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Focus: Mi Escuelita, a place to heal

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Rocio Duncan chose the parking lot of the Imperial Beach sheriff’s substation because she thought it would be safe.

Her husband had threatened to kill her if she ever left him, and then she’d left, and now she was meeting him to hand over their two young daughters for a court-ordered visitation.

At previous exchanges, she’d brought her stepfather along for protection. Then she decided that was unnecessary. “Don’t worry about it,” she told him. “Nothing is going to happen.”

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But this time was different. A few days before, her husband, Marvin Duncan, had learned how much he was going to have to pay in monthly spousal and child support. Right away, he started in with Rocio. Drop the divorce, he said, and we’ll work things out.

After earlier separations, his pleas had worked. She wanted to keep the family together. But now she stood her ground. Talk to me through my lawyer, she told him.

He pulled out a knife he was hiding behind his thigh, grabbed her and started stabbing — once, twice, 13 times.

The two girls— Romina, 3, and Nadxieli, 17 months — were too young to understand the rage unfolding around them, but not too young to be terrified by it.

“No!” they screamed. “Stop! Mommy!”

Rocio Duncan collapsed to the ground, a 41/2-inch knife stuck in the back of her head. “I will always be with you,” she whispered to Romina as the older girl leaned over her. “I will always love you.”

Marvin Duncan picked up the girls and walked to the door of the substation. He repeatedly pushed the intercom buzzer. A deputy answered.

“I just killed my wife,” Duncan said.

He was arrested, convicted of murder and sent to prison for 25 years to life. Rocio Duncan was buried in Tijuana. And the two girls were cast into an uncertain future.

Children exposed to traumatic violence between the ages of 3 and 5 struggle later in school, studies show. They do poorer on standardized tests. They’re more likely to repeat a grade, to need special-education services.

They struggle at home, too. Consumed by anger, some become bullies, perpetuating the cycle of violence across generations. Others withdraw and are easily victimized. They wind up in foster care, get into drugs, have long-term health problems.

“The earlier we can intervene,” said Valerie Brew, child well-being director for South Bay Community Services, “the better.”

This is where Mi Escuelita Therapeutic Preschool comes in.

Breaking the chain

South Bay Community Services has been a pioneer in combating the impact of domestic violence and child abuse. In the 1980s, it began partnering with the Chula Vista Police Department on around-the-clock response teams that didn’t just arrest alleged batterers but also steered the victims to counseling, shelter, food and other assistance. The program was so successful it expanded to other police departments.

Administrators saw how trauma can ricochet through a child’s life and on into adulthood. A free, specialized preschool, they thought, might break the chain. When it opened 10 years ago, Mi Escuelita became the first and only school of its kind in Southern California.

Mi Escuelita looks like many other preschools. There’s a playground with swings and a slide. The children ride tricycles at recess. Inside the classrooms, there are tiny chairs and “cubbies” where the 72 kids enrolled in the program put their belongings.

But there’s a locked gate out front, and nobody gets down the long sidewalk to the school without an escort. The school’s address is kept private. And inside each classroom, there’s an area set aside by a partition. That’s where the therapists work.

The kids who come to Mi Escuelita don’t just need help learning how to use scissors, identify shapes and colors, or count to 10. They need help learning how to cope with their anger and fear. They need help learning how to trust again.

“We see a lot of aggression and violence mimicked in their play,” Brew said. “They tend to have an inability to self-regulate. They throw tantrums, scream and cry, run away and throw things.”

Mi Escuelita has individual counseling and group sessions. There’s a life-sized puppet named Wally used to help the children feel comfortable through “play therapy” talking about what they’ve gone through. There are parenting workshops and in-home visits.

“It’s about putting them in the best place that they can be,” said Pam Wright, clinical director at South Bay Community Services, “so when they start kindergarten and first grade, they are not only going to be ready to learn, but also be able to develop friendships.”

It seems to be working.

A study done at UC San Diego of students who attended Mi Escuelita and moved on to the Chula Vista Elementary School District showed they did at least as well academically as their peers. They advanced to the next grade at the same rate. They did better on local and state tests, especially in math.

“The Mi Escuelita program demonstrates clear benefits to children who may otherwise fall quickly and unsparingly behind,” the researchers said. “Continued commitment to (the program), and the children it serves, cannot be underplayed.”

Another way to measure the school’s worth: There’s a waiting list to get in that can have as many as 90 names on it.

But sometimes the need is so great, the trauma so profound, children get bumped to the front of the line. Children like Romina and Nadxieli.

Getting out

Early on, Romina described her mother’s murder and her father’s incarceration this way: “Papi is a bad man. They took him to time out because he poked mommy with little sticks.”

But that benign recounting masked a fury that later came out in other ways. One day she kicked a puppy.

“I knew that was a red flag,” said Juan Medina.

He and his wife, Elsa, are the girls’ grandparents. (Elsa was Rocio Duncan’s mom, Juan her stepfather.) After she was murdered, they became the girls’ guardians and later adopted them.

“There was no Plan B,” Juan said. But that didn’t make it easy. Juan, 67, was a program manager for an agency that helps the mentally ill find jobs. Elsa, 58, was the full-time caretaker for their 19-year-old son, Juanito, who has autism. They were thinking about retirement, not child-raising.

Again they would change diapers. Again they would worry about the million things parents worry about.

But first they had to get past their own grief.

They never thought much of Marvin Duncan. He and Rocio met in February 2008 while taking a salsa class at Southwestern College. He was 60, married with two adult children. She was almost 32 and single.

His wife had terminal cancer. That didn’t sit well with Elsa. “While his wife was at home dying, he’s out dancing,” she said. “I told (Rocio), ‘He’s not a good man.’”

But Rocio wanted children of her own. She saw something in Marvin that felt like a pathway to her dreams. After Marvin’s first wife died, Rocio moved in with him. In December 2009, Romina was born. They married in 2011, the same year Nadxieli was born. Family photographs captured happy times.

Problems surfaced. Her family said Marvin’s controlling behavior included taking food out of Rocio’s mouth while she was eating and throwing away breast milk stored in the refrigerator. Twice, Rocio accused him of domestic violence, according to court records.

In a journal, she wrote that Marvin had choked her after learning she had filed her income taxes separately. Another journal entry said he locked her inside the house, nailing the windows shut, hiding the remote control for the garage door, and taking her cellphone.

“Threatens to kill me if I leave him,” she wrote.

By early 2012, she had had enough. She moved out, filed for divorce and got a restraining order. She and the girls lived in a shelter for battered women for six months, then moved to an apartment in Imperial Beach. She was working as a special education aide at Mar Vista High School and taking classes to be an IT specialist.

“She was really happy about where her life was headed, to finally be rid of this guy,” Juan said.

During the divorce proceedings, Marvin Duncan was granted visitation with the girls, a few hours during the week and one overnight on weekends. The first few times Rocio met him for the exchange, she asked Juan to come, too. Then she decided it was OK to go alone.

On Feb. 6, 2013, she went to the parking lot at the Imperial Beach sheriff’s substation to hand over the girls. She didn’t know that earlier that day he had told a co-worker at his shipbuilding job that he wanted to “kill the bitch” because he was upset about the divorce and the custody battle.

She didn’t know that he had withdrawn $15,000 from his retirement account and sent a check to his son because he didn’t want her to have any of his money.

That afternoon, Juan sat down to watch TV and saw a “BREAKING NEWS” alert scroll across the bottom of the screen. The scene being broadcast was from a helicopter hovering over the sheriff’s substation.

He saw Rocio’s black Kia Sorrento. He saw Marvin’s white Nissan pickup. He saw the blurred image of a body on the pavement.

He got in his car and raced to the substation, less than a mile away. Deputies had blocked off the parking lot and wouldn’t let him through. He needed to confirm what had happened. He asked the deputy if there were little girls involved..

The deputy said yes, two girls were taken into protective custody.

“That did it for me,” Juan said. “I knew now for sure it was her.”

Learning to cope

The girls clung to their grandmother, Elsa, the way koalas cling to tree trunks. They wouldn’t let her out of their sight. At night, she had to be in the same bed with them, their sleep interrupted by nightmares and bed-wetting.

Romina flew into rages, spitting, screaming, scratching the walls, breaking things. “Sometimes she literally vomits out trauma,” Juan said. The outbursts would frighten Juanito, the son with autism, and send him into spells of jumping up and down and flapping his hands.

“I had to inform the neighbors that we weren’t torturing our children because it was so loud,” Juan said.

They were feeling overwhelmed. “How do we help them get through this?” they wondered.

A friend told them about Mi Escuelita.

The bilingual preschool, funded largely by First 5 San Diego grants from foundations and individual donors, is free to the families and runs all day, all year. Students can be referred from anywhere in the county, but most come from the South Bay.

“There was hope with Mi Escuelita that things were going to get better,” Elsa said. She found it comforting that all the children had suffered some sort of trauma. She knew the girls would fit in.

Teachers use a curriculum called The Incredible Years that features monthly themes aimed at helping children understand and express their feelings. The staff is trained in recognizing the effects of trauma.

In individual and group counseling, the therapists help students process what they’ve been through and build a sense of control over their lives and behaviors. “Once they get the sense that it’s a safety zone,” said Wright, the clinical director, “the kids start opening up to their trauma.”

That’s what happened with Romina, who was shy and withdrawn when she first arrived at the school. “She would answer your questions but was a little cautious,” said Nancy Pratt, the school’s program director. “As the trust started to build, she accepted us and started sharing a lot of details about what she witnessed.”

Sometimes those details would come out in the now 6-year-old’s drawings. Pictures of veiled princesses dressed in purple and pink morphed into images of knives, blood and bodies. At any given time, according to Pratt, a trigger “allows a child to share a memory from their trauma.”

When those triggers happened at home, Juan and Elsa — trained by the staff at the preschool — were better able to help Romina control the emotions that led to outbursts, they said.

Nadxieli wasn’t old enough to enroll at Mi Escuelita right after the murder, but she visited her older sister, and when it was her turn to go, she was less anxious. “She responded well to the coping (strategies), the therapists and the teachers,” Pratt said. Now almost 5, she’ll graduate from the preschool next year.

Her drawings aren’t as violent as her sister’s, but she documents the loss in other ways. One day at school, the children in her class gathered in a circle to hear a story. The teacher had brought in a suitcase as a prop. She told the kids to draw a picture of what they would put in their suitcase if they went on vacation.

Nadxieli drew a picture with family members, money and “fresh fish” in it, smiling when she finished. Her mom used to make fish for dinner.

Ask Elsa what the school has meant to her family and she taps her chest, near her heart. “Mi Escuelita, for me — it’s my life,” she said. “It’s where I found a lot of support, love for my girls, and understanding.”

Unexpected reminders

More than three years have passed since the murder, but nobody talks about closure.

“The hurt of losing a child — that’s never going to go away,” Juan said. “The hurt I see in my wife over the death of her daughter — that’s always going to be there. But the resiliency to go forward, that’s what we really must engage in. That’s what we really have to build.”

Elsa wears a purple bracelet with a photo of herself and Rocio on it. “Every day I wake up and go to sleep thinking about her,” she said. “I’ll miss her all my life.”

When the girls moved in with them, their house in Imperial Beach wasn’t big enough, so they bought a larger one in Otay Mesa. In its own way, it’s a reminder of what happened: It was purchased with the proceeds from a life insurance policy Rocio had.

They know from experience that other reminders will come at unexpected times and in unexpected ways. Two weeks after Rocio died, a letter arrived. She’d been approved for a college scholarship to continue her IT studies. That made them sad, but also proud.

Another letter came with a report from a psychologist who had seen Marvin Duncan, Rocio’s husband, in preparation for a child-custody hearing scheduled for two days after the slaying. “You would be an excellent influence in your daughters’ upbringing,” the evaluation said. “They would benefit from your proven parenting skills.”

That one left them speechless.

There’s a lot they’ll never understand, they said. After Marvin Duncan pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, he was interviewed by a probation officer. “Killing her in that parking lot was a message,” Duncan said. “She thought she was safe at that police station. Now she’s in hell looking up.”

Juan said it’s “hard to imagine such hate.”

So he and Elsa try to steer themselves, and the girls, toward happier memories. One bedroom in the house is a shrine to Rocio, decorated with photos: In her wedding dress, on the beach with Romina when she was pregnant with Nadxieli, together with both girls.

One day Elsa plans to pass along to the girls the albums their mother made of them when they were babies. Inside, Rocio wrote about her hopes for their futures: that they go to college, have worthwhile careers, be independent. That they value themselves and learn from their mistakes.

“Appreciate life,” she wrote. “Treasure the things you have and fight for what you want.”

One of Rocio’s dreams was to have the girls take ice skating lessons. She’d become a fan of the sport watching the Winter Olympics. After she died, Juan began taking the girls to a local rink. It feels to him like a promise being kept.

Now retired, Juan regularly honors Rocio in another way. He makes presentations during domestic violence training for probation officers.

“I share our story and point out some red flags that we missed,” he said. “I talk about my experiences not as an expert, but as a witness to how things unfolded before our very eyes.”

During every presentation, there comes a time when photos from the crime scene are about to be shown. “Juan,” the lead trainer tells him, “you don’t want to be here for this.”

He doesn’t. He leaves.

Juan said he would like to see legislation passed that puts more teeth in restraining orders, perhaps something that provides protective supervision during child-custody exchanges. He’d call it Rocio’s Law.

“As a community, we’re not sending that message out of the pain, the hurt, the damage that domestic violence does to a family,” he said. “We’re not doing enough as a community about the kids that are abused, traumatized.”

He said the preschool is an exception. “Without Mi Escuelita, I don’t know how we would have coped.”

The coping, of course, continues. Nobody pretends that any preschool can solve all the complex problems these children and their families face. Dark shadows will always linger.

“When they walk out the door, it’s not over,” said Pratt, the school’s program director. Support services are ongoing.

One part of the transition involves bringing back students who have been through the program to talk to kids who are getting ready to graduate and may be nervous about what’s ahead, unsure how they will do outside the protective cocoon of Mi Escuelita.

“Where do you eat?” the preschoolers asked one recent returning student.

“In the cafeteria,” she said.

“What’s a cafeteria?”

The girl had gone on to do well in kindergarten. She’d won an academic achievement award from the principal. She had a perfect attendance record. She could write sentences in both English and Spanish and count past 100.

Her name is Romina.

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