Tina Freeborn

Tina Grace Freeborn

From Nets to Networks

Part I: Trapped in Juarez

by Larry Greco Harris

Along the streets of many towns, especially border towns, walk pornographers who are fishing for girls. They cast inviting nets in the direction of young women who appear vulnerable: those who walk alone or appear a little lost, those who waver slightly under the influence of a drink or a drug, those who are tired and hungry, even those who are just sweetly naive.

Tina Freeborn must have appeared to fit one of these categories when, at 25, she walked down a street in Juarez, Mexico. It was 2004.

“I was by myself and I met this man. He was Mexican, but he spoke very good English. He asked me if I needed anything. I said yes, and he took me into his house. I slept there for a while and when I woke up, I found that I was locked in a single room. There was only one window, and there were bars covering it from the outside. I was trapped and scared to death. He wasn’t around, so all I could do was watch Spanish language television and wait for hours for him to return.

“When he came back, he asked me, Have you ever heard of a donkey show? I knew that in those shows girls had sex with donkeys and other animals. Before I could respond, he said, I have women who perform these acts for me and for other people. You’re going to be one of my girls now.

“I was terrified!

“Luckily, I remembered something that my biological dad had told me when I first started running the streets at 15. He said that if you’re ever in a bad situation, tell people that your dad is a cop. Well, my dad wasn’t a cop, but he told me that saying that would usually scare people away. So I tried it. I said he was a police officer and that he knew what city I was in (which he didn’t) and that he was going to be expecting me home (which he wasn’t) and that he was really going to be worried about me (which I don’t think anybody was).”

The ploy worked. He dropped Tina off at the bridge that connects Juarez to El Paso, and she walked directly across to her freedom. Thus she had escaped the trap, slipped through the net. But this was not the last net that would snag her. In fact, before five months would pass, Tina would be locked away in a state facility for the first of her five prison incarcerations. Nor was that barred room in Juarez her first experience of being caught in a trap. For Tina, the troubled net of her own family had always been the saddest trap of all.

Part II: Born Too Free

Tina Freeborn grew up trapped in a net of total freedom—an oxymoron maybe, but the sad truth. “Growing up,” says Tina, “my little sister and I were on our own. There was no food in the fridge. And around the beginning of the month when food stamp time would come, there might be some little ice creams and hamburger meat around, but what I didn’t know at the time was that the food stamp money would get traded for drugs. We were hungry, we didn’t have a change of clothes, and the clothes we did have were always dirty.

“Let me put it this way, our mom was either gone or locked behind some door—the bedroom, the bathroom.” But she would open it easily for men, many men—“boyfriends, uncles, you know what I mean?” Tina winks sarcastically as she describes this.

So, by default, Tina became parent to both herself and her younger sister.

“One day Rose, who was four years younger than me, had to go to school to get her report card. My mom was supposed to come get it, but of course she wouldn't. So I went to the school and asked for it. I was so offended that they wouldn't give it to me, yet they would give it to my mom. I told them, ‘I am the caretaker, the one who handles these affairs in our business.' I was only in fourth grade,  but I was offended by these adults because I truly thought I was the adult here.”

Rose was sent to the playground and Tina was taken to the principal’s office to sit and wait, but when the staff turned away, Tina burst out of the office, ran through the playground, grabbed her sister and kept running.

“I think I snatched the report card, too. “Screw these people!” I thought.

It is not surprising that Tina, at nine, might have thought she was already an adult. Her mother did not treat her as a daughter, rather as an acquaintance to have fun with and often confide in.

Tina was too young and too isolated from what might be called a normal childhood to even notice any of the more “traditional” families that lived outside of the dysfunctional net of her own.

“I did have a feeling that maybe I should have some clean clothes. I saw the kids at school. They wore different clothes every day. I thought, How come I don’t have different clothes; how come I wear the same dirty clothes every day?”

When asked if there was anyone she could have turned to for help for such concerns, Tina said:  “I wouldn’t have even thought to ask anyone. Besides, my mom would warn us not to tell anything to anybody because the police would take us away. She said that CPS would come get us because CPS’s whole goal in life was to tear our family apart.  So we didn’t tell anybody anything.”

For three  more years, Tina Freeborn, born far too free of guidance,  trapped in a net of fear and ignorance, where drugs turn children into parents and parents into children, remained until, at 12 years old, “the one truly good adult in my life took me into his home”—a normal home.

More chapters . . .