For those who judge her for her past, Selena López has a message: “He who points with his finger does not know that he has three fingers pointing at himself.”
This 27-year-old woman, married to Rigoberto Murillo and mother of two children: Nathan, 10, and Joseph, 2, has risen in life from her own ashes.
Selena was the daughter of a drug-addicted mother and an alcoholic father. Both are already deceased. She, from cancer, and he, from cirrhosis of the liver.
Born in the city of Burbank and raised in Compton, Selena tells La Opinión that she was in the Los Angeles County Department of Family and Children Services (DCFS) foster system since she was three months old.
“Unfortunately, my birth mom was addicted to drugs,” she says. “I was in various programs until my dad was able to get me back.”
However, Selena’s father also beat her. He abused her verbally, physically, and mentally.
“He was an alcoholic,” he notes.
In 2014, her mother Cynthia died and a week before Selena turned 19, her father, Luis López, was arrested and deported to Guatemala.
But, two years before her father’s expulsion from the United States, Cynthia had given birth to Nathan, their first child.
“My son was the blessing that God brought into my life,” he recalls. “I was angry with God because he asked why I had to live that life?”
From the age of three months to the age of 18, Selena lived in different homes where she felt that “it was like a door that wouldn’t close.”
Something was wrong and she was immediately returned to the county child care system.
“My father’s physical abuse was so strong that one day I woke up with bruises all over my body; I told my teacher and they took custody of me,” she recalls. “He was still an alcoholic and my mom was addicted to crack and methamphetamine… It was his lifestyle… It was normal for everyone.”
He takes refuge in alcohol and drugs
In the narration of her story, Selena revealed that from the age of eight or nine she also began to drink wine, smoke marijuana and follow the steps that her parents were teaching her.
Where he lived, drugs and alcoholic beverages were at his fingertips.
And didn’t your parents realize that you were becoming an addict too? she was asked.
“Before they died I was able to have talks and they said they didn’t know…, or they turned a blind eye,” he replies.
Selena’s diet was limited to the little food that was in her poor house. Sometimes her neighbors gave her dinner, and sometimes nothing from her because of her strong addiction to her drugs.
It was logical, he says, that she grew up without love.
“They never showed me. That is something that I wanted to change, now I give all the love that I did not have to my two children… I was used to receiving little love and, at first, it was difficult for me to show it to them, but not anymore. I am a different woman, who flies like eagles and who is not stopped by anything”, she affirms.
they change your life
“I thank God for giving me the love of my children, the love and attention that I always wanted,” she adds. “They (Nathan and Joseph) are my everyday smile.”
After her mother’s death and her father’s deportation, Selena had lost custody of Nathan for two years. She says that she “threw me” to alcohol and wanted to die.
However, through the A New Way of Life Reentry Project (ANWOL) they helped her and taught her that she could be someone in life if she wanted to.
Selena went back to school; she graduated from high school, and when the DCFS system returned her child to her.
“There I found God… He had always accompanied me in difficult moments, although I did not see him that way; my son was the sign that God loved me and he wanted me to love my child forever ”, he underlines.
Immediately, he also joined an Alcoholics Anonymous group, changed radically and managed to “get clean.”
In a Christian church in Huntington Park, he felt “that God did love me and that all the things that happened to me were for a reason: to talk about his story and motivate children, adolescents and young adults who are going through the dark world of drugs.” , gangs or sexual abuse. Something I hadn’t done before.
On Tuesday, May 16, 2023, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communications from Cal State Long Beach, although her next goal is to go for a master’s degree in counseling, and later a doctorate.
“With God all things are possible”, he affirms. “Now I have 100% custody of my children and my marriage of four years is going very well with my ‘chubby’. I already have my own home and I work as a counselor at Long Beach University with all the people who got out of jail and want to change their lives with education.”
In her past, the mistreatment received in different foster homes was buried, they made her eat in the bathroom. Or when she had to beg them for underwear.
-And you never denounced those abuses?
“Yes I did, but with my story so bastardThey didn’t believe me. It was my word against theirs.”
-I imagine that you brought a lot of resentment and resentment against everything and everyone, right?
“I went from abuse to abuse. That was one of the reasons why I was violent. I was lost, I had courage and I reneged against the world and asked why all this had to happen, why they treated me badly… It was a hard process and I remember it until I went to jail”.
Precisely, because of her drug addiction, between 2016 and 2017, Selena was confined in the Los Angeles County Correctional Center in the city of Lynwood.
Under the influence of drugs, he tried to commit a robbery at a house, precisely to continue his addiction to methamphetamines.
“They were going to give me between three and seven years, but before I went to court they let me out…they told me take your things and you’re going home…God gave me the opportunity to dismiss my case, and you know that , it almost does not happen in the criminal justice system of this country… that is why I searched more and more to get closer to God”.
At those critical moments, Selena would even steal the aluminum cans that other people collected.
He says he did it with no intention of hurting anyone.
“I only wanted to survive for vice,” he assures La Opinión. “Methamphetamine was what destroyed me; since I was 10 or 11 years old I took the pills; That was my biggest addiction, my biggest mistake and I remember that I started using drugs together with my mother until I was 14 years old”
But when Selena got out of jail she stopped smoking marijuana, drugs and alcohol, even though she had no place to live.
A counselor from A New Way of Life instructed her to go to a shelter. Two days later she was told that there was a bed in the program that she founded, Susan Burton, in 1998.
Desperate to find help, Selena accepted the invitation and from one night before lined up, slept outside and waited until the doors opened at dawn at ANWOL in South Los Angeles.
– How did a bed change your life?
“More than anything, the founder of the show, Susan Burton, came to me and said she wanted to know what my aspirations were in life, what my dreams were… No one had ever said that to me and I couldn’t answer,” says Selena. “Daughter, don’t worry, she told me, here you will find and fulfill your dreams.”
Forever grateful to Mrs. Burton, Selena even invited her to her graduation and wedding. She became her confidant in difficult times when she experienced moments of anxiety or depression.
“Truly, A New Way of Life is a show where everyone wants to see us get better in life,” Selena assesses.
And, although she knows that in her life she made bad decisions and lost many things, that does not determine who she wants to be now.
Her focus is on being a counselor at Cal State Long Beach, where she is now director of programs, but would like to become a college president in the not too distant future.
“I want to directly help undocumented students, students who live or have lived in foster care, low-income families, and moms,” she says. “I want to tell them that it is never too late to achieve their dreams and that their past does not identify them about who they are going to be in the future.”
Today, Selena López has broad goals to fly like eagles. She wants to change the world, telling her life testimony.
“I would like to make a new world; This one that we live in is no longer useful ”, she expresses. “That’s why I want to encourage people to listen to my story and ignore those who judge them for their past.”
To his words, his son Nathan adds: “My mom is super powerful!”
Legislative efforts increase
Mothers who had once been behind bars in their lives began to push for state and federal legislative initiatives that would support women who faced the criminal justice system.
“In 2023 alone, the US criminal justice system will separate thousands of mothers from their children,” Pamela Marshall, co-director of New Way of Life, said during a rally. “To make matters worse, when mothers are released from jails and prisons, little is done to reunite families.”
Marshall says more compassionate community approaches are required in the criminal justice system to keep families together.
According to the nonprofit organization, Prison Policy Initiative, at the federal level, more than half of all women (58%) in US prisons are mothers.
Most of these women are incarcerated for drug offenses and property theft, often stemming from poverty or substance use disorders.
The report indicates that most of these women are also the primary caregivers for their children, meaning that punishing them with imprisonment robs their children of a vital source of support.
However, those numbers don’t cover the many women preparing to become mothers while in lockdown this year.
In fact, an estimated 58,000 women are pregnant each year when they enter local jails or prisons.
Likewise, The Sentencing Project establishes that in the country there are approximately 976,000 deaths under the supervision of the criminal justice system.
And, according to official figures from the United States Department of Justice, in the “Golden State”, in 2020-2021 there were 2,993 women incarcerated and 41% were African-American women (1,234). Latinas made up 21.3% (639). Of the global numbers, 175 have been sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole.