conuly

This is triggering for just about everything, I should think.

Family Saga, and Skeleton, Uncovered
By JONATHAN MILLER

WEST NEW YORK, N.J., Oct. 11 - About a year ago, a girl was born in this working-class town and was promptly flung out of a third-floor window. She tumbled down a thin air shaft, naked, her umbilical cord still attached. Her head smashed into the concrete 31 feet below. She died instantly. And there she lay, unnamed, buried in a grave of garbage and cigarette packs.

The story gets worse.

On the morning of Sept. 13, another baby was born and he, too, was shoved through the same window, splattering blood through neighbors' window panes as he fell, landing with a thud near the decaying body of his sister. His screams cut through the walls, and neighbors called the police. His skull cracked, and his eye was blackened, but he lived.

The story gets worse.

The authorities soon learned that the mother of the two children was Lucila Ventura, an 18-year-old immigrant from El Salvador. Their father was a 44-year-old named Jose Julio Ventura. But he is not just the father of Lucila's children, the police say. He is also their grandfather.

This tale of incest, abuse and murder has shaken nearly everyone involved here. Edward J. De Fazio, the Hudson County prosecutor, has called the case a "vivid explosion of family dysfunction."

"I've never seen anything quite like this," Mr. De Fazio said in an interview. "And I've been involved in this kind of work for some time."

As many try to make sense of the horrific events here, so much remains a mystery. And like all mysteries, there are questions and bewilderment.

"Everyone was saying, 'How could the mother not know what was going on?' " said Maria Ortiz, 40, who lived above the family and yet knew next to nothing about them. "It's sad, very sad." She paused. "And disgusting."

Ms. Ventura has been charged with murder, attempted murder, endangering the welfare of a child and child abuse. If convicted, she could be sentenced to up to 40 years in prison. The authorities say she threw both of her babies out the window shortly after giving birth to them in the tiny apartment she shared with her mother, father, four brothers and uncle. Prosecutors have not decided whether to try her as an adult in the death of her first child. Her lawyer says that her father had possibly been abusing her for several years.

Mr. De Fazio suggested in an interview that he was trying to pry information from Ms. Ventura so that he could charge the father with a more serious offense. "In order to pursue the case against the father, Lucila would need to be a state's witness," Mr. De Fazio said.

She is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, according to the authorities. Mr. Ventura is charged with aggravated sexual assault, endangering the welfare of a child and child abuse, though the results of a paternity test for the babies are not back. He has not been implicated in the killings. He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment, with bail set at $500,000. If convicted, he could face up to 20 years in prison.

Mr. Ventura's public defender, E. Carl Broege, said his client is far from the "beast" portrayed in media accounts. Instead, he said, his client was a "pathetic little man" who seemed "scared and subdued, and he seemed not to comprehend what was happening."

Both father and daughter are now being held at the Hudson County Correction Center in Kearny.

The young life of Lucila Ventura is one that has been lived out of sight, behind closed doors, away from others. Though her family has lived in New Jersey for some time, she joined them about six years ago, after living with a grandmother in El Salvador, according to a person involved in the investigation.

For at least six years, she has lived in a two-bedroom apartment on 64th Street with her family, relatives and neighbors said. But she was never seen outside hanging on the stoop, like other teenagers in her neighborhood, many say. She slept in a room with her parents and a younger brother, according to relatives. Her parents said little more than "hello" to neighbors in the building. Even cousins of Ms. Ventura's who live in the same building say they had no idea that she had ever been pregnant, or that her father had been abusing her.

"I couldn't believe it," said Aleyda Romero, 15, a cousin of Ms. Ventura's who lived a floor below and saw her two days before the birth in September.

She said of her uncle and cousin: "They got along with each other. We never saw him doing something to her." She added: "We couldn't believe he was the father."

Ms. Ventura's lawyer, Anthony J. Fusco Jr., said in a news conference last month that the abuse might have lasted for several years.

"We are now learning that this abuse may have started to occur when she was 13 or 14 years old and continued on multiple occasions each week for years," he said. Through a secretary, Mr. Fusco declined to comment further.

Nearly every weekday, Mr. Ventura, a cook who worked the night shift at a local restaurant, put his daughter in a green minivan and drove her 13 blocks to Memorial High School, according to relatives and classmates. Often, he would pick her up during lunch. And when school was dismissed at 3 p.m., he picked her up again and took her back home. The mother had worked as a laborer in the jewelry business during the day.

While she was in school, Lucila never did much to distinguish herself to classmates.

"She would walk down the hall with her head down," said one of those classmates, George Triantafyllopoulos, 18, "like she was invisible."

Even now, a month after the news broke - during which students at Memorial High School have been lectured about their options for unwanted babies - many students and teachers responded to the mention of Lucila Ventura's name with a puzzled expression and a one-word question.

"Who?"

Classmates said that Ms. Ventura was an enigma: a loner who was never picked on, a girl who never had a boyfriend and who never seemed able to connect with other students. When he was a freshman, Mr. Triantafyllopoulos said that he and another friend approached Ms. Ventura in gym class. "Me and a girl would try to talk to her and she would just walk away," he said.

She had been a student in the English as a Second Language program since starting high school four years ago, said the principal, Matthew Sinisi.

Another classmate, Kayla Rivas, 16, said that while Ms. Ventura "was always a quiet person, shy," they would sometimes talk about "girl stuff" in gym. She did not mention any problems with her father, Kayla said. When asked what, exactly, they would talk about, Kayla shrugged and said, "You know, girl stuff."

In this tightly packed, 1.3-square mile working class city of immigrants from Cuba, Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador, children play on the sidewalk and the streets teem on a weekday afternoon. Its luxury high-rise apartments face Midtown Manhattan.

West New York also suffers with a poverty rate of 19 percent. Students say that the high school has grappled in the past with MS-13, the Central American gang. Some students said teenage pregnancy is not considered unusual.

Amid this, Lucila Ventura had seemed like a "good girl," according to Ms. Ortiz. No one - teachers, neighbors, even relatives - seemed to notice that she had twice been pregnant. She was heavyset, Ms. Ortiz said, and no one noticed a protruding belly.

According to a person familiar with the situation, Lucila Ventura might be mentally "limited" in some way. The source did not want to be named for fear of compromising the investigation. Prosecutors are awaiting an assessment of her mental condition. Ms. Ventura's lawyer, Mr. Fusco, has said in newspaper interviews that his client might have been insane when she threw the babies out the window, a defense that, if successful, could result in her release, supervision or commitment to a psychiatric institution.

The cousin, Aleyda Romero, said that she saw Ms. Ventura in the hallway of their building Sept. 11, two days before the birth, and she asked her if she would be in school on Monday, since she had not seen her on Friday. "And she said, 'Yeah.' "

Though she said she did not notice anything unusual, she nonetheless asked Ms. Ventura what was wrong. "She said she ate something and she felt bad after," Aleyda said.

She said she did not see her cousin in school on Monday. On Tuesday, the baby was born.

After the most recent baby was found, The Jersey Journal interviewed Ms. Ventura's mother, Maria. "We had no clue she was pregnant. She hid it from us," Maria Ventura told The Journal. "She wore loose, baggy clothes."

She said she had assumed that her daughter had a stomachache and she made her cinnamon tea before leaving for work on the morning her daughter gave birth.

For now, the month-old boy who survived the plunge into the air shaft remains in the care of the state's Division of Youth and Family Services.

He has recovered from his fractured skull, and is in a "special medical placement" in Hudson County, awaiting a transfer to a foster home. He has been named David, said Andy Williams, a spokesman for the agency.

Relatives had expressed interest in caring for the baby, but Mr. Williams and others deemed that scenario "highly unlikely."

"Family members have to be considered," he said. "But our recommendation to the court, based on circumstances in the house, we'd need more clarity before placing the child with someone from that household."

Initially, as the police responded to reports of a crying infant, they found only David, with no clue to how he got to the bottom of the 3.5-by-5-foot shaft. But as they looked up, they saw blood on the windowsill of the Venturas' bathroom window. Once inside the apartment, the police said, investigators found blood everywhere.

A day later, as maintenance workers cleared the garbage that had broken the newborn's fall, they found what they thought was a doll. It turned out to be the mummified remains of his sister.

Mr. De Fazio, the prosecutor, said that Ms. Ventura's mental state will play a significant role in the case, but noted: "It should never lead to these babies being thrown out the window, like they were some piece of garbage."

He, too, was having a hard time explaining what had happened. "I don't think you can understand it," he said. "It's complete dysfunction. It's a complete breakdown of the family."

A much cheerfuller story about a man and his strange trips around the city

His New York State of Mind
By MARK ALLEN

IT is a puzzle to many of my friends: I live on Pitt and Delancey Streets, and yet for 10 years I have traipsed all the way up Avenue A, gone west on 11th Street, and then marched back down Third Avenue to visit my hole-in-the-wall video store on Third Avenue and Eighth Street. Why such a roundabout route?

The answer, I'm afraid, is nowhere near as simple as "I need the exercise" or "I always go to this great doughnut place with you-cannot-believe crullers." No, the reason is deeply complex. It has to do with the nature of New York, and the travails of growing old.

When we're young and fresh to the city, New York's nonstop buzz carries all frequencies at once. It is white noise, a good kind of white noise that can actually sharpen the senses. The city demands that we pay constant attention and, being young, we do, snatching our desired information out of the chaos in order to clarify, discover and categorize.

This abundance is one of the sweetest gifts New York can bestow on newcomers. It offers potential and hope, a fresh start, the very essence of youth.

When I arrived in Manhattan 15 years ago, I was constantly looking forward. I'd pick and choose the things I wanted to discover as if perusing a huge and eclectic menu and in doing so slowly accumulated my own personal "city story." To most New Yorkers, for example, the entrance to Grand Central Terminal near the Park Avenue overpass is just another transit passageway. To me it will always be the spot where I was arrested during my first demonstration for Act Up, the AIDS activist group.

As the years rumbled forward, however, the initial sense of potential became more and more cluttered with the details of my life. Events and memories piled up until they became a kind of weighty encyclopedia that was always with me. The southwest corner of Tompkins Square Park will always be where a wide-eyed me wandered on my first day in the city - a day that an event called Wigstock, the annual drag festival, happened to be taking place. A corner table of an East Village restaurant called 7A will always be the site of an uncomfortable lunch with my father. The newsstand at the bodega on First Avenue and 11th Street will always be where I breathlessly picked up a copy of the magazine that contained my first byline.

At the same time that these memories grew, the city kept changing. The family-run Spanish cafe on my street is now a trendy restaurant, and Times Square has gone from gritty to Disney. Right now, I'm anticipating the demise of the historic club CBGB.

Even the most hardened New Yorker will be delighted, disappointed, frustrated or wistful at these sorts of changes. I feel angry about my Spanish restaurant; I miss its $1.99 breakfast special and its smiling hostess, who gave every patron a cheery bilingual greeting. Even today, years after it closed, I instinctively look up every time I pass the spot, but instead of seeing the friendly hostess, I see the skinny, clipboard-holding replicant who took her place.

Such resistance to change is primal, nothing less than a refusal to cede our marked mental territory to the enemy. By altering the landscape, the city is revising and even erasing my personal city story.

But there is no point in railing at New York's stubborn disposition to evolve. To live in New York is to live in change. To stamp one's foot on the pavement in rage is to stamp one's foot on a moving sidewalk.

I've devised a strategy to keep me steady on this shifting pavement, and to help me negotiate bricks-and-mortar New York as my personal mental map of the city has become more elaborate. My approach is akin to "cognitive mapping," a term coined by the urban planner Kevin Lynch to describe an internal set of laws that govern familiar environments. Over time, these inner ordinances, based on events and feelings from our past, merge and mix with external reality until it's almost impossible to know which is which.

For example: We dislike a shop not because of its looks or wares but because it replaced a wonderfully quirky bookstore. We enjoy a certain time of day on a certain street because it reminds us of a street in Rome, where we lived during a personal golden era. We spurn a particular cafe, even though it is popular, because our detested ex-lover hung out there. We love a market because its gruff proprietor looks and acts just like a beloved, long-gone uncle.

We like a gallery not because of its art but because of its reputation. We dislike stores that inhabit spaces of former stores we like before they were replaced. We like certain times of day on certain streets. We love a club because the people we dislike hate it. We hate a club because the people we love hate it.

That is the secret behind my odd route to the video store. I walk on Avenue A because in my early days in the city some friends had an underground record store there, a place where the greetings were always warm and the sounds always harsh. And because on Avenue A I could always count on running into my squatter friends and their many filthy dogs. And because Avenue A was the territory of that weird woman who walked around at all hours wearing a motorcycle helmet.

Those things are gone. My route remains.

This compass has two guidance systems - one full of facts and figures, the other full of memory - but its purpose is to pare down, not to complicate. I joke with friends that day in and day out I stubbornly take the same five routes to the same eight locations - the downtown pizza joint where a slice is still $1, the corner bench in East River Park that is always empty - just so I won't have to face anything new, just so I can preserve My Own Private New York.

IN youth, I was open to all comers; now I hunker down. Foot trips can resemble subway rides, long stretches of void, interrupted only by necessary information like station stops and conductor announcements. Everything else can become a blank, black tunnel, allowing my mind to wander, to remember.

In traveling through these psychic tunnels, I get the same rush I experienced as a youth but in reverse. The excitement I used to get from throwing myself into each new experience is now the excitement I get from each remembered one.

At my worst moments, I feel as if I am locked into patterns of behavior long ago rendered impractical. But at my most tranquil, I feel as if I've stitched up the loose hems in the layers of New York's white noise and wrapped it around myself, the old and new coming together like a patchwork quilt, the bustling city as a creature comfort.

All these students, learning Chinese. Whatever *that* means.

Classes in Chinese Grow as the Language Rides a Wave of Popularity
By GRETCHEN RUETHLING

CHICAGO, Oct. 14 - The future of foreign language study in the United States might be glimpsed here at Louisa May Alcott Elementary School, in a classroom where lanterns with cherry blossoms and pandas dangle overhead, and a paper dragon, an American flag and a Chinese flag hang from the wall.

One recent morning, a class of third graders bowed to one another and introduced themselves in Chinese, and a class of fourth graders practiced writing numbers in Chinese characters on marker boards. Chinese classes began at Alcott in February, but more students are already choosing it over Spanish.

"Chinese is our new baby," said David J. Domovic, the principal at Alcott, on the North Side, one of 20 public schools in the city offering instruction in Mandarin. "Everybody just wants in."

With encouragement from the Chinese and American governments, schools across the United States are expanding their language offerings to include Chinese, the world's most spoken tongue, not to mention one of its most difficult to learn.

Last month, the Defense Department gave a $700,000 grant to public schools in Portland, Ore., to double the number of students studying Chinese in an immersion program. In May, Senators Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, and Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, introduced a bill to spend $1.3 billon over five years on Chinese language programs in schools and on cultural exchanges to improve ties between the United States and China. The bill has been referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

After 2,400 schools expressed interest, Advanced Placement Chinese classes will be offered in high schools around the country starting next year. Beijing is paying for half the $1.35 million to develop the classes, including Chinese teachers' scholarships and developing curriculums and examinations, said Trevor Packer, executive director of the Advanced Placement Program at the College Board.

"Many Americans are beginning to realize the importance of speaking Chinese," Zhu Hongqing, consul at the Chinese Education Consulate here, said. "We need to provide as much powerful support as we can."

The number of Chinese language programs around the country, from elementary school through adult programs, has tripled in 10 years, said Scott McGinnis, an academic adviser at the Defense Language Institute in Washington.

"Chinese is strategic in a way that a lot of other languages aren't," because of China's growth as an economic and military force, Mr. McGinnis said.

"Whatever tensions lie between us, there is a historical longstanding mutual fascination with each other," he said. "Planning to be ready to engage with them rather than only thinking of them in terms of a challenge or a competitor is the smart thing to do."

Up to 50,000 students are studying Chinese in elementary and secondary schools in the United States, experts estimate. Many are in cities like New York and San Francisco that have large numbers of Chinese-American students, and many take lessons after school or on weekends.

The Chicago program stands out because it is entirely in public schools during the regular school day and primarily serves students who are not of Chinese descent.

Mayor Richard M. Daley, a vocal supporter of the program, said proficiency in Chinese would be critical in understanding the competition.

"I think there will be two languages in this world," Mr. Daley said. "There will be Chinese and English."

From an all-black elementary school on the West Side to a nearly all-Hispanic elementary school on the South Side to more diverse schools throughout the city, some 3,000 students from kindergarten through high school are learning Chinese. The Chinese Education Ministry has called the program a model for teaching students who are not of Chinese descent. The ministry donated 3,000 textbooks to the school system last year.

The program has expanded from three schools in 1999 to 20 this year and is scheduled to add five by the end of the school year.

"They have a great international experience right in their own classroom," said Robert Davis, manager of the district's Chicago Chinese Connections Program, which seeks to develop skills to help students compete in the world marketplace. "We want them to meet on an equal playing field."

Some parents here worry at first about how relevant the Chinese classes are and whether they will be too difficult. The Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats, ranks Chinese as one of the four most time-intensive languages to learn. An average English speaker takes 1,320 hours to become proficient in Chinese, compared with 480 hours in French, Spanish or Italian, the institute says.

Sevtap Guldur, 31, said she and her daughter Sahire, a fourth grader at Alcott, looked over the unfamiliar Chinese characters before deciding whether to take the class.

"If you're ready to learn that, go for it," Ms. Guldur said she told her daughter.

Sahire, who is fluent in Turkish, said it was her favorite class.

At Alcott, 160 students from kindergarten to fifth grade are studying Spanish, compared with 242 taking Chinese, although not without occasional frustration.

"Do we have to do it in Chinese?" a third grader asked during a recent exercise, perhaps missing the point of the class.

Raul Freire, 9, a fourth grader fluent in Spanish, said he taught words to his mother so she could better communicate with Chinese-speaking customers at the bank where she works.

"Mostly everybody in the school wants to take Chinese," Raul said. "I think about being a traveler when I grow up, so I have to learn as many languages as I can."

Adriana Freire, 33, Raul's mother, who is from Ecuador, said the skills would help her son be a better competitor in the job market. "I never thought that he was going to be able to do something like that," Ms. Freire said.

Most of the 10 elementary and 10 high schools in the program here offer the language four times a week for 40 minutes a day. Each school decides how to fit the class in the school day, with some taking time from classes like physical education, music and art to make room.

Chicago has a waiting list of schools that want to offer Chinese. The main obstacle is a lack of teachers certified by an American college, a requirement of the No Child Left Behind law, Mr. Davis said.

"It's hard when we can't hire a teacher that is qualified because of that missing certification," he said.

The shortage of teachers is common throughout the United States, said Michael Levine, executive director of education at the Asia Society in New York.

Six states have signed or plan to sign agreements with the Chinese government to import teachers from China and send teachers from the United States to China for training, Mr. Levine said.

"Eventually," he said, "we're going to have to homegrow our own."