‘It Was His Life or Mine’: A Drastic Plan Altered Her Course
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Version 0 of 1. The man would not leave Jacqueline Torres alone. He had harassed and stalked her every day for two years. He broke into her apartment and beat her, her lawyer would later tell a judge. Ms. Torres was so frightened that she quit nursing classes and a secretarial job to avoid him. When she told him she was marrying someone else, he threatened to kill her, she said. That was when Ms. Torres decided to get a gun. In the spring of 1992, she bought a used handgun for $75. When the man, Peniel Martinez, called her a few months later in July, Ms. Torres invited him to her Manhattan apartment. She had never shot a gun. She had just three bullets — what came in the pistol. “I had to stop him,” Ms. Torres, now 60, said at her former defense lawyer’s office in Manhattan, her service dog, Maximus, beside her. “It was his life or mine. I said, ‘Come and get it.’” Mr. Martinez worked in Ms. Torres’s neighborhood and had befriended her three children, bonding with her teenage son over their shared love of cars. He lavished gifts on the children, and he and Ms. Torres went on a handful of dates. Still, Ms. Torres, who at 18 had escaped with her children from a stormy relationship, remained wary. After a fire forced her to move from her Brooklyn apartment to a hotel on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. Martinez continued pursuing her. Ms. Torres and two of her children eventually moved to an apartment on the Lower East Side, where he threatened to knock down the door if she did not let him in, she said. “Did you think I wouldn’t find you?” she recalled him asking. Ms. Torres slept on a cot in the living room, acting as a sentry to the door. So on that July night, she braided her hair and dressed in a red and gold-filigreed kimono. She secured the gun in her thong, and her fiancé, Kenneth Ruiz, released on bail in a robbery case that day, hid in the bathroom to intervene if the situation went awry. When Mr. Martinez arrived, Ms. Torres turned the radio on and lit a cigarette to steady her resolve. Taking two drags, she walked toward him, slowly undoing her kimono. He moved forward, “and I saw an opportunity,” Ms. Torres said. She pulled at his shirt with one hand and reached for the gun with the other. She shot him just below his waist. She dressed, left money for her children and headed to the lobby to call the police, leaving Mr. Martinez slumped in her apartment. She did not know if he was dead, but she recalled hoping she had killed him. Downstairs, “I sat, shaking,” she said. “It was such a relief.” Later, Ms. Torres watched as Mr. Martinez waved to her from a stretcher. Soon after the shooting, Lori Douglass, the prosecutor assigned to the case, visited Mr. Martinez in the hospital. “He was mad, but he wasn’t like, ‘She should go to jail forever,’” Ms. Douglass said. “And maybe that was because he abused her and thought, ‘I got what I had coming.’” Ms. Douglass, who left the district attorney’s office before Ms. Torres eventually pleaded guilty, said that Mr. Martinez had not wanted to press charges, though court records show that he had previously filed an order of protection against Ms. Torres in the early 1990s. Patricia Bailey, the prosecutor who took over the case, declined to comment. Most documents relating to Ms. Torres’s case burned in a Brooklyn warehouse fire in 2015, but transcripts from her plea and sentencing hearings, as well as Mr. Ruiz’s, housed elsewhere, remained intact. Ms. Torres’s defense lawyer, Daniel Arshack, said in court that Mr. Martinez had stalked Ms. Torres, forced his way into her apartment and once beat her “serious enough to send her to a hospital.” Mr. Arshack added that Ms. Torres had brought charges, but that they “ultimately never went anywhere.” Mr. Arshack, then an 18-B lawyer representing the poor, remembered Ms. Torres’s case decades later. “She had been pushed past her breaking point,” he said during a recent interview at his firm. “There was certainly a history of abuse and an expectation that it would continue. And in her world, the only option she saw at the time was a violent response. She used the resources she had, and she paid a terrible price.” Her fiancé, who left the scene before the police arrived, was arrested the next day. Ms. Torres and Mr. Ruiz laid out the entire story to a prosecutor in a videotaped confession. Both pleaded guilty to attempted murder, conspiracy and criminal possession of a weapon, and according to transcripts from their separate plea hearings, Mr. Ruiz took the fall, saying, “I shot him with a loaded weapon.” Ms. Torres served the minimum, three years and four months. Mr. Ruiz, who had a criminal record with a handful of offenses, including robbery and criminal possession of a weapon, and had a couple of other charges attached to the case, served almost five years, according to jail and prison records. (He could not be reached for comment.) While in jail, Ms. Torres received several letters, including a birthday card, that Ms. Bailey said Mr. Martinez admitted to writing. “They go through how he wishes she could get less time for this, that he is sorry she has to go to jail for this,” she told the judge. “They are not threatening.” (Mr. Martinez could not be reached for comment.) After her conviction, Ms. Torres lost touch with Mr. Ruiz. She passed among four prisons across the state, eventually ending at Bayview Correctional Facility in the West Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, according to prison records. Her reputation preceded her, and she earned the nickname “Poison.” Ms. Torres realized she would regain her life outside a cell only if she redirected her anger, making a promise that she would change her life for the better. “I wanted to prove I could do what I said I’d do,” she said with an affirmative nod. “Because when I decide to do something, I do it.” So she took cooking and art classes during her incarceration, going on to prepare meals and serve them to the other inmates. Ms. Torres, who dropped out of high school at 17 as a single mother of two children, had also earned her high school equivalency diploma by the time she was paroled in November 1995. She remained on probation for almost seven years, living with her mother and taking jobs through the probation office, cooking and serving meals. Ms. Torres, who said she had previously smoked marijuana every day, promised her probation officer that she would quit, “and I kept my promise,” she said with a smile. “I stopped smoking, started looking for a job and started paying more attention to my children.” The felonies on her record dashed her hopes of becoming a nursing assistant. She married briefly. She took a job as a mail sorter for six years. She was laid off in 2006, starting a relationship that ended in 2016, after the couple were forced out of their apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, when the landlord sold the building. She lived with different friends and relatives, but eventually found herself on the street with Maximus, a white-haired Shih Tzu and registered service animal whose tag reads “Poison’s Puppy.” She slept on subway trains and park benches with Maximus, who helps her cope with anxiety and depression. She was denied entry by two homeless shelters and at least three other housing agencies because of rules against keeping pets, according to the program director at Brooklyn Community Services’s Transitional Living Community. In January, Ms. Torres and Maximus moved to the shelter, which supports single homeless women with mental illness, many of whom were domestic violence victims. In September, she moved into her own apartment in Brownsville, Brooklyn. Ms. Torres has been in and out of the hospital with health problems, including asthma and emphysema, which has kept her from seeking employment. She lives off $823 in Supplemental Security Income, about $250 of which goes to rent. To ease the transition to her new home, Brooklyn Community Services, one of the eight organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, put $250 from the fund toward supplies for Maximus in September. She has dreams of opening a dog hotel in a future home. “It hasn’t been an easy road, and I can’t say I have a lot in my pocket,” she said, turning to Maximus. “But I’ve done pretty well.” |