The Urban Jungle

By NANCY GIBBS

In New York City parents are usually arrested for trying to kill their children, not for trying to save them. So when police were tipped off that a couple in the Bronx were keeping their daughter chained to a radiator, they moved in, figuring that they would be rescuing the girl and preventing a tragedy. Maria and Eliezer Marrero were hauled off in handcuffs; bail was set at $100,000, a sum fit for a murderer; and their daughter Linda, 15, landed in a foster-care center in Queens.

None of this would be especially remarkable, except that by the end of the week fewer people were praising the courts for saving the child than were defending the natural rights of parents to lash their children to radiators. As the Marreros tell it, they had tried everything to keep Linda in school, off drugs and out of the local crack house. When all else failed, Eliezer, a building superintendent, went down to the local hardware store and bought a 15-ft. chain. If the Marreros could not drive drugs from their door, they could at least lock their daughter behind it.

They wound up in a courtroom that has seen parents who threw their children out windows, dipped them in boiling water, beat them with electrical cords. The Marreros, who had never had any trouble with the law, were accused of unlawful imprisonment and endangering the welfare of a child. There was a special irony in that charge, since it was being leveled at parents who had been driven to despair watching as their daughter was seduced by the ghetto's most beguiling drug. "We are not criminals," said Maria. "There was nothing else to do."

As the story unfolded in the tabloids, it forced other parents to wonder whether, given the same choices, they might not have done the same thing. Friends and neighbors were accustomed to seeing Linda in chains -- including, the girl claims, the police themselves. Linda and her brother told reporters that she had called the police back in the summer and that when officers came to investigate, they found her locked up. Their response was to tell her mother, "Good job. Just keep her away from the phones." "They told me I was a lost case," Linda recalls.

To hear her story, they may not have been far wrong. She dropped out of school in sixth grade after throwing a teacher down the stairs, and started ; selling crack at 13. In 1989 she was placed in a home for troubled girls but fled after the first day. So her parents sent her to live with her grandfather in Puerto Rico. But when she returned to New York, she began staying out all night with a dangerous crowd. One time she disappeared for three weeks and was returned, bruised and beaten, by two gun-toting drug dealers demanding money that they said she owed them.

Maria and Eliezer say they had petitioned the city for help. They called the welfare agencies and urged the courts to intervene. City officials admit that children like Linda fall through the cracks. "We really haven't faced this before," said Marjorie Valleau, spokeswoman for the Child Welfare Administration. "I'd be hard pressed to name a specific program that specializes in the children." Which left the parents to their own meager resources. "They said what I did was cruelty," said Maria. "But when I begged them for help, they denied it to me. How can they say I was cruel?"

Last week Linda seemed to have reached the same conclusion. "My mother preferred seeing me here, chained, than dead in an alley," she said, lending a whole new meaning to the notion that parents need to set limits for their children. She even said she would be willing to be chained again. "As long as I'm with them, I wouldn't mind."

After two nights in jail, Maria and Eliezer returned home as heroes. Linda, meanwhile, had left the foster-care center and turned up in a local crack house. She said she had not been doing drugs -- she just went to see her friends, dance, listen to music, as though this were a natural place for a teenage girl's pajama party. "I'm desperate now," her father told the Daily News after he tracked her down. "I'm going to the hardware store to buy another chain."

By this time the drama had become New York's latest epic tale of urban tragedy. Talk-show producers swooped down to book the family for television, thereby ensuring that their private lives would not be the same until the lights had dimmed. When a photographer arrived at the tiny apartment, Linda, who still drinks from a baby bottle, was lying on the floor of her room under a dirty blue comforter, sucking her thumb. She refused to pose for pictures until her father cajoled her with hugs and soothing promises. "We haven't slept for days," Maria said, as camera crews from the local stations camped outside.

But Eliezer saw value in all the attention. By the end of the week his family's anonymity in this most anonymous city was gone, and city agencies were vying with one another to see which would do the most to help the family. The judge reduced the parents' felony charges to a misdemeanor. "It's good for us," said Eliezer, instructing his family to hug for the camera. Linda just lay down on her mother's lap. "Estoy cansada. Quiero dormir. Dejame quieta" -- I'm tired. I want to sleep. Leave me alone.

With reporting by David Seideman/New York