Child of a Lesser God

It was a modern-day horror story: a little girl hidden away in rat-infested squalor for most of her life. When the authorities took her away from her mother and grandmother, the nine-year-old had never been to school or played outside.

by Skip Hollandsworth

December 2000

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And so it went for the next year. Most days Victoria was so out of contact with her surroundings that she didn't seem to realize when someone was right beside her. Occasionally, however, she gave signals that she knew far more than anyone could have predicted. In the special-education classroom at the school Victoria began attending near her foster parents' home, a teacher gasped when she saw Victoria work a simple wooden puzzle designed for toddlers. On another occasion, the teacher noticed Victoria looking at herself in the full-length mirror. She leaned forward, then leaned backward, poking at parts of her body. Was it possible that this child was finally developing a rudimentary self-awareness?

At meetings with school officials, LaVallo and Professor Granof proposed that Victoria start spending most of her school days with nondisabled students her own age. It seemed like an impractical idea: What good would it do for Victoria, who didn't speak, to sit in an English class? "What was easy to forget was that Victoria had never seen the way normal girls her own age talked and behaved," Granof told me. "She wasn't going to learn what normal was by staying in a classroom filled with other special-needs children." Granof also knew there was a chance for her to develop her capabilities. One child Granof had worked with, a severely spastic girl with cerebral palsy who had limited eye and head movement and no ability to speak, was put in the back of a regular classroom in a tiny school district in Texas that had no special-education program. For two years the girl sat there, her head down, staring at whatever book the teacher stuck in front of her. She was ignored for most of the day. Yet, on her own, the girl taught herself to read.

Officials at Victoria's school district (they also requested anonymity to guarantee Victoria's privacy) readily agreed to LaVallo and Granof's proposal that she be put into the mainstream. A teacher's assistant was assigned to spend most of the day with her, to go wherever she went. A group of nondisabled students, known at the school as Victoria's Circle of Friends, volunteered to help her get off the school bus, walk with her to her locker, take her to her classroom, and sit with her at lunch.

Sometimes the situations were comically touching. In one videotape, Victoria stood in the front of the room to hold a poster another student had made as part of his book report. The poster kept slipping out of her hands and crashing to the floor while she stared idly at the ceiling. During the school's Christmas pageant, Victoria was led onstage by the teacher's assistant to be with the rest of the students. During "Jingle Bells," she excitedly jumped up and down and flapped her hands.

But the mainstreaming was unquestionably having an effect. In the cafeteria line she began to point at food she wanted. Although the toilet training was still a problem, she developed a kind of sign language—tugging at her pants—to let her Circle of Friends know she needed to be led to the bathroom. Granof saw one videotape in which Victoria was sitting with some girls at the cafeteria. They had torn up her sandwich for her, but Victoria would not eat. She kept tapping the unopened lunch box of a girl beside her. After watching the videotape, Granof was so excited that she called LaVallo, exclaiming, "Victoria was communicating. She was trying to tell her friend that she was not going to start eating until she got out her sandwich too!"

In the summer of 1999, nearly two years after she was found, Granof and LaVallo pushed for Victoria to attend a YMCA day camp for nondisabled children rather than a camp that had been created for special-needs children. Granof had recruited two of her undergraduate students to be with Victoria each day: Marisa Leon and Caryn Bross, both speech pathology majors. "We didn't have any idea what we were going to do," Leon later said. "We realized from the moment we met Victoria that we were in way over our heads." The first day at camp, Victoria, overwhelmed by her new environment, wouldn't leave the front entrance of the YMCA. She had to be dragged through the doorway. At the end of that day, camp officials said the experiment with Victoria was not going to work and that she could not return. They relented after LaVallo forcefully reminded them of their obligation to provide services to the disabled.

Bross and Leon had been instructed by Granof not to act like therapists with Victoria. So they decided to become her playmates, taking her fishing and swimming, asking her to play board games with them, shooting basketballs with her, telling her stories, letting her sit on their laps. "We didn't know what else to do except play with her," said Bross. "But all along, we had this spooky feeling that there was all this intelligence inside Victoria that she just wasn't letting out. There were times Marisa and I would be joking or talking, and we'd turn to Victoria and say, 'We know you know what we're saying,' and she'd start giggling."

Then, toward the end of camp, Bross saw something that would confirm her theory about Victoria. She and Victoria were in the bathroom. Bross took a big drink of water and swished it around in her mouth. Victoria looked at her and said, "Water." Bross was so shocked that she spit out the water, which landed all over Victoria's face.

"You have to understand that the reason I wanted to work with handicapped children was because of the play, The Miracle Worker," Bross told me. "I had seen the play and the movie countless times, and every time during the scene when Anne Sullivan puts Helen Keller's hands under the water, I'd start to cry. And here was the same scene happening right before my eyes."

A few days later, Marisa Leon went swimming with Victoria. Uncharacteristically pushy, Victoria tried to make her way to the deep end. As Leon held her back, Victoria said, "I wan go."

Victoria had just said her first sentence.

How could this be explained? How could a girl who had stayed mute her entire life—a girl whose communication age had been diagnosed at twelve months by one doctor—suddenly start saying words to two college students? Had a part of Victoria's brain been at work all this time, assimilating information, learning the English language? "I think what brought her out at camp was that she knew, for the first time in her life, that she was being treated just like other children," Leon theorized. "I know there are people who think Victoria has got to be retarded or autistic. I know there are teachers who think Victoria never really said those things to us, that maybe Caryn and I got excited and exaggerated everything. No, I promise you. That's what she said."By the start of this year, no one could deny that Victoria was slowly, tentatively emerging into a larger world. Not only was she beginning to say more words—her foster parents heard her say "get" as she pushed away dogs that were trying to lick her, and she said "more" when she wanted more food—but she was also acknowledging more of what was being said to her. When her foster mother would tell her to take her dirty laundry to the laundry room, to make up her bed, or to put her seat belt on in the car, Victoria often complied. This past summer, she returned to YMCA camp. The UT students were also there. Marisa Leon spent most of the time with her, then Caryn Bross arrived to replace her for a couple of weeks. The day Bross arrived, she told Victoria that Leon was taking a vacation. Victoria stood up, looked around, and said, "Where she?" It was, by all accounts, her second sentence.

In spite of this remarkable progress, the truth was that Victoria was still a profoundly disabled child, perhaps irreversibly damaged from her years of epic neglect. Most of her vocalizing remained a moaning, squeaking, incomprehensible gibberish. She continued to lapse into helpless arm-flapping or body-rocking stimming. She needed constant supervision. Yet, as Kristene Blackstone, the CPS supervisor, pointed out, "You cannot help but wonder what kind of child Victoria would be if there had been earlier intervention in her life. We'll never know. That's what is so haunting. We might never know what kind of potential she had."

It's sometimes hard to tell who has been more changed by the discovery of Victoria—Victoria herself or those who have gotten to know her. Many of the people who have worked with her cannot talk about her without choking up. "It's not just her past that deeply affects you," LaVallo said. "It's that Victoria remains so full of goodwill."

In September I was allowed to meet her at LaVallo's house. She was then twelve years old. Her brown hair was thick and worn shoulder-length. She weighed 116 pounds, almost 50 pounds less than when she was found. She was accompanied by her foster parents and, to my surprise, her mother, Diana. (Edna, who had suffered a stroke, almost never leaves the North Austin apartment.) Although Diana has lost her custodial rights, CPS supervisors, recognizing that she still deeply loved the girl, decided there was no reason to keep the two from seeing each other during supervised visits. According to caseworkers, Diana had become more cheerful since being liberated from the Blanco Street house. She also had been working with a parenting coach to learn to care for Victoria. As I watched, she brushed Victoria's hair and helped guide her into the kitchen with the foster mother to fix Victoria a snack.

Victoria was in a joyful mood, babbling, lying on the couch and kicking her legs, swinging her head back and forth. She was, however, still locked in her own private domain. She never looked my way once—I could have been invisible—and she made no attempt to communicate in any way with anyone else. I wondered out loud what would happen to Victoria once she turned eighteen and the state no longer controlled her future. If she remains in the condition she is in today, would she end up in a state hospital for the rest of her life? Or was it possible that she might live with her mother again? LaVallo told me that she would never go to a state hospital and would probably not live with her mother. Her name is on a waiting list to get into a community-based placement for persons with disabilities. "But we'll have to keep our fingers crossed," he said, "and keep on working for her."

After a couple of hours with her, I still had seen no sign that she knew where she was or who she was with. It was heartbreaking. I stood up and told her good-bye.

"Tell the man good-bye, Victoria," said her foster mother, guiding her toward me.

Victoria stared over my shoulder, and I thought she still didn't see me. Then, for an instant, her eyes locked on mine, and she waved at me.

"Do you see it now?" said her foster father. "The light inside her? I know she wants to say something to us. I know it."

But Victoria was already turning away, her arms flapping again, her head shaking back and forth.

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