. He would take her to the movies, to the circus, buy her toys—whatever she wanted, nothing was good enough for his baby girl. When Elisa turned four, he rented out the best banquet hall he could find and had it adorned with chandeliers and decorations, celebrating Elisa’s baptism into the Catholic Church. “She was his life. He would always say Elisa was his princess,” said Mary Crespo, a close friend of Gustavo’s. Things were really as good as they could get. Nothing felt better to Gustavo than sharing that bond and caring for his beloved Elisa.

But in 1991, Awilda, Elisa’s mother, would petition the courts for unsupervised visitation with her daughter because she was trying to get her life together. Social workers had determined that Ms. Lopez was a changed woman and her drug use was no longer an issue. Awilda also made it a point to attend parenting classes through Project Chance, a federally funded parenting program for the poor. Here, she met the program’s organizer, Bart O’Connor, who stated Awilda seemed to love her children beyond belief. She had moments where she fell back into her old habits with drugs, but she would again fix herself up and get straight. He would vouch for her in court and say she was ready to be the parent Elisa needed. The home was always clean, her children were well-behaved, and they saw this as a sign that things were good in the home.

Elisa would spend the weekends with her mother at her lower Manhattan apartment. At the time, Awilda was married to a maintenance worker by the name of Carlos Lopez, who she married in 1991. They had several children together: Taisha, Carlos, and Raphael Lopez. She also had two other children: Rubencito and Casey. Their relationship was anything but stable. Carlos had done time in prison for stabbing Awilda 17 times with a pocket knife, right in front of Elisa. By 1992, during these weekend visits, it became apparent that Elisa was being abused. She would arrive back in her father’s care with fresh bruises and behaving unlike her usual fun and loving self. Alicia Stahl, a friend of Gustavo’s, recalls how the little girl would throw up and even refuse to enter bathrooms. She refused to play with other children, which was unlike her, and she always had new marks on her body. Awilda was constantly falling back into her old ways, seeking the comforts of crack cocaine and abandoning her children. Gustavo petitioned to end these weekend visits once he saw what was going on, and he was granted custody once again.

Sometime after Gustavo caught wind of how his daughter was being treated, he would fall behind on tuition payments to the Montessori school for Elisa. The school was so very fond of Elisa that they referred her situation to Prince Michael of Greece. He was a benefactor of the Montessori school. He cleared Gustavo’s $1,000 debt with the school, and in 1993, he offered to pay Elisa’s school tuition all through college. She would have been attending the prestigious Brooklyn Friends School. Prince Michael was very fond of Elisa and he saw her as somebody that could have been his own daughter. He cared for her so much that every Christmas, Easter, or just for no reason at all, he would buy her stuffed animals, clothes, and anything else she might have needed. Elisa would respond to this as a princess would, with thank you notes and pictures that she would draw him to show her gratitude. In 1994, Elisa took the screening exams necessary to be accepted into the Brooklyn Friends School. She passed, and she was scheduled to begin classes in the fall of that year.

But terrible news would soon be received. In May of 1994, Gustavo checked himself into a hospital due to bad chest pains and problems with his lungs. He would be told he had lung cancer and not much longer to live. Shocked by the news and still looking to do all that he could to protect his baby, Gustavo worked up a plan to take his daughter back to Cuba to leave her with his cousin, Elsa Canizares. He knew she would be loved and cared for during his absence, and he wanted the best for her. Gustavo bought tickets for himself and Elisa to depart New York City and head to Cuba, but on May 26, 1994, the very same day that they were supposed to leave, Gustavo lost his battle with cancer, leaving Elisa stuck in New York City.

When Gustavo died, there was a custody battle for Elisa between Awilda Lopez and Canizares, Gustavo’s cousin. Family friends, the director of the Montessori school, and Prince Michael all wrote letters and expressed the importance of Gustavo’s cousin being given custody. These pleas were ignored, and custody was awarded to her mother. Now Elisa, who had it all with her father and was protected and cared for, found herself stuck in a crowded home with five other children and a mother who had already been abusing her. When Gustavo passed away and Awilda gained custody, her behavior became even more erratic. She would tell friends and neighbors how frustrated she was with Elisa’s behavior. This puzzled people because they knew how good of a child Elisa normally was, but Awilda would say that Elisa was acting like a child possessed and might have fallen under her father’s evil spell. Now, this was confirmed by her own sister. From the moment Elisa was born all the way through 1995, there were several reports that would be made and ignored when it came to the well-being of a helpless child, and unfortunately, little Elisa had to experience the worst yet.

Elisa was singled out by her mother, and she was as cruel and evil as it could get. Her siblings were ordered to never have any communication with her while they ate and played together. There were times when she was confined to the home for 24 hours a day while her brothers and sisters went out to play. She was forced to watch her siblings eat entire dinners while she sat there and was fed nothing. Poor Elisa was forced to eat her own waste by her mother. Her head was used as a mop to clean the floor, and her hair was then chopped off. Due to the trauma she was enduring, over the course of months, Elisa developed a condition where she began to tear out sections of her own hair. Elisa was beaten and tortured in her mother’s care. Awilda withdrew Elisa from school, and the torture continued. She was violated with a toothbrush and a hairbrush. Neighbors would hear the little girl pleading with her mother at night as she was tortured. She would be left to sit in her own feces and urine. Complaints were made, and nothing was done. In fact, over the course of Elisa’s short six years on Earth, city authorities had been notified at least eight times.

Carlos, Awilda’s husband, was no better. To anyone outside of the home, he was a regular guy caring for his family. He supported Awilda through her tough times and came off as compassionate and loving. But when he was home, neighbors would hear plates and glass shattering. He was a temperamental man with little patience. He also took part in Elisa’s torture and beatings. In 1995, he would be sentenced to three years in prison for slamming Elisa’s head against the wall repeatedly when she was five. Elisa would often cry and plead for her father, asking where he had gone. She thought her father had abandoned her. Her mother would scream at her anytime she mentioned her father, telling her he wasn’t coming back because he was dead.

One night in November of 1995, Elisa Izquierdo’s suffering finally came to an end in the most tragic of ways. Awilda Lopez slammed Elisa’s head into a cement wall at full force. Her head had been slammed so hard that her brain hemorrhaged. One of her sisters recalls the sadistic phone call that Awilda made to her: “She told me that Elisa was like [__] 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 responded that she would think about it after she finished doing the dishes.” The next day, she invited a neighbor to inspect Elisa’s cold body, and to his horror, he knew that this little girl was gone. He observed what turned out to be brain fluid flowing from the little girl’s nose. He pleaded with Awilda for two hours to call the police. She refused. He called the cops himself, and as soon as he did, Awilda attempted to go to the roof and jump off to end her life, but she was restrained from doing so.

Officers told reporters that there wasn’t one part of the little girl’s body that wasn’t bruised or cut. Firefighters responded to a 911 call to their apartment at the Rutgers housing project on the Lower East Side near the Manhattan Bridge. What they saw inside, they say they will never forget. “It’s actually so horrible I wouldn’t want to go into graphic detail, but just to say that she had cigarette burns and scars all over her torso and numerous, uh, deep contusions on both sides of the body and her head. Her injuries suggest the little girl was abused over a long time.” Five other youngsters, dirty but unharmed, were found crying in the apartment. One of them led the firefighters to Elisa’s body. “First question you ask as the first responder is what happened, and the young girl just looked at Firefighter Karowski and said, ‘Nothing happened. She’s just dead. Nothing wrong with her, she’s just dead.'” She had 30 small circular marks on her body that were at first believed to have been cigarette burns, but it turns out these were markings from the stone in someone’s ring.

Elisa Izquierdo’s body was laid to rest at Cypress Hills Cemetery in Queens, New York. At her wake, her casket remained open. “Somebody in there watching those kids, why when they hear the kids crying, why right away they didn’t call the cops? Let them come in and stop this before this happened to her.” Family, loved ones, and others filled her casket with pictures, flowers, and stuffed animals. The makeup could barely conceal the horrific injuries she sustained. In a very bitter end to an already awful tragedy, Awilda Lopez was granted rights to Elisa’s remains. Even in death, Elisa was never reunited with her father. Elisa Izquierdo’s life came to a tragic end, and still in 2022, there are very few signs that anything has changed. From Dayan Bennett to Lisa Steinberg to Nixzmary Brown, the torture and deaths of innocent children in this city make it clear that a bigger issue isn’t being addressed. How many more kids have to have their lives reduced to a few forgotten news articles? Reverend Gianni Agostinelli told mourners that Elisa was not killed only by the hand of a sick individual, but by the impotence of silence of many, by the neglect of child welfare institutions, and the moral mediocrity that has intoxicated our neighborhoods.

Thank you guys so much for stopping by and watching today’s video. I really do appreciate it. Elisa Izquierdo’s case is truly heartbreaking to me because her case felt like the one that was supposed to change everything, even down to Mayor Giuliani and everybody who was in charge at the time dismantling the child welfare system and creating it from the ground up again out here to ensure the safety of these children. But in the year 2022, you see that a lot of this is still happening, and it feels like in a lot of ways it’s only gotten worse. My only hope in getting these types of videos out is hoping to raise awareness and making sure that people do something and say something when they see and witness these kinds of behaviors. There are red flags all around us, and nothing is more heartbreaking than knowing that you could have done something for somebody, especially a helpless child. Now, I pass the question off to you guys: how many other situations do you think this has to see before they get it across their heads that whatever they’re doing just simply isn’t working? Feel free to discuss in the comments below. Let’s just always keep in mind that these are still real cases with real people attached to them, and they are still mourning. Now friends, always remember: keep a tight circle, mind your surroundings, and protect our babies, because you never know who around them might have evil intentions. I’m out.