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(Testimony of John Carro)
Mr. Carro.
boy but we were just trying to get her involved in whatever plan we had for the boy.
Mr. Liebeler.
I wanted to seek your opinion on that.
Mr. Carro.
I think she was. Even at that time I said that she was so self-involved in her own situation that she tended to blame everything, and yet say it was nothing, for the boy's problems. The fact that a boy could stay out of school, I think it was 47 days before he went to this new school and not report at all, and have a parent whom the attendance officer and the bureau of education, bureau of attendance is getting after, and the parent admits that she cannot control or cannot do anything about her boy not going to school, is significant of her inability to cope with this situation.
Then this plus, this idea--I don't know if she, in fact, came from wealth or not; this giving you this idea that where she came from she was a woman of means and all that, but in New York here, she had been downgraded to this kind of a thing. She mentioned that part of his problem was that when he first came to live here in the Bronx, they lived around the Grand Concourse, and I don't know if you are familiar with the Bronx, but Grand Concourse is an area of fairly middle class Jewish community, and she felt this, that the boy was dressed in a little below the level of the children up there. He did dress in levis and I think his reaction in not going to school was in part the fact that some of the children had poked fun both at his dress and his manner of speech, and he had retreated from this, and this is why he would not mix and why he became a loner, and she reacted in the same way, and she was working, as I think I recall it, in a department store, and she was very unhappy about the whole situation, and she was really in no position to be with this boy any length of time, and she seemed so preoccupied with her own problems at the time that I do not think she really had an awareness as to the boy's own problem and fears.
Mr. Liebeler.
Did you get the feeling that Mrs. Oswald felt that if--I can say this because I have lived in New York for the last 7 years myself, so it doesn't bother me too much to bring it out. I am really a New Yorker. Did she have the feeling, do you think, that if these nosey New Yorkers would just leave her alone and keep out of her business everything would be all right? In other words, it was just a kind of situation that exists here in this city because of the nature of the city that was different from the way things were in Texas, maybe, or Louisiana, that this had----
Mr. Carro.
I don't have any doubt about it. I think she must have thought that we were making a mountain out of a molehill, and that in some other States--I was brought up in Puerto Rico, myself; if a boy didn't go to school or so nobody saw to it that he was brought to court, that he was sent to a psychiatrist, that the Big Brothers got involved in it, that you referred him here and there, and this is why I said she must have been threatened by this whole process; there is no question about it in my mind, that she could not see what all this fuss was all about. She said so, too. No question in my mind about that. I am sure that this had an effect on her decision to leave the State and take off, and particularly when she came to see us and we told her she could not go without the OK of the court, that the boy was under the supervision of the court, and he would have to remain so until the court felt that it was OK.
Mr. Liebeler.
She did advise you, however, before leaving the State, that she did intend to leave the State of New York, did she not?
Mr. Carro.
Well, she advised my colleague, Timothy Dunn, I was on vacation I think that month of January, she came in to see him, she was referred by the Big Brothers, who told her she could not leave without coming to see us, and she came in to tell him, and he told her before she did we would have to put the matter on the calendar and that it would be up to the judge.
You see, normally it is not that we don't allow it, that we prohibit it. Routinely, even if a boy is under supervision or probation, what you do is, if the parent comes in, you put it on the calendar, you go up and report to the judge, and the judge will ask the parent, or you will have the information, and the parent wants to go to Newark, N.J., or, you know, Louisiana, that they are going to live with such-and-such a person over there and the court may ask you to write to that jurisdiction, to go out and make a visit to that home to see
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