On television, a local resident said, “Where was this girl’s mother? This is her fault.”
With her mother serving as an army medic in Afghanistan, Luz was largely unsupervised and went where she pleased. This didn’t go unnoticed around the neighborhood. She was a girl who had wandered away from the safety of the herd, a feral girl, easy prey. Did you see how that girl was dressed?
It happened in an abandoned apartment, on a dirty mattress in a bedroom with no curtains on the windows. A classmate’s older brother, a man named Chris, had invited Luz to a party. Chris and his friend Lamar picked her up. They drove her to the apartment, but Luz could see there wasn’t a party, just a group of men standing around, waiting. Chris told Luz to take off her clothes. Come on, Lamar said, we know you’ve done it before. He said if she didn’t do it, he would cut her. He had a knife, so she undressed and lay down on the mattress in the middle of the room and that’s how it began. Chris went first, then Lamar, then the other men, taking their turns one after the other. Luz stared at the ceiling, not wanting to see their faces, and waited for the hours it took to be finished.
On television, the mother of one of the accused men said, “That girl let them boys run a train on her.”
When the men left, Luz was alone in the apartment. She crawled into the hallway and pulled herself up. She wasn’t going to tell anyone about what had happened; they said if she told anyone they would kill her.
It was Chris’s little sister who told. She saw pictures on her brother’s phone of Luz naked on the mattress. There were photos of Chris on top of Luz, and photos of Lamar on top of her, and photos of other men she didn’t recognize. The girl posted some of the photos online and shared them with her friends. She told the principal, hoping Luz would get into trouble. Slutty-ass bitch. The photos of Luz and the men circulated throughout the school and on social media.
The principal called the police. The faces of Chris Martinez and Lamar Wilson were the only recognizable ones in the photos, but the police counted at least four other men who’d been present. When questioned, Martinez, twenty-one, and Wilson, twenty-three, said the girl had consented to sex. They said she’d told them she was eighteen. She liked to ride around in cars with boys, they said. She wasn’t a virgin.
In the newspaper, one of the mothers of the accused men said, “That little girl lured my son to the apartment.”
After their arrest, Martinez and Wilson gave up the names of the four other men, who were also arrested. The local news media covered the case. A community leader said young men of color were being harassed by the police. Threats were made against Luz, the slutty-ass bitch who’d gotten the guys into trouble. Social Services was considering moving her to foster care in another part of the state until her mother returned home, but it never came to that. One morning, Luz made her way to the Santa Mariana train station, wrapped in a shawl.
On television, after Luz had jumped in front of the train, a pastor from the local church said, “Why wasn’t this girl’s mother supervising her? That’s what I’d like to know.”
Luz’s mother returned home from Afghanistan to bury her daughter. Martinez and Wilson were released on bail, but the other men had been on probation and remained locked up, luckily for them. Soon after Martinez and Wilson returned home, they disappeared. No one had seen them in more than a month.
Every day for twelve days, the editors at the Los Angeles Times received a video via email. The videos, each titled “Death Porn,” were shot in grainy black-and-white and featured a different man sitting in front of a concrete wall. There was a tiny shard of light to illuminate the scene, just enough to differentiate the man from the shadows. The men were unshaven, naked, and sweaty, their hands and feet bound with rope.
Twelve men, twelve videos.
The men in the first two videos were immediately recognizable to the newspaper’s editors as Chris Martinez and Lamar Wilson. They both pleaded to be released, writhing and moaning against the concrete and restraints. A female voice, off camera, sexy, said, “Do you like pain?” Then the screen went black.