FERN

my brother will stand before you october 23d for sentencing. my other brothers and sisters, we have all been waiting for this day, more than five years for this one day. I have prayed for him , we all pray for him we all believe in him , all 7 of us. I thought alot about what I was going to write you . with so many unspoken and unknown things about my brother to say I held myself to only taking up one sheet of your time to tell you about my brother. I feel I am writing the letter of my life , a letter for a life. We are all very close and eachothers best friends and we are all survivors though it was a hard life from the beginning for all of us , I guess you can say we all made it except for Fernando , for some reason he was the one who fell through the cracks and ended up in a gang very young and paying a very high price for it. many times I have thought about the day we were all separated and I think , If I could take that day way would he be where he is today? I could change the past would the present include my brother in my life, in all of our lives?
We come from an abusive past and much poverty. My father was and still is an alcoholic and drug addict. He was very abusive towards us and to my mother who was and still is mentally unstable. We led a very secluded life and he controlled everything in it.It was really hard for all of us.In our house we kids held eachother together, we supported eachother through everything bad that was happening.The older ones took care of the younger ones. Never enough food often no heat or electricity, never enough of anything except for the unending abuse. I am the oldest , my name is Karina and I'm 33 , my brother and I are about 10 and a half years apart but very close. He went in right after his 18th birthday and just turned 24 oct 3rd in prison.
The summer that I turned 15 my sister Lily ,she is 32 now, ran away from home. When my father reported her as a runaway, she was, after about a week, picked up by police. When they tried to take her back home , she told them everything. I remember at the time I felt like I was the weak because I was angry at her for telling. Can you believe that? I knew instantly that our lives were going to change , that they were going to take us all away and separate us, who wants 8 kids? My sister told them about the beatings, the sexual abuse against me and her, that was the hardest having to talk about that. My father abused me sexually from age 3 to age 15 and my sister also. What kept me alive during those years was the love for my brothers and sisters. Soon after , DCFS came and much to my horror , only took me and my sisters and they left the boys. I will never forget that day, I never will. How my brothers cried when they saw us being taken away , our belongings thrown into a black garbage bag. They didn't understand what was happening. They had to stay there with my abusive father and mentally unstable mother , they didn't get to leave. Over the next couple of years I was in and out of foster homes as were my sisters, the boys suffered tremendously without us and bore the brunt of the abuse now that we were no longer there. I feel that all those years of heartache, mental and physical abuse led to my brother seeing the gang as a way out, a way to escape. He became involved with the gang at about 13 years of age and it just continued from there . My dad continued with his drinking and could never hold down a job , often taking money from my brother to buy food for mom and thew boys, it was an incredible amount of responsibility for my brother to shoulder but him being the oldest he felt he needed to provide, needed to do something.
I just wante to tell you these things because I am afraid that you will see him as a cold-blooded man that does not care about anything or anyone because that is how he has been prtrayed in the papers just by him having been in a gang. He is young still but he has been through more turmoil, more abuse, uncertainty, more loss than most people will ever experience in their whole lives, we all have. We are survivors , and we believe in him. We believe that there is still time for him to turn his life around. I know that he can be a good member of society.I know that he has it in him to one day lead a good life.Please give him one chance.Please let us all be together again one day, like we once were.We won't let him fall again. I promise you that. We all made it and we want our brother to make it too. I know that there are many victims in this story and beyond this story. My brother , no matter what, is a victim of his own life and a victim of the gang epidemic too. Everyone loses here , everyone has lost here, nobody wins. I beg that you can see beyond all that's been presented to youabout him up until now, I know that it's not good, I know that it's alot. I beg that you see him as a person that still can be a functioning member of society, someone that still deserves a chance. We love him, he's a good person, don't let his life go to waste in a prison forever. Please don't throw him away. I pray that one day he gets his chance to live becuase while he was free he never did.