Stronger Than You Think

Blog entry #18 by Jo Rodriguez

One of the difficult things to do as a survivor of domestic violence is to come face to face with the time that comes for parole review of their abuser. In my mind, when we speak up, we are speaking for all survivors, even those voices that have been silenced by their abusers. Every abuser is unique and individual and should be addressed as such, but they all have one thing in common….they all have crossed a line that they can not come back from.

I am alive today and grateful to God for that gift. That I am able to rise above so much suppression, My abuser is up for parole consideration once more and I chose to protest and use my UN-silenced voice.

Protest letter May 2020

Board of Pardons and Paroles,

My name is Jo Anna and I am the survivor of domestic violence, marital rape, aggravated kidnapping, and aggravated sexual assault at the hands of Esteban Gonzales. I am writing this letter of protest because I understand that it is a privilege for Esteban to be considered, but I am here to say to you that his behavior during the years that I knew him and leading up to his heinous crime shows a constant pattern of abuse and clearly no fear of consequence as he tormented me. As I also have a full understanding that the prison system is bursting at the seams and that some offenders may be deemed no longer a threat to society due to their good behavior while incarcerated.

I’m sharing some of my life snapshots with you to help you see that someone like Esteban will never change and will manipulate in any way he can to make people believe he is something that he is not. He would sit at church with me and our children and look at the face of God on Sundays knowing what he was doing to me with absolutely no remorse. I see the abuse more now for what it was, as when I was in it, it was not something I was willing to admit to myself and others around me.

I want you to know that he writes to my family, the family that disowned me, and the family that you most likely have letters from asking for his release. They have chosen to look the other way and believe him without knowing all the facts and details that you and I know. I have accepted the choices that he and they make and have moved on to make a better life for myself..

This does not excuse or minimize what he did to me in any way. May God strike me down if I say this without good intentions, but if he is released, he will be a threat to society and a threat to me. As much as I want to move past even speaking his name, I know him and know that he will do whatever he has been sitting in his cell planning for me.

I am prepared to protect myself when the day comes that he is released, but I ask that you deny this parole consideration and have him serve his entire sentence. It has taken me years to embrace the person I became after his attack and to find a healthy path of healing to allow me to not live in a ball of fear. He does not deserve to walk free with those that obey the law and have respect for life.

As far as if he would be a productive member of society and no longer a threat, I will share items to note below.

• The records that you have visibility show that his crime was more than “just having a gun” and I mention this because this is what he has led his family and mine believe, so I want this noted on the record that he continues to not take accountability for what he did to me and he continues to be manipulative even behind bars.

• He continues to write to my family to try and rewrite/deny and minimize the severity of what he did and make me out to be the liar and to discredit the facts. This is why survivors stay silent so often for fear of not being believed and because their abuser twists and turns the truth to benefit themselves.

• During the time frame between his public crime against me in 2004 and the year he was found guilty and incarcerated in 2007, there was consideration to allow him supervised visitation with our children at the Child Safe facility in Austin, Texas. He had to go through an interview process as part of the intake evaluation for consideration of services. After his interview, my attorney received a phone call from Child Safe denying services due to the fact that they could not guarantee my safety, my children’s safety, the other parents and their children’s safety, or their trained staff while he was on their premises. That decision spoke volumes. It opened my eyes to see that others finally saw him for what he was and also made me understand that what I had been living with was much worse than even I had acknowledged.
• During that same 2004-2007 timeframe, he paid a visit to the trustee that handled the trust funds for children from his first marriage. Those trust funds were designed to provide the children with what they needed, not what he needed after the death of their mother. All I know is that I received a call from their office saying that he was no longer allowed to step foot in their office, due to an incident that took place while he was there that scared the staff and resulted in him being escorted out by security.
• In the years since his incarceration, the company that I worked for was doing some hiring. I was contacted by Human resources because a potential candidate for hire wound up being my ex stepdaughter. HR wanted to make sure that I was ok with her being considered for hire due to the history of my ex-husband and taking my privacy and potential conflict into consideration. In my eyes, all of our children have been victims and deeply affected by the actions/manipulations and decisions that their father decided to do and continues to do. They are innocent in all of this, but have been torn apart, used as pawns, and lied to. I let HR know that I had gone home and spoken about this to my new husband and that we both shared the same position that we would support the hiring of my ex stepdaughter as long as she understood that my privacy was to be respected and we were to remain professional in the workplace. So, she was hired. She and I did have some discussions from time to time respecting boundaries with each other. She shared how difficult it was during the time before the trial and how her father depended on them financially since he chose to not work. Hearing this was upsetting because it was then that it verified that he had been draining their accounts to save his own behind. Knowing this also leads me to believe that when the day comes that he is released from prison, that he will continue to be a financial burden to those children and will expect them to continue to clean up his mess. This infuriates me because they have their own families to raise.
• Before his incarceration, he was ordered to pay child support, which he did not do either. He signed over and terminated his parental rights to the children he and I had just like that. I know in my heart that this was for the best and I did my best to protect them from him as they grew up so that they would not suffer as his other children did. Knowing what I do know after conversations with my ex stepdaughter, he has stuck to his guns of innocence/being falsely accused/denying any wrongdoing and has not been forthcoming with them in order to save face.
• The manifest that was found in his car demonstrated how calculated and planned out his thought process was leading up to my kidnapping, assault, and rape. He is a planner and always will be. He came up with an elaborate plan for the day of my attack in just 2 weeks’ time. The crime scene where he attacked me for hours was set up like a scene in a horror movie, but you already know all the heinous details. I know how lucky I was to survive that day and am grateful to be alive today to share with you what most victims cannot because they weren’t’ so lucky.

In summary, yes, he will continue to be a threat to society because he only knows how to self-gratify and only knows how to control. He treated me, the mother of his children like a possession and an object that deserved nothing and must feel nothing. He abused me in every way a person can be abused.

His words to me on the day of the attack as I begged for him to stop trying to strangle me and let me go, were, “that I didn’t matter, our children didn’t matter, and after that day, no one was going to matter”. He will be a leach to anyone that allows him to be in their lives as demonstrated during the time above. He has no respect for women and will do the same to someone else given the chance and this haunts me to no end.  As I stated above,,, He would sit at church with me and our children and look at the face of God on Sundays knowing what he was doing to me with absolutely no remorse….He does not deserve to be released at this time. Thank you for your time, consideration, and for allowing me to share all of this with you.

With respect and prayers,

Jo Anna Rodriguez