In Snow, in Ice, in Rain, One Mother's Trip

By Steve Lopez/New York City

The light is low in Adelaida Rosado's New York City apartment, and shadows fill her eyes, for she is a mother who loves an only son who has been called the devil incarnate.

Mrs. Rosado is 80 years old, and nothing good has ever fallen her way. But she will see him tonight, and that is enough for now. "I lost a daughter and a son, and my husband too. He's all I've got left." She shows you yellowed photographs of John, 39, and the shadows begin to recede, and then she shows you the Bible that gets her through the day. Barely 5 ft. tall, she slides into her overcoat and pauses to make the sign of the cross before a cardboard crucifix as she slips out the front door.

It is just past 1 o'clock on a Thursday morning, and the towering dominoes of Manhattan are falling past her as Mrs. Rosado's cab speeds from the northern tip of the slab all the way down to Columbus Circle. At 2 o'clock, bundled against winter, complete to her L.A. Gear sneakers, she will board a van for a five-hour ride to visit John in the Elmira Correctional Facility. Door to door, counting the visiting period and pit stops, the round-trip ordeal will take between 18 and 20 hours. Along the way, Mrs. Rosado, a diabetic, will inject herself with insulin, and she will try to steal some sleep.

In the 18 years John has been locked up, she has missed seeing him a grand total of three times. "I don't know of anyone who's been doing it as long as she has," says Tyrone Simmons, who runs a shuttle service called Operation Prison Gap and rewards Mrs. Rosado's loyalty by charging her only half the $40 fee. During the course of a week, thousands of New Yorkers visit relatives in upstate and western New York prisons. On Friday and Saturday nights, dozens of buses and vans stack up at Columbus Circle. Mrs. Rosado, who retired as a seamstress four years ago, prefers to go on a weekday and avoid the crowds.

"Snow, ice, rain, I don't care," Mrs. Rosado says. "I missed two weeks because of surgery. They gave me a colostomy. And one time I came here, and the snow was up to here. That's the third week I missed."

Mrs. Rosado has earned the front seat of the packed 14-passenger van as it sets out with its cargo of broken hearts across the frozen streams of New Jersey and the ghostly, moonlit fields of Pennsylvania snow country. She is going to see a son who did 14 years for a horrific sexual assault, was freed in 1994, then committed a string of crimes even more ghastly.

"A collective pox on the parole board that ever sees fit to unleash this demon on society again," New York Supreme Court Justice Edwin Torres said in sentencing John Rosado to 50 to 100 years in prison, calling him the devil incarnate. "And if necessary, I will arise from my mouldy grave to visit it on them myself."

Mrs. Rosado forgives what she can; the rest she refuses to believe. Born in Cuba, she left a bad marriage in 1957 and found another one in America. Her husband beat John from the beginning, she says. "And he beat me too." She says nothing about her son, or herself, that means as much as this: "I'm his mother. This is what a mother does."

At the prison, she buys his favorite foods from vending machines, then wipes a Formica tabletop clean and waits. When finally he appears, her eyes fill and so do his, and their hug seals whatever bargains they have struck.

John sits, and as he tries to convince a stranger that he was railroaded the second time around, the lie flickers across his face and then settles in his eyes. You want to stand up and throttle him--first for what he did to his victims, and second for what he has done to his mother. And then you want to reach down inside him and get to his father too.

But then he stops himself, and his eyes become clear and matter-of-fact, and he says, "You know what? I can't lie. I did some things, and I deserve to be here." His father's abuse is part of what he became, he says. "But not a major part." He put himself in prison, he will likely die there, and his mother, who amazes him, is all he has. "Her love transcends whatever obstacle I've thrown in front of her."

A steady rain falls all the way home, and the snow and ice fade into darkness again. Mrs. Rosado looks out the window in silence, hiding what she needs to out there. And then her thoughts drift to next week's visit with her son.