Navigation
Volumes
|
(Testimony of John Carro)
Mr. Liebeler.
Or did you think that the fact that he had this different kind of truancy was a reflection of some sort of mental disturbance on Oswald's part, or would you say that it was just as much a function of environment, the environment that he found himself in here in New York?
Mr. Carro.
Well, I don't think there is any question in my mind that there was an inability to adapt, to adapt from the change of environment. One of the things that probably influenced me in this is that I came to New York City when I was 9 years of age and when I came here I didn't speak a word of English, and I lived in what we call East Harlem, in an area where there was a Puerto Rican community within a Negro area, and I recall when I went to school there were four Puerto Rican boys in a class that was otherwise all Negro, and I used to virtually run home every day in the first 2 months I lived in the city, because at one point or another the Negro boys would be waiting for me outside to take my pencils, my money, and anything that I had in my hands.
I remember my mother bought me a pair of skates and I don't think I was downstairs for 10 minutes with the skates--I don't think I was down there for 10 minutes before they took them away from me. And I just stayed upstairs and waited for my mother at 5 o'clock.
Then eventually I made friends with the other three boys, and when somebody took my books, one of the other boys stayed with me, and I fought with the Negro boys until things worked out--and, as I remember, things didn't work out. I had to transfer to another school.
But I can see this kind of reaction taking place. You meet the situations. Either you meet them head on or you retreat from them.
Now he apparently had one or two incidents where he was taunted over his inability to speak the same way that the kids up here speak and to dress the same way or even comb his hair--you know, here the kids wore pegged pants and they talked in their own ditty-bop fashion. There is no--that this kid was a stranger to them in mores, culture and everything else, and apparently he could not make that adaptation, and he felt that they didn't want any part of him and he didn't want any part of them, and he seemed self-sufficient enough at the time that I recall that I asked him. He felt he wasn't learning anything in school and that he had other, more important things to learn and do.
Now, whether this was an artifice on his part, you know, a mechanism, I don't know---but it didn't--let me say it didn't trigger any reaction on my part that this was symptomatic of a deeper emotional disturbance. I thought that this was just symptomatic of a boy who had chosen one way of reacting to a situation that other boys would react to in another fashion.
Mr. Liebeler.
I understand that some statements have been made, based apparently on the psychiatric reports or the observations of people who worked with Lee Oswald here in New York when he was 13 years old, to the effect that one might have been able to predict, from seeing the boy at that time, that he might well commit an act such as the assassination, or some similar violent act. Did you see any such indication in Lee Oswald?
Mr. Carro.
No; naturally I didn't see it, and I would say that would be extremely difficult in order to be able to make that sort of projection or prediction. I have even, when I worked with the Youth Board as a streetclub worker, I worked in the street where we had no psychiatrists along with us and where we worked with much more psychotic and deeply disturbed boys, who did kill somebody right along the line, possibly a couple of months later, and even though, you know, the studies we have done here in the city and everything shows that there are a great many people who are extremely disturbed walking around, and the crutch that just keeps them on their marginal--what do you call--on this marginal living, where they just don't go out and commit some violent act, that you don't know what it is, what the factors are that keep them from just blowing up or exploding altogether.
I didn't see any particular behavior that would say that this boy would someday commit this act. I have seen it, let's say, in the Puerto Rican youth I am familiar with, the Negro youth, that sometimes they ascribe this to a crying out of people to say that they exist and that they are human beings, and they commit that violent act, just to get their one day in the sun, the day when all the papers will focus on them, and say, "I am me. I am alive."
|
Found a Typo?
Click here
|
