The Way I See It: My Side of the Story (part 1)

For a person placing a fresh set of eye's on all of this material on the site, who may have questions about things that I didn't think to explain previously:

Part One.

I met Sonya Lopez in March of 2000 when I was 22 years old. We dated for approximately three months. She was broken down in the middle of the road when I found her so I stopped to help. I pushed her car out of the road into a parking lot of an abandoned gas station and gave her a ride to Providence hospital where her mother worked. I managed to get her phone number, we talked for a week and I convinced her to go out to dinner with me. One of the things we talked about was the fact that she had a daughter that her mother had custody of because she had her so young. I assumed that the grandmother had custody of the child since Sonya was a minor when she had the child and now that she's of age the grandmother doesn't want to give the child back. I had seen this before with other Hispanic families so I didn't think anything of it. It seemed like she didn't want me to think that she was a bad mother because her child lived with her mother.

The day came when I went to meet her family which consisted of her grandparents, mother and daughter, Ashley. I remember a very uneasy tone in their body language and really the only person that talked to me past our introduction was her grandfather, John Lopez.

We talked about the pile-of-junk car Sonya and her mother shared.

I later found out what the tone in their body language was about when Sonya's mother Margaret Lopez had been drinking and proceeded to tell me that she didn't know why her daughter “insisted on you white boys” and would not find a good Mexican man. I remember thinking this to be odd because her granddaughter, Ashley, is half white. You find out just how racist a person is when you date their daughter.

From that point, I began to see the emotional hold Margaret had on Sonya and how she tormented her by using the child as leverage.

At one point Margaret had told Sonya that she was not going to pay her half of Ashley's private school tuition, it was a big fear for Sonya to send Ashley to public schools due to the fact that she feared that the other children would pick on her because of her being a half breed.

Sonya suggested that I ask my grandmother for the money to pay for Ashley's private school. I knew that would not go over well with my grandmother but I mentioned it anyway and got the reply I knew I would get. My grandmother probably thought it was a ploy to get money for things that she didn't approve of, and told me she would not give me money to pay for private school for a girl friend's kid who I just met. 

One of the things that haunts my memory is when Ashley asked me if I was going to be her daddy. I told her that I did not know. 

Looking back on it all, I can now see what I was unable to see then. There was something that Sonya did not tell me back then. 

I learned in 2016 five years after my conviction that Sonya had a son that quite possibly is mine. Considering Sonya never told Ashley's father about her it seems she’d done the same with me.

That certainly shines a different light on why Ashley was asking if I was going to be her daddy.  At the time when I broke it off with Sonya I had no idea I left her holding a baby. So I speculate that Margaret Lopez took full advantage of the situation to make me out to be the bad guy and to keep me out of my son's life.

After I left, I still saw Sonya from time to time for the few more months that I stayed in Texas. By then I had started getting back into drugs real heavy and was painting myself back into a corner. I made the choice to leave Texas after an encounter with a sheriff that knew my father and I had come to know over the years who told me that I should leave Texas because it was going to end badly for me if I didn't.