Shattered Lives

The parents of the library-assault victim face a harsh new reality.

by Helen i-lin Hwang

The 8-year-old girl can no longer sleep at night, unless her mother is lying next to her.

She’s terrified of strangers.

And where she once averaged 90 percent to 93 percent on school tests, she now struggles to make a 60.

In the wake of what police call a brutal February attack in a bathroom at the Free Library's Independence Branch, an innocent child, described by her parents as "a very nice girl," has understandably had a tough time dealing with what happened to her.

Last week, in an exclusive interview, her parents spoke to a reporter, mostly in Mandarin Chinese, about how their family is coping with an appalling assault. City Paper is honoring their request that their names, their child's name and what school she attends, remain private.

According to police, in February, a homeless man named Brian McCutcheon followed the child into the women's room, tried to rape her and then choked her. Charged with attempted murder, sexual abuse, attempted rape and a slew of other charges, McCutcheon, 23, is scheduled to appear in court for a May 5 pretrial conference.

Though much of the media attention about the case has focused on the attack itself, the family must deal with the aftermath. The girl is doing well, given what she's survived, but she's not "back to her normal self," her parents say.

Both parents were working in different restaurants when they heard their daughter was hurt.

The girl's grandmother, who is in her late 50s, had taken three children to a place they went often, the library that served as their refuge from the busy city streets. It's a place where the grandmother, who doesn't speak English, could browse the Chinese-language room while the children could read all the English- and Chinese-language books they wanted.

That day, the father got a call on his cell phone from one of the girl's two younger siblings. The message: "Big sister had an accident. She fell in the bathroom."

The father then called the mother at her workplace before rushing to the hospital. The mother went to the library, where police had already cordoned off the area.

While the father's employer has been kind to him throughout the post-assault process, the same can't be said for those at the corner noodle house where the girl's mother worked. (She told CP that she didn't want to name the restaurant.)

The day of the incident was the last day she worked. She left work after her husband's 5 p.m. phone call. Though she'd already been working since 10:30 a.m., she was only halfway through her shift when she told her boss that her daughter had an accident and that she had to leave.

She was allowed to leave work, and for the next several days she remained at her daughter's hospital bedside as the little girl fought for her life. They recall how her head was swollen and her eyes were bloodshot, an image they can't shake from their minds.

When the mother called her "boss lady" a few days later, she was told she didn't have a job to come back to. She'd been fired for missing days of work.

The restaurant's manager, who would only give her name as Victoria, said the mother was working on a trial basis and that they were going to let her go anyhow. Victoria said the mother's "personal thing" is not related to her firing.

The mother says she had worked in the waitressing job for just 20 days, after years of toiling in garment factories. To add insult to injury, when the girl's father went back to collect the mother's last wages, the "boss lady" paid $22 for six-and-a-half hours of waitressing on a Saturday, apparently shorting her of tips.

"Working in a restaurant is liquid income," he explained, noting that tips are the bread and butter. "Saturdays and Sundays are the busiest. Usually, I can make up to $100 on a Saturday."

As the mother describes the struggle of still looking for a job, her eyes redden and swell. She begins to cry. The job loss, compounded with the burden of her child's suffering, makes her weep often. Like the victim's father, she worked six days a week, but because they have very little money, the father could only take three days off before returning to work waiting tables and managing.

Still, almost every morning for the next month, he'd take his daughter and wife, who speaks little English, to the hospital by bus or hospital shuttle. After dropping them off, he'd work an 11-hour shift.

Though the girl is not in the hospital anymore, she still makes regular visits for checkups. She's also back in school, but the adjustment has been an uphill battle. Her teacher, who also helps counsel her, tutors her two days a week.

She missed a month of classwork and her concentration is not the same. She still loves to read, draw and write. She's very smart, her parents boast, and can speak and write in two languages.

"I write a Chinese character, and she can copy it directly," says her father, obviously proud of his child.

She also loves playing with computers and says that when she grows up, she wants to help her mom and dad. Her dad dreams that someday she'll work in an office, rather than in restaurants and factories like her parents.

The father, who is in his 40s, worked as a farmer before he emigrated 14 years ago from a small village in Guangdong province, in southern China. Their family's farm didn't fare well, so his parents and brother came over first and then sponsored him to come to the U.S. After the father settled in America, he returned to China, married a woman from his village and brought her to Philadelphia. Eventually, they had three children and the family worked hard to achieve a piece of the American dream.

Never in their lives did they expect their family to encounter a situation like the one they now face.

The parents have not seen McCutcheon. In fact, they've chosen not to. Though they don't want to go to court, they say they will when the District Attorney's Office asks them to. They say they are pleased to have the D.A.'s office deal with as much of the details of the case as possible and commend the police for being "very nice" to their family.

One major reason they've decided to talk to a reporter after nearly two months is that they wanted to express gratitude to the donors who sent gifts and money to an account set up for the child at Chinatown's Asian Bank. ("Kindness of Strangers," CP, April 8.)

"We don't know who they are and they don't know who we are, but we wanted to thank them for what they've done," explains the father, who says he doesn't feel comfortable disclosing the amount because it would be "impolite" to the donors.

To this day, the parents have not talked to their daughter about what happened. Nor do they plan to.

It's hard to say how the child will be affected.

"There's a lot of variability," says Dr. Hugh Johnston, a child psychology expert at the University of Wisconsin. "The biggest factor is the intrinsic resilience of the child. She can bounce right back. There's also an element of shame. It's quite possible that she can have a vivid memory and not want to talk about it."

He adds that events of this nature can lead to permanent memory loss, so she may never remember the details.

The money people have donated to their daughter is in a joint account and will be used for her education, if she wants that. But, her parents say, it's also in case their daughter wants to move to a new city where no one will have heard of the story of the little girl who was assaulted and nearly killed in a library.

"When she gets older and possibly starts to remember what happened," says the father, "she may want to get a fresh start."