Faith and Spirits Bring Solace to a Grieving Mother

Home Brooklyn Life Faith and Spirits Bring Solace to a Grieving Mother

Norma Cayetano walked slowly, balancing a steaming plate of food in each of her large, walnut-colored hands. One dish held a soft mound of rice and beans and a juicy slab of oxtail meat; the other was piled high with sweet plantains, macaroni and cheese and potato salad.

Cayetano set the plates down on a small glass table in the living room of her Brownsville apartment. Lighting a candle and a thin stick of incense, she waved the fragrant wand over the food, filling the heavy July air with the scent of pine needles.

The 52-year-old Guatemalan immigrant took a deep breath and addressed the young man in the framed photograph on the wall in front of her. “Here you go, son, I’m leaving the food you like,” she said softly. “Enjoy your plate, and if you’re bringing your grandma, or somebody else with you, then share. Eat, ok?”

Cayetano stood quietly for a moment, gently fingering the black cross that hung from a string of wooden beads around her neck. Then she settled into an overstuffed recliner to keep her son, Marcos Jr. – who was shot and exactly killed four years ago – company while he ate.

Marcos Jr., then 24, was murdered at dawn on Sunday, July 22, 2007, in the courtyard of the Riverdale Osborne Towers, where he had been raised. Police found little evidence and no witnesses came forward, so Cayetano’s case joined the backlog of open homicides piling up in a neighborhood where unsolved murders are not uncommon. With few facts for comfort – a suspect, arrest, trial, conviction or sentence – Norma Cayetano relies on the spirit world instead, finding a measure of peace there that the criminal justice system could not provide.

Alone in the apartment one day, Norma heard the refrigerator door slam shut, as it did each time Marcos was finished rummaging for leftovers. Later, she felt a rush of air when she entered the apartment, as though someone were walking through the door with her.

“I can’t describe the feeling,” Cayetano said recently. “But his spirit is around the house all the time. It’s like he’s still alive. He’s close to me, taking care of his mama.”

Sometimes, Norma feels a breath at her back while she is cooking. It is Marcos Jr., she says, patting her shoulder as he always did when he entered her kitchen. Lying in bed at night, Norma has felt a slight depression in the mattress and smelled the familiar scent of her son’s cologne. She knows it is Marcos Jr., come to sit down beside her.

“I feel more relaxed, more peaceful,” said Cayetano. “It’s like he touches me to help me fall asleep.”

The day before his murder, Marcos Jr., who worked as a maintenance supervisor at the Police Athletic League, was running errands. He went to the laundromat to wash his clothes and then to the barbershop for a haircut and shave.

At 3 p.m., Marcos Jr. knocked on his mother’s apartment door. “Where are you going, smelling so good?” Norma asked her son, catching a whiff of his favorite Dolce and Gabbana cologne. She thought he looked handsome in his crisp white t-shirt, jeans and a blue Yankees cap.

A neighbor is throwing a birthday party for his one-year-old son in the courtyard, Marcos Jr. told her. He helped himself to food from the refrigerator, and begged his mother to cook his favorite meal – oxtail, rice and potato salad – for dinner the next night. She said she would.

When Marcos Jr. left two hours later, Norma Cayetano removed a piece of meat from the freezer and set it on the counter to defrost overnight. She made a cup of chamomile tea, took two Tylenol and her usual cholesterol pill, and fell into a deep sleep.

Neither Norma nor her husband, Marcos Sr., awoke until 5 a.m. the next day, when a cousin banged frantically at the door, shouting the news that their son had been killed six floors below.

Norma remembers jumping from her bed and following her husband downstairs. She remembers rushing toward an ambulance that she thought held her son. She remembers the paramedic’s shaking head and pointed finger, and how she turned in time to see the police cover a body with a long, white sheet. Then Norma fell to the ground.

“I was out,” she said. “I was out of the world.”

On the fourth anniversary of her son’s murder, Norma Cayetano shakes the contents of a worn manila folder into her lap. A cascade of papers documenting Marcos Jr.’s life and death – immunization records, school report cards, newspaper clippings, a death transcript and receipt for funeral services – pour into her lap.

But it is the page that says the least that stops her cold. The complaint report from the New York Police Department’s 73rd Precinct bears no suspect information; instead hard, black letters spell the word “UNKNOWN” with mocking regularity down the length of the page.

In a study released last June, researchers at the University of Colorado-Denver School of Public Affairs reported that co-victims – a term used to refer to surviving family members and friends of an unsolved homicide victim with origins in research published by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine – have particular difficulty making sense of their loss given the enormous uncertainty that surrounds the crime.

According to the 20-page report, the criminal justice system plays a crucial role in survivors’ ability to make sense of violent crime. When law enforcement officials fail to solve or prosecute murders, co-victims may experience a phenomenon called secondary victimization, in which further harm is caused by the belief that justice has been denied.

Norma Cayetano, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1983 and gained citizenship in 1997, pursued information about her son’s murder for a year after his death. She made regular visits to the 73rd Precinct to inquire about his case but was rarely rewarded with reliable news.

Norma did learn that her son’s killer entered the housing complex through the eastern delivery entrance, shot wildly as he ran through the courtyard, and exited out the north gate. Marcos Jr. was sitting on a concrete rise in the middle of the courtyard when he was killed by a single bullet to his head. His friend, Javier (Wabu) Figueroa, who was seated next to him, was wounded.

For a while, rumors circulated through the Riverdale Osborn Towers about how many shooters were involved, and whether or not Marcos Jr. was the intended target. But Norma dismissed all this as speculation and eventually the talk dried up.

In time, Norma’s faith in the justice process waned, too. Though the NYPD defines all unsolved homicide cases as active, Norma says it feels like the investigation into her son’s murder ended years ago. She says she is resigned to living with uncertainty, but traces of anger still flash across her face when she speaks of Marcos Jr.’s death.

“I know that no one will do anything about this case anymore,” Norma said. “My son’s murder, it’s like they killed a dog and left it in the street.”

For two years, Norma grieved over her son’s death. She rarely left the apartment, preferring the comfort of her favorite armchair. Each day, she willed herself to shower and change her clothes.

Finally, a local spiritual group stepped in. Like Norma, its members are part of a small Central American ethnic group – called Garifuna – whose mixed ancestry includes African slaves, Caribbean natives and Arawak Indian tribes. For two nights of a purification ceremony, Norma was hidden in a thick cloud of smoke. The members joined hands and circled around her; they danced, sang, prayed, and reached their hands through the fog to touch her head and body.

After the ritual cleanse, Norma began to feel better. “I felt like I came from another world,” she said. “I was lost. They brought me back to life.”

Like many Garinagu – plural for Garifuna – Norma’s religious beliefs are a hybrid of Roman Catholicism and traditional Afro-Amerindian spirituality. She attends the 10 a.m. Mass in Spanish at a church down the block and has tucked wallet-sized pictures of Jesus and Mary into the corners of framed photographs of her son.

When Norma prays, the heaviness inside of her is momentarily lifted. “Without faith in God, maybe I would be in the crazy house,” she said. “Maybe I would have stood in the street until a car hit me.”

But Norma’s faith extends beyond God to belief in a reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead that is negotiated through ancestral invocations and spirit possession. In addition to feeling Marcos Jr.’s presence around the house, she also asks his spirit for protection when she leaves.

“I come here to talk to him anytime I go outside,” said Norma, gesturing to the shrine she built to her son. Upon it are Marcos Jr.’s basketball trophies, with his gold chains hung from the plastic figurines. Norma leaves a fresh glass of water here each morning for her son to drink.

“I tell him, ‘Son, bless me, I’m going outside. Bring me back home sound and safe,’” she recalls. “He’s my company, my cane to walk.”

In 2007, the year Marcos Jr. was killed, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that 38 percent of the 16,929 murders and non-negligent manslaughters that took place in the United States were not solved right away. One year later, an article in the Associated Press showed that the nationwide clearance rate for homicides had plummeted from 91 percent in 1963 – when records were first kept – to 61 percent in 2007.

Even today, arrest statistics in Brownsville under-represent the incidence of violence in the neighborhood since many shootings never result in arrest. According to a report by the Center for Court Innovation, the 73rd Precinct had 22 open shooting cases – including 3 homicides – by April of this year, but only two arrests had been made.

Kim Herring, director of the Families of Homicide Victims Program in Brooklyn, said that more than half of the murder cases that cross her desk each year are unsolved. Most families are looking forward to justice, Herring said, as though a guilty verdict will restore their loss. It rarely ever does.

“So the question is,” Herring said, “how do you learn to live with the memory of a loved one? How can you incorporate the deceased into your life?” For many of Herring’s clients, participation in religious communities increases over time. “After the immediate loss, when everyone else goes back to normal and a family member is still grieving, faith can provide an outlet.”

Victorino Elijio, the Belizean deacon at Our Lady of Mercy Church in Brownsville, was ordained two weeks before Marcos Jr. was shot. Since then, he has watched many of his congregants turn to faith for consolation when they fail to find justice on earth.

“It’s never easy for parents to bury their children,” he said. “But without someone to hold responsible, there can be no closure, no healing, and the pain lingers.”

Elijio remembers what he told Norma when he arrived at her apartment that Sunday. “Knowing may not be possible,” he said, “but God has promised never to leave or forsake us. Have faith, and you will find peace.”

On the second day of mourning, Norma arrived at John’s Funeral Home early. Standing over her son’s casket, holding his hands in hers, she spoke to Marcos Jr. for the last time.

“I told him, ‘Marcos, I know you didn’t see the guy that shot you, but if somehow he comes to your mind, please, come to me and reveal him so that I will know him,’” she recalled. “‘Don’t do anything to him; just let him go. God will take care of him and sooner or later he will pay for what he did to you.’”

At first, Marcos Jr.’s hands were cold, said Norma. But when she finished, they were warm and her son’s fingers tightened around hers. “I felt it,” she said. “He responded.”

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