Dec. 30, 2025
KILLER: Ana Maria Cardona Part 01 | Miami, Florida 1990
On November 2, 1990, Florida Power and Light workers discovered the emaciated body of a small child hidden in the bushes of a wealthy Miami Beach home. The boy, dressed only in a lollipop-decorated T-shirt and a soiled diaper wrapped in brown packing tape, had been beaten, starved, and systematically tortured. He weighed just eighteen pounds. This is part one of the story of how a mother's resentment turned deadly.
VICTIM PROFILE:
Lazaro Figueroa was born September 18, 1987, into what should have been a life of comfort. His father, Fidel Figueroa, was a well-connected drug dealer who kept his family in a lavish penthouse overlooking Biscayne Bay. But fate intervened before Lazaro ever drew breath. Just two days after his birth, his father was executed in a gangland-style shooting outside a Miami riverfront bar. The murder was never solved. From that moment forward, Lazaro became the target of his mother's displaced rage, blamed for the loss of everything she had.
THE CRIME:
Ana Maria Cardona's abuse of Lazaro began shortly after he was returned to her custody from foster care in late 1988. Over the next eighteen months, she systematically starved, beat, and confined her son in conditions the Dade County Medical Examiner would later call the worst child abuse he had ever witnessed. Lazaro spent weeks locked in closets and tied to beds. His arm was broken and left untreated, eventually becoming fixed at a ninety-degree angle. His two front teeth were knocked out. Cardona wrapped duct tape around his diapers to avoid changing them, leaving his skin raw with bedsores. On October 31, 1990, Cardona beat Lazaro with a baseball bat, fracturing his skull. She then dumped his dying body in the bushes of a Miami Beach mansion and fled the state with her girlfriend, Olivia Gonzalez, stopping at Disney World before their arrest.
THE INVESTIGATION:
Miami Beach police initially could not identify the battered child, dubbing him Baby Lollipops after his T-shirt. Detectives conducted door-to-door interviews in English and Spanish and distributed flyers throughout the community. The break came when a neighbor who had occasionally cared for Lazaro recognized him from police bulletins. The investigation led detectives to Ana Maria Cardona and Olivia Gonzalez, who had fled to central Florida. Both women were arrested within weeks. Gonzalez eventually testified that Cardona had called Lazaro the son of the devil and blamed him for her descent from riches to rags.
CURRENT STATUS:
Ana Maria Cardona has been convicted of first-degree murder three times. Her first two death sentences were overturned by the Florida Supreme Court on procedural grounds. In 2017, she was convicted for the third time and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Olivia Gonzalez served fourteen years for her role in Lazaro's abuse and has since been released.
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WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_02]: Listener, some lives are marked early, not by a single catastrophe, but by a narrowing of options, the world closes in an inch by inch until there is nowhere left to stand that is not already found.
00:19.804 --> 00:32.620
[SPEAKER_02]: This story begins in that narrowing, in the absence of mercy, in the steady removal of softness, long before anyone died, something essential was already being taken away.
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[SPEAKER_02]: eroded.
00:34.145 --> 00:36.608
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a kind of damage that does not rage.
00:37.388 --> 00:38.009
[SPEAKER_02]: It's sentals.
00:38.730 --> 00:41.192
[SPEAKER_02]: It teaches a person how little to expect.
00:41.913 --> 00:47.939
[SPEAKER_02]: It trains the nerves to accept hunger, fear, and silence as normal conditions.
00:48.619 --> 00:59.890
[SPEAKER_02]: It tells you that asking makes things worse than endurance is the only currency that matters.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It becomes method.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It seeks repetition.
01:03.596 --> 01:06.842
[SPEAKER_02]: It looks for a place where it can be exercised without resistance.
01:07.302 --> 01:11.009
[SPEAKER_02]: This is not a story of a moment snapping out of control.
01:11.049 --> 01:25.152
[SPEAKER_02]: It is a record of deterioration of care-fitting until it is indistinguishable from neglect of authority-turning heavy and purposeless of a child reduced to something inconvenient.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Something that must be managed hidden, subdued.
01:28.737 --> 01:32.243
[SPEAKER_02]: Pain, when it has nowhere else to go, is not dissipated.
01:32.864 --> 01:37.771
[SPEAKER_02]: In my grates, what followed took place in rooms no one remembers clearly.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Small spaces, bad bite, thin barriers that kept nothing out, and nothing in.
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[SPEAKER_02]: People brushed close enough to feel something was wrong.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Then they stepped away.
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[SPEAKER_02]: the sound stopped, the door closed, life resumed.
01:54.395 --> 01:59.401
[SPEAKER_02]: That is often all it takes, not secrecy, just distance.
01:59.421 --> 02:07.892
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a story about a mother and her son, about power used in cruelty, about fear that arrived daily and stayed.
02:08.553 --> 02:17.464
[SPEAKER_02]: About a little boy whose life was not shaped by possibility or career, but survival, moment by moment, until even that failed him.
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[SPEAKER_02]: This is the story of Anna Marie Cardona, the short broken life of her son, Lazzaro Figaroa.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome, listener.
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[SPEAKER_01]: I'm glad you're here.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Take a seat.
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[SPEAKER_01]: Next to the fire.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Obscura, where we shine a light on the dark.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Some lives begin in ruin, and they stay there, pressed down by the weight of what came before, until the ruin spreads outward, and claims whatever is closest.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Cardona carried damage from the start.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The kind that settles deep, and hardens over time, it's shaped her.
03:26.213 --> 03:29.697
[SPEAKER_02]: It's shaped her the way wind and salt shaped stone on a Cuban shore.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Slow and relentless.
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[SPEAKER_02]: What she did to her boy was not a sudden storm.
03:36.265 --> 03:38.348
[SPEAKER_02]: It was the slow accumulation of years.
03:39.089 --> 03:43.235
[SPEAKER_02]: The quiet turning of grievance into something colder and more final.
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[SPEAKER_02]: This is not the tale of monsters leaping from the dark.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Listener, it is the record of ordinary failure.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Repeat it until it became
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[SPEAKER_02]: a mother who looked at her child and saw only burden.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Anna Maria Cardona was born on November 26, 1961, in Havana, Cuba.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Under the long shadow of Fidel Castro's revolution, the island was a place of families fractured by politics and poverty.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Anna's father abandoned the home the day she came into the world, leaving no note, no trace, just absence, and it did not meet him until she was seven.
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[SPEAKER_02]: a chance encounter on a dusty street that left her with nothing but questions.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She was a dark-haired child, oil black hair framing a face with bright, curious eyes that took in too much, too soon.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Her mother drank through the night's rum or whatever was cheap and available, keeping Anna up into the early hours.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The woman would cry over old photographs and tell the
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[SPEAKER_02]: The man who wasn't there, she called Anna Stained, born dirty, damned from the first breath.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Those words lodged into Anna-like birds, sharp and impossible to pull free, without drawing blood.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Children remember, listener.
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[SPEAKER_02]: School was hard for Anna.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She struggled with letters and numbers, repeated grades until the system gave up.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Officials placed her in a residential school.
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[SPEAKER_02]: A place of strict rules and gray walls.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But she never advanced past the fourth grade.
05:22.625 --> 05:28.675
[SPEAKER_02]: At around 10 years old, they sat her for tutoring, one-on-one sessions that promised progress.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She took to a well enough, the individual attention, a rare kindness, the tutors mailed teenage cousin, noticed in her, he stole glances, silent, and lingering.
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[SPEAKER_02]: One day, the tutor stepped out for a small errand, the cousin followed Anna into a room, and violently raped her.
05:47.297 --> 05:52.123
[SPEAKER_02]: He pressed close afterward, and whispered that if she told anyone, he would kill her.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The threat hung heavy, a secret she carried alone for a time.
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[SPEAKER_02]: When Anna finally gathered the courage to tell her mother, her mother refused to believe it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She accused the girl of lying to avoid schoolwork.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She spanked Anna hard, the little girl begging and screaming for it to stop, the blows fallen without mercy, broken by the rejection, Anna left and went to live with her aunt.
06:17.028 --> 06:22.894
[SPEAKER_02]: Things were nice at first, the older woman bought her guava pastries when they shot together.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Smiling and calling it their little secret, Anna looked up to her, a flicker of light and all that darkness.
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[SPEAKER_02]: When her uncle and cousin drank, when the liquor flowed, they focused on Anna, sexually harassing her with words and stares.
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[SPEAKER_02]: One day, they forced her to undress in front of them, accusing her of stealing.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Making her cry as she removed each piece of clothing under their gaze, her uncle's upper lip, trembled with sweat.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The aunt walked in, found her niece naked and sobbing, and beat the men with a shoe, driving them from the house.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She called in as mother and said the girl could no longer stay.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It was no longer safe, between the ages of 14 and 16, and I attempted suicide three times, the attempts were cries swallowed by indifference.
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[SPEAKER_02]: At 15 or 16, she fled her mother's house and moved in with five older girls who lived on the streets.
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[SPEAKER_02]: They introduced her to marijuana pills.
07:22.966 --> 07:33.786
[SPEAKER_02]: alcohol, sex with men and women, they haze blurred the edges of her pain, later in life doctors diagnosed her with PTSD, from all the accumulated traumas.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, she suffered no other mental illnesses.
07:36.494 --> 07:38.257
[SPEAKER_02]: No voices or delusions to blame.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Just the residue of harm layered on thick.
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[SPEAKER_02]: In Cuba, mental health resources were scarce reserved for the politically aligned or the severely impaired.
07:49.413 --> 07:54.441
[SPEAKER_02]: In a suffering, when untreated, festering like an open wound and tropical heat.
07:54.421 --> 07:59.310
[SPEAKER_02]: It has philosophical truism that underdress trauma, that gets more trauma.
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[SPEAKER_02]: In the end, as case, it was not abstract theory, but lived reality.
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[SPEAKER_02]: A chain of events that would one day link to a child's demise.
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[SPEAKER_02]: In 1980, and arrived in America alone in pregnant.
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[SPEAKER_02]: One of the Maroitos swept up in the boat lift.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The Mariel boat lift lasted from April to October that year.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The chaotic exodus when Castro opened the port of Mariel, after thousands saw to silent at the Peruvian embassy.
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[SPEAKER_02]: About 125,000 Cubans made the crossing to Florida.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Boats overcrowded in dangerous.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The influx strained resources.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Re-shaped Miami with new voices and rhythms, Cuban heritage pulsed through the city, and the cafes and music, the food and families were building, but for many arrivals, it was hard ship, exile on top of poverty.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Anna, 19, and carrying her first child, stepped into a new world that promised freedom, but delivered uncertainty.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She had no family waiting, no safety net.
09:02.127 --> 09:25.178
[SPEAKER_02]: The boat lift brought not just refugees, but also criminals released from Cuban prisons, painting the perception of all the Marriottos, and an navigated this stigma, her pregnancy, visible mark in the city, already wary of newcomers, Miami in the 1980s, sold itself as sunlight and water, blue sky, white sand, all trees bending just enough to look relaxed.
09:25.158 --> 09:41.952
[SPEAKER_02]: From a distance it looked weightless, up close, it was a city running hot, swollen with money that arrived too fast, and asked two few questions, cocaine paid for the shine, blood paid for the rest, the drug trade moved through Miami like weather.
09:41.932 --> 09:55.438
[SPEAKER_02]: It came off the water and through the air, packed into boats, planes, cars with false bottoms, cash flowed, thick and dirty, stacked in closets and shoe boxes, washed through banks that pretended not to notice.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Manchins went up overnight, nightclub stayed open until the morning.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The city learned how to look the other way.
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[SPEAKER_02]: and still collect a fee.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Violence became routine.
10:06.102 --> 10:11.798
[SPEAKER_02]: Bodies turned up in canals and motel rooms in the trunk of cars left baking and parking lots.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Drive buys on busy streets, bombs and office buildings, murders that barely slowed traffic.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The newspapers tried to keep up, and they failed.
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[SPEAKER_02]: By the middle of the decade, death had lost its ability to shock and became background noise.
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[SPEAKER_02]: But beneath the headlines in the neon, there was another Miami.
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[SPEAKER_02]: One that did not profit from the flood of money, immigrants crowded into efficiencies and aging apartment blocks, Cubans, Haitians, Central Americans, all arriving with whatever they could carry.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And whatever they were running from, the mario boat lift had dumped tens of thousands into a city, already stretched thin, jobs were scarce, rent was not, people lived stacked on top of one another, sharing rooms, sharing silence, the divide was sharp and unforgiving, on one street cocaine money bill pastel palaces with gates and guards.
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[SPEAKER_02]: on the next.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Family slept three to a bed.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Windows opened because the air was dead and thick.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Human.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Children raise themselves when adults work nights are disappeared.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Everyone knew someone would vanished.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Some came back.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Some did not.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And so Miami in the 1980s was a city built-on contrast sharp enough to cut, paradise and rod sharing the same heat, and in that heat, some lives burned fast and bright.
11:34.115 --> 11:44.448
[SPEAKER_02]: While others were quietly and completely consumed, it was a philosophical experiment in excess and deprivation, where the American dream twisted into a nightmare for the vulnerable.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Anna Maria Cardona, fresh from Cuba shortages, found herself in this cold drain,
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[SPEAKER_02]: were opportunity mingled with peril and her past traumas found fertile ground to grow.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Anna Cardana led a different life, post-pregnancy.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She was seen as a prize by the Cuban man who found success in Miami.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She was lavished on.
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[SPEAKER_02]: repaid for a nice car purchased, and had grown into someone that was considered a beauty among her peers, and she was quick to take advantage of her status as Arm Candy, then came the excess, partying late into the night became a common activity, and she was not unfamiliar with cocaine.
12:25.146 --> 12:30.111
[SPEAKER_02]: At first, when Anna arrived to Miami, she gave birth to her son, one point at,
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[SPEAKER_02]: But that original relationship fell apart when she landed in Miami, and eventually became the girlfriend of Fidel Figaroa, a man tied to the drug trade.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He fathered her daughter, Tahimi, in 1987, and it was pregnant again with his child.
12:45.751 --> 12:52.537
[SPEAKER_02]: The unborn Lazarole figure Roma could have been born into excess, the kind that insulates children from consequence.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He might have grown up around glass balconies and baby views, learned early that money smooths over most things.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The future ended before he drew his first breath.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Four weeks before he was born.
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[SPEAKER_02]: His father was executed on a Miami stream.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The life that had brought him all that excess was eventually the life that took it all away.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It happened late on a Sunday night, September 20th, 1987.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Outside of Riverfront Bar, were men with money and enemies tended to gather.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Fidel Figaroa was exactly the kind of man Miami rewarded in those years.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Flashy, confident, untouchable until he was not.
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[SPEAKER_02]: $10,000 Rolex caught the white on his wrist.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It drove a blue Mercedes that cost more than most people made in a year.
13:40.657 --> 13:47.791
[SPEAKER_02]: Bodyguards followed him everywhere in a white Cadillac, El Dorado, a rolling symbol of how badly he knew he was wanted.
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[SPEAKER_02]: As he pulled away from the bar, another car east up beside him, no warning, no exchange, a gun came out in a single shot and did everything.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Figaroa slumped in the driver's seat, blood spread quietly where confidence had been moments before.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The bodyguards did not rush into a hospital.
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[SPEAKER_02]: They lifted his body from the Mercedes, and placed it in the back seat of the Cadillac.
14:12.124 --> 14:18.309
[SPEAKER_02]: As if rearranging furniture, they drove a mile and a half to a restaurant, parked and called the police.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The murder was never solved, no arrests, no clear motive, drugs were assumed.
14:24.895 --> 14:27.477
[SPEAKER_02]: In Miami then, they always were.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Figaroa was 28 years old and already well-established.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He had come over during the Marielbo lift, just like Anna, and found his footing fast.
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[SPEAKER_02]: A North West 17th Avenue, he was known as Papito, a distributor, a familiar name, a man people recognized.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Hundreds attended his funeral, that alone told the story.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He kept two women in separate penthouse apartments at the Charter Club.
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[SPEAKER_02]: High above Biscayne Bay, one had already given him a son.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The other, Anna Maria Cardona, was pregnant.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She was carrying Lazaro, a boy who would be born into a world already stripped of its center.
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[SPEAKER_02]: In hindsight, they feel settled then.
15:14.673 --> 15:20.742
[SPEAKER_02]: Marked by the sound of a gunshot echoing through his ninth month, the wealth for Anna vanished quickly.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The balcony views disappeared.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The palace was gone.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Detectives saw the apartment once when they came to speak with Cardona after the murder.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Two floors, lavish.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Expensive in ways that could not last without the man who paid for it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Rent a loan for it ran into the thousands.
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[SPEAKER_02]: for someone only a few years in the country, but life had been unreal.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She didn't even have to work, and then it was over.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I could dream you wake up from, and you close your eyes quickly, begging for that vision to return.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Babyless Arro was born on September 18th, 1987.
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[SPEAKER_02]: By then, Cardona had already two children.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Stability did not follow the birth within a year she leftless Arro and one of the others with a baby sitter.
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[SPEAKER_02]: for months at a time.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Without Fidel Figaroa, she drifted, small apartments, a trailer park, at least one of X-Shin, the penthouse of life collapsed into temporary rooms and borrowed space.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And his history with the law stretched back years.
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[SPEAKER_02]: In 1982, she was arrested alongside three men during a home invasion robbery.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Her attorney later said she was present, but not a participant, the charges were dismissed
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[SPEAKER_02]: She was arrested again in 1985.
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[SPEAKER_02]: This time for armed robbery in Berglory.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Those charges, too, did not stick.
16:46.577 --> 16:51.286
[SPEAKER_02]: By the time Lazaro arrived, this scaffolding holding everything up was already rotting.
16:51.867 --> 16:52.869
[SPEAKER_02]: The money was gone.
16:53.390 --> 16:55.133
[SPEAKER_02]: The protection was gone.
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[SPEAKER_02]: What remained was a woman with children.
16:57.756 --> 17:04.364
[SPEAKER_02]: She did not know how to carry in a boy whose life began after the bullet had already decided its shape.
17:04.904 --> 17:11.752
[SPEAKER_02]: Whenever Chancellor Zaro might have, at the end of that car beside the river, the rest was only after math.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Fidel's death left Anna with a $100,000 estate, and some that could have provided security, but instead fueled her to sin.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She squandered it on cocaine and extravagance, blaming the infant Lizaro for her fall from grace.
17:27.572 --> 17:31.877
[SPEAKER_02]: In her mind, he was the son of the devil, the reason her wife unraveled.
17:32.478 --> 17:41.230
[SPEAKER_02]: Echoes of her mother, calling her a stain, all those years ago, this was that myth festered, turning maternal instinct into malice.
17:41.751 --> 17:48.981
[SPEAKER_02]: It speaks to how laws can distort perception, transforming innocence into a scapegoat
17:48.961 --> 17:52.627
[SPEAKER_02]: From the beginning, Anna established a pattern with Ozzaro.
17:53.048 --> 17:55.873
[SPEAKER_02]: She left him in the care of others, even strangers.
17:56.454 --> 18:02.484
[SPEAKER_02]: For weeks, or even months, Martha Flightas Husband had known Fidel Figaroa back in Cuba.
18:02.785 --> 18:07.633
[SPEAKER_02]: When Ozzaro was only months old, Anna met Mrs. Flightas for the first time.
18:07.673 --> 18:13.062
[SPEAKER_02]: That same day, she left Ahimi in Ozzaro with her and it gave a phone number.
18:13.042 --> 18:14.544
[SPEAKER_02]: A call went unanswered.
18:14.945 --> 18:17.168
[SPEAKER_02]: Flight has kept the children for months.
18:17.688 --> 18:19.491
[SPEAKER_02]: She did the same with Carlos Lima.
18:19.911 --> 18:25.479
[SPEAKER_02]: That first, he babysat the three children overnight once a week, then two nights, then three nights.
18:26.040 --> 18:28.744
[SPEAKER_02]: When he had a said she had been evicted, he took them all in.
18:28.784 --> 18:37.075
[SPEAKER_02]: Eventually she retrieved one, but left Ahimi and Lazaro, she gave a beeper number, ignored pages for weeks on end.
18:37.055 --> 18:43.027
[SPEAKER_02]: In July 1988, Anna asked Susie Hernandez to babysit Rosarro and Tahini for a weekend.
18:43.368 --> 18:47.837
[SPEAKER_02]: Hernandez had never met Anna, a newer boyfriend from Fidel's funeral.
18:48.478 --> 18:55.873
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna did not return Sunday by August, still gone, in early September, Hernandez contacted Lima.
18:55.853 --> 19:00.399
[SPEAKER_02]: They plan to turn the children over to the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services.
19:00.880 --> 19:04.966
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna called later, asked them to go to court to help get the children back.
19:05.266 --> 19:13.317
[SPEAKER_02]: They attended the hearing, the judge placed the children with Lima and his mother, and October or November, HRS were turned them to Anna.
19:13.818 --> 19:17.744
[SPEAKER_02]: Even then, Hernandez continued babysitting, sometimes for weeks.
19:18.244 --> 19:20.848
[SPEAKER_02]: She cared for them over Christmas in New Year.
19:20.828 --> 19:36.880
[SPEAKER_02]: In July and August 1989, Anna and the children lived with Olivia Gonzalez in a Miami Beach hotel before September 1990, Anna lived in a housing development, at Northwest 7th Avenue in 14th Street, that month.
19:36.860 --> 19:45.313
[SPEAKER_02]: She, Olivia, Juan, and Tahimi moved to the Palado home at 5976 southwest third street in South Miami.
19:45.714 --> 19:53.646
[SPEAKER_02]: Louis Palado rented the efficiency in his house to Anna Cardona, in Olivia Gonzalez, from September through early November 1990.
19:54.087 --> 19:59.475
[SPEAKER_02]: He built the home himself, interior walls were hollow sheet rock over two by fours.
19:59.455 --> 20:04.404
[SPEAKER_02]: The efficiency shared a wall with his mother-in-law's room, a hollow cord door between.
20:04.444 --> 20:07.669
[SPEAKER_02]: He left a two-inch gap at the bottom for air conditioning.
20:08.010 --> 20:09.653
[SPEAKER_02]: The shower door was transparent.
20:09.913 --> 20:11.476
[SPEAKER_02]: The closet was 4 feet wide.
20:11.496 --> 20:15.102
[SPEAKER_02]: 21 inches deep with slotted doors.
20:15.082 --> 20:23.339
[SPEAKER_02]: The door opened to the backyard, and on Olivia kept it in the windows wide open, a auto had a tool shed, a few feet away.
20:23.360 --> 20:25.524
[SPEAKER_02]: It went there often for supplies.
20:26.165 --> 20:30.074
[SPEAKER_02]: He kept lovebirds in the yard, fed them twice daily with a sun.
20:30.735 --> 20:33.040
[SPEAKER_02]: He could see right into the efficiency.
20:33.020 --> 20:36.184
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna and Olivia never closed the door when he approached.
20:36.825 --> 20:38.467
[SPEAKER_02]: For problems they left word.
20:39.108 --> 20:41.551
[SPEAKER_02]: He came when he could, unannounced.
20:41.571 --> 20:50.943
[SPEAKER_02]: During that time, while I don't ever saw or heard a small boy, neither did his nine-year-old son Louis Jr., nor daughter of Marxa, who visited her two-year-old.
20:51.444 --> 20:53.847
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna and Olivia Gonzalez-Mendoza,
20:53.827 --> 20:56.851
[SPEAKER_02]: at a nightclub in Miami Beach, in March 1989.
20:57.913 --> 21:08.087
[SPEAKER_02]: Cardona was attractive and confident, partying excessively, drinking heavily using cocaine, Gonzalez was smitten, and the two began a romantic relationship.
21:08.628 --> 21:14.536
[SPEAKER_02]: As Anna's finances crumbled, Olivia became her partner in both life, and eventually, crime.
21:15.057 --> 21:17.320
[SPEAKER_02]: This union marked a turning point.
21:17.300 --> 21:22.426
[SPEAKER_02]: where Anna's personal demons found a collaborator, amplifying the cycle of abuse.
21:23.146 --> 21:34.018
[SPEAKER_02]: On the morning of November 2, 1990, a Florida power and light worker found a child's body in the yard of a wealthy Miami Beach home, bushes obscured it from the street and door.
21:34.438 --> 21:43.408
[SPEAKER_02]: Dr. Bruce Hyma examined around midday, death ate to 12 hours earlier, the body emaciated, severe abuse evident.
21:43.388 --> 22:02.967
[SPEAKER_02]: Medical Evidence revealed massive trauma, unhealed arm fracture, skull fractures with subdueral and subaract noise to hematomas, one arm immobilized, muscles ossified from a pita trauma, a diaper filled with calcified feces, wrapped many times with brown plastic packing tape.
22:02.947 --> 22:04.069
[SPEAKER_02]: to avoid changes.
22:04.570 --> 22:12.422
[SPEAKER_02]: The three-year-old Wade 18 pounds at 11 months, hit Wade 20, to fry upper teeth missing from blunt trauma.
22:12.762 --> 22:14.645
[SPEAKER_02]: Internal injuries date it back months.
22:15.466 --> 22:20.074
[SPEAKER_02]: The date County Medical Examiner called it the worst child abuse he had ever seen.
22:20.114 --> 22:24.280
[SPEAKER_02]: The child suffered torture for 18 months before death.
22:24.260 --> 22:33.966
[SPEAKER_02]: Captain Beds so long he developed Beds Source, especially on one side of the head, Wazaro had been the victim of a slow and methodical torture.
22:37.591 --> 22:41.755
[SPEAKER_02]: And that, listener, brings us to the close of this dark prelude.
22:42.476 --> 22:43.998
[SPEAKER_02]: The foundation's laid bare.
22:44.819 --> 22:53.007
[SPEAKER_02]: A life forged in abandonment, exile, and unchecked rage, spilling over into the fragile existence of an innocent boy.
22:53.588 --> 22:59.915
[SPEAKER_02]: Lizaro's story thus far is one of being where mercy evaporated long before the final blows fell.
23:00.375 --> 23:03.919
[SPEAKER_02]: But this, listener, is merely the beginning of that descent.
23:03.899 --> 23:07.346
[SPEAKER_02]: the outline of a tragedy that demands deeper excavation.
23:08.067 --> 23:14.339
[SPEAKER_02]: This concludes part one of our two part series on the murder of Azaro Figaroa.
23:14.359 --> 23:19.208
[SPEAKER_02]: In the next installment, we will delve further into the heart of darkness.
23:19.188 --> 23:23.916
[SPEAKER_02]: the precise mechanics of the abuse that twisted a mother's hand into a weapon.
23:24.377 --> 23:40.223
[SPEAKER_02]: The psychological fractures that propelled Anna Maria Cardona toward irrevocable cruelty and the reverberations that followed the crime from the fractured investigations and courtroom reckoning to the lingering scars on survivors and society alike.
23:40.663 --> 23:41.685
[SPEAKER_02]: The fallout.
23:41.665 --> 23:51.135
[SPEAKER_02]: Graham and unyielding reveals how such horrors do not end with a single death, but echo through time, questioning the very structure as meant as shielded the vulnerable.
23:51.576 --> 23:55.940
[SPEAKER_02]: Until then, I ask that you reflect on the silences that allowed this to unfold.
23:56.361 --> 23:57.883
[SPEAKER_02]: That narrowing continues.
23:58.603 --> 24:11.217
[SPEAKER_02]: Even now, if you'd like to get access to part two ahead of time, at Depatreon.com, so I substitute a
00:03.743 --> 00:18.862
[SPEAKER_02]: Listener, some lives are marked early, not by a single catastrophe, but by a narrowing of options, the world closes in an inch by inch until there is nowhere left to stand that is not already found.
00:19.804 --> 00:32.620
[SPEAKER_02]: This story begins in that narrowing, in the absence of mercy, in the steady removal of softness, long before anyone died, something essential was already being taken away.
00:32.684 --> 00:33.305
[SPEAKER_02]: eroded.
00:34.145 --> 00:36.608
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a kind of damage that does not rage.
00:37.388 --> 00:38.009
[SPEAKER_02]: It's sentals.
00:38.730 --> 00:41.192
[SPEAKER_02]: It teaches a person how little to expect.
00:41.913 --> 00:47.939
[SPEAKER_02]: It trains the nerves to accept hunger, fear, and silence as normal conditions.
00:48.619 --> 00:59.890
[SPEAKER_02]: It tells you that asking makes things worse than endurance is the only currency that matters.
00:59.870 --> 01:01.032
[SPEAKER_02]: It becomes method.
01:01.753 --> 01:03.035
[SPEAKER_02]: It seeks repetition.
01:03.596 --> 01:06.842
[SPEAKER_02]: It looks for a place where it can be exercised without resistance.
01:07.302 --> 01:11.009
[SPEAKER_02]: This is not a story of a moment snapping out of control.
01:11.049 --> 01:25.152
[SPEAKER_02]: It is a record of deterioration of care-fitting until it is indistinguishable from neglect of authority-turning heavy and purposeless of a child reduced to something inconvenient.
01:25.132 --> 01:28.277
[SPEAKER_02]: Something that must be managed hidden, subdued.
01:28.737 --> 01:32.243
[SPEAKER_02]: Pain, when it has nowhere else to go, is not dissipated.
01:32.864 --> 01:37.771
[SPEAKER_02]: In my grates, what followed took place in rooms no one remembers clearly.
01:38.452 --> 01:44.100
[SPEAKER_02]: Small spaces, bad bite, thin barriers that kept nothing out, and nothing in.
01:44.621 --> 01:47.706
[SPEAKER_02]: People brushed close enough to feel something was wrong.
01:48.247 --> 01:49.789
[SPEAKER_02]: Then they stepped away.
01:49.769 --> 01:53.774
[SPEAKER_02]: the sound stopped, the door closed, life resumed.
01:54.395 --> 01:59.401
[SPEAKER_02]: That is often all it takes, not secrecy, just distance.
01:59.421 --> 02:07.892
[SPEAKER_02]: This is a story about a mother and her son, about power used in cruelty, about fear that arrived daily and stayed.
02:08.553 --> 02:17.464
[SPEAKER_02]: About a little boy whose life was not shaped by possibility or career, but survival, moment by moment, until even that failed him.
02:17.444 --> 02:24.191
[SPEAKER_02]: This is the story of Anna Marie Cardona, the short broken life of her son, Lazzaro Figaroa.
02:29.717 --> 02:30.478
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome, listener.
02:31.378 --> 02:32.279
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm glad you're here.
02:33.341 --> 02:33.841
[SPEAKER_01]: Take a seat.
02:34.642 --> 02:35.423
[SPEAKER_01]: Next to the fire.
02:39.026 --> 02:46.354
[SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Obscura, where we shine a light on the dark.
03:07.293 --> 03:17.504
[SPEAKER_02]: Some lives begin in ruin, and they stay there, pressed down by the weight of what came before, until the ruin spreads outward, and claims whatever is closest.
03:18.084 --> 03:20.667
[SPEAKER_02]: Cardona carried damage from the start.
03:21.328 --> 03:25.572
[SPEAKER_02]: The kind that settles deep, and hardens over time, it's shaped her.
03:26.213 --> 03:29.697
[SPEAKER_02]: It's shaped her the way wind and salt shaped stone on a Cuban shore.
03:30.578 --> 03:32.760
[SPEAKER_02]: Slow and relentless.
03:32.740 --> 03:35.584
[SPEAKER_02]: What she did to her boy was not a sudden storm.
03:36.265 --> 03:38.348
[SPEAKER_02]: It was the slow accumulation of years.
03:39.089 --> 03:43.235
[SPEAKER_02]: The quiet turning of grievance into something colder and more final.
03:44.077 --> 03:47.061
[SPEAKER_02]: This is not the tale of monsters leaping from the dark.
03:47.401 --> 03:50.586
[SPEAKER_02]: Listener, it is the record of ordinary failure.
03:51.327 --> 03:54.732
[SPEAKER_02]: Repeat it until it became
03:54.712 --> 03:57.656
[SPEAKER_02]: a mother who looked at her child and saw only burden.
03:58.297 --> 04:04.546
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna Maria Cardona was born on November 26, 1961, in Havana, Cuba.
04:05.107 --> 04:12.097
[SPEAKER_02]: Under the long shadow of Fidel Castro's revolution, the island was a place of families fractured by politics and poverty.
04:12.638 --> 04:22.913
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna's father abandoned the home the day she came into the world, leaving no note, no trace, just absence, and it did not meet him until she was seven.
04:22.893 --> 04:26.857
[SPEAKER_02]: a chance encounter on a dusty street that left her with nothing but questions.
04:27.358 --> 04:35.647
[SPEAKER_02]: She was a dark-haired child, oil black hair framing a face with bright, curious eyes that took in too much, too soon.
04:36.228 --> 04:43.596
[SPEAKER_02]: Her mother drank through the night's rum or whatever was cheap and available, keeping Anna up into the early hours.
04:44.337 --> 04:50.183
[SPEAKER_02]: The woman would cry over old photographs and tell the
04:50.163 --> 04:56.897
[SPEAKER_02]: The man who wasn't there, she called Anna Stained, born dirty, damned from the first breath.
04:57.679 --> 05:04.273
[SPEAKER_02]: Those words lodged into Anna-like birds, sharp and impossible to pull free, without drawing blood.
05:04.854 --> 05:07.159
[SPEAKER_02]: Children remember, listener.
05:07.139 --> 05:08.762
[SPEAKER_02]: School was hard for Anna.
05:09.202 --> 05:13.830
[SPEAKER_02]: She struggled with letters and numbers, repeated grades until the system gave up.
05:14.331 --> 05:16.575
[SPEAKER_02]: Officials placed her in a residential school.
05:17.156 --> 05:19.219
[SPEAKER_02]: A place of strict rules and gray walls.
05:19.940 --> 05:22.004
[SPEAKER_02]: But she never advanced past the fourth grade.
05:22.625 --> 05:28.675
[SPEAKER_02]: At around 10 years old, they sat her for tutoring, one-on-one sessions that promised progress.
05:28.655 --> 05:39.267
[SPEAKER_02]: She took to a well enough, the individual attention, a rare kindness, the tutors mailed teenage cousin, noticed in her, he stole glances, silent, and lingering.
05:39.748 --> 05:46.856
[SPEAKER_02]: One day, the tutor stepped out for a small errand, the cousin followed Anna into a room, and violently raped her.
05:47.297 --> 05:52.123
[SPEAKER_02]: He pressed close afterward, and whispered that if she told anyone, he would kill her.
05:52.683 --> 05:56.788
[SPEAKER_02]: The threat hung heavy, a secret she carried alone for a time.
05:56.768 --> 06:01.733
[SPEAKER_02]: When Anna finally gathered the courage to tell her mother, her mother refused to believe it.
06:02.253 --> 06:05.657
[SPEAKER_02]: She accused the girl of lying to avoid schoolwork.
06:05.677 --> 06:16.528
[SPEAKER_02]: She spanked Anna hard, the little girl begging and screaming for it to stop, the blows fallen without mercy, broken by the rejection, Anna left and went to live with her aunt.
06:17.028 --> 06:22.894
[SPEAKER_02]: Things were nice at first, the older woman bought her guava pastries when they shot together.
06:22.874 --> 06:29.302
[SPEAKER_02]: Smiling and calling it their little secret, Anna looked up to her, a flicker of light and all that darkness.
06:29.943 --> 06:37.712
[SPEAKER_02]: When her uncle and cousin drank, when the liquor flowed, they focused on Anna, sexually harassing her with words and stares.
06:38.233 --> 06:43.920
[SPEAKER_02]: One day, they forced her to undress in front of them, accusing her of stealing.
06:43.900 --> 06:51.074
[SPEAKER_02]: Making her cry as she removed each piece of clothing under their gaze, her uncle's upper lip, trembled with sweat.
06:51.495 --> 06:58.989
[SPEAKER_02]: The aunt walked in, found her niece naked and sobbing, and beat the men with a shoe, driving them from the house.
06:59.711 --> 07:03.478
[SPEAKER_02]: She called in as mother and said the girl could no longer stay.
07:03.458 --> 07:13.252
[SPEAKER_02]: It was no longer safe, between the ages of 14 and 16, and I attempted suicide three times, the attempts were cries swallowed by indifference.
07:13.813 --> 07:19.681
[SPEAKER_02]: At 15 or 16, she fled her mother's house and moved in with five older girls who lived on the streets.
07:20.202 --> 07:22.986
[SPEAKER_02]: They introduced her to marijuana pills.
07:22.966 --> 07:33.786
[SPEAKER_02]: alcohol, sex with men and women, they haze blurred the edges of her pain, later in life doctors diagnosed her with PTSD, from all the accumulated traumas.
07:33.850 --> 07:36.033
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, she suffered no other mental illnesses.
07:36.494 --> 07:38.257
[SPEAKER_02]: No voices or delusions to blame.
07:38.637 --> 07:41.321
[SPEAKER_02]: Just the residue of harm layered on thick.
07:41.842 --> 07:48.873
[SPEAKER_02]: In Cuba, mental health resources were scarce reserved for the politically aligned or the severely impaired.
07:49.413 --> 07:54.441
[SPEAKER_02]: In a suffering, when untreated, festering like an open wound and tropical heat.
07:54.421 --> 07:59.310
[SPEAKER_02]: It has philosophical truism that underdress trauma, that gets more trauma.
07:59.811 --> 08:04.259
[SPEAKER_02]: In the end, as case, it was not abstract theory, but lived reality.
08:04.800 --> 08:08.547
[SPEAKER_02]: A chain of events that would one day link to a child's demise.
08:09.188 --> 08:13.476
[SPEAKER_02]: In 1980, and arrived in America alone in pregnant.
08:13.456 --> 08:16.440
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the Maroitos swept up in the boat lift.
08:16.881 --> 08:20.787
[SPEAKER_02]: The Mariel boat lift lasted from April to October that year.
08:21.207 --> 08:27.497
[SPEAKER_02]: The chaotic exodus when Castro opened the port of Mariel, after thousands saw to silent at the Peruvian embassy.
08:27.917 --> 08:31.723
[SPEAKER_02]: About 125,000 Cubans made the crossing to Florida.
08:32.143 --> 08:33.986
[SPEAKER_02]: Boats overcrowded in dangerous.
08:34.547 --> 08:36.730
[SPEAKER_02]: The influx strained resources.
08:36.710 --> 08:51.011
[SPEAKER_02]: Re-shaped Miami with new voices and rhythms, Cuban heritage pulsed through the city, and the cafes and music, the food and families were building, but for many arrivals, it was hard ship, exile on top of poverty.
08:51.511 --> 08:58.802
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna, 19, and carrying her first child, stepped into a new world that promised freedom, but delivered uncertainty.
08:58.782 --> 09:01.566
[SPEAKER_02]: She had no family waiting, no safety net.
09:02.127 --> 09:25.178
[SPEAKER_02]: The boat lift brought not just refugees, but also criminals released from Cuban prisons, painting the perception of all the Marriottos, and an navigated this stigma, her pregnancy, visible mark in the city, already wary of newcomers, Miami in the 1980s, sold itself as sunlight and water, blue sky, white sand, all trees bending just enough to look relaxed.
09:25.158 --> 09:41.952
[SPEAKER_02]: From a distance it looked weightless, up close, it was a city running hot, swollen with money that arrived too fast, and asked two few questions, cocaine paid for the shine, blood paid for the rest, the drug trade moved through Miami like weather.
09:41.932 --> 09:55.438
[SPEAKER_02]: It came off the water and through the air, packed into boats, planes, cars with false bottoms, cash flowed, thick and dirty, stacked in closets and shoe boxes, washed through banks that pretended not to notice.
09:55.899 --> 09:59.606
[SPEAKER_02]: Manchins went up overnight, nightclub stayed open until the morning.
10:00.188 --> 10:02.472
[SPEAKER_02]: The city learned how to look the other way.
10:02.452 --> 10:03.635
[SPEAKER_02]: and still collect a fee.
10:04.257 --> 10:05.601
[SPEAKER_02]: Violence became routine.
10:06.102 --> 10:11.798
[SPEAKER_02]: Bodies turned up in canals and motel rooms in the trunk of cars left baking and parking lots.
10:12.219 --> 10:18.216
[SPEAKER_02]: Drive buys on busy streets, bombs and office buildings, murders that barely slowed traffic.
10:18.196 --> 10:20.660
[SPEAKER_02]: The newspapers tried to keep up, and they failed.
10:21.000 --> 10:26.508
[SPEAKER_02]: By the middle of the decade, death had lost its ability to shock and became background noise.
10:26.929 --> 10:30.674
[SPEAKER_02]: But beneath the headlines in the neon, there was another Miami.
10:30.694 --> 10:42.111
[SPEAKER_02]: One that did not profit from the flood of money, immigrants crowded into efficiencies and aging apartment blocks, Cubans, Haitians, Central Americans, all arriving with whatever they could carry.
10:42.091 --> 11:05.466
[SPEAKER_02]: And whatever they were running from, the mario boat lift had dumped tens of thousands into a city, already stretched thin, jobs were scarce, rent was not, people lived stacked on top of one another, sharing rooms, sharing silence, the divide was sharp and unforgiving, on one street cocaine money bill pastel palaces with gates and guards.
11:05.446 --> 11:06.188
[SPEAKER_02]: on the next.
11:06.789 --> 11:08.492
[SPEAKER_02]: Family slept three to a bed.
11:08.993 --> 11:11.539
[SPEAKER_02]: Windows opened because the air was dead and thick.
11:11.980 --> 11:12.380
[SPEAKER_02]: Human.
11:12.841 --> 11:16.749
[SPEAKER_02]: Children raise themselves when adults work nights are disappeared.
11:17.311 --> 11:19.375
[SPEAKER_02]: Everyone knew someone would vanished.
11:19.856 --> 11:20.678
[SPEAKER_02]: Some came back.
11:21.339 --> 11:22.341
[SPEAKER_02]: Some did not.
11:22.321 --> 11:33.615
[SPEAKER_02]: And so Miami in the 1980s was a city built-on contrast sharp enough to cut, paradise and rod sharing the same heat, and in that heat, some lives burned fast and bright.
11:34.115 --> 11:44.448
[SPEAKER_02]: While others were quietly and completely consumed, it was a philosophical experiment in excess and deprivation, where the American dream twisted into a nightmare for the vulnerable.
11:44.788 --> 11:50.455
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna Maria Cardona, fresh from Cuba shortages, found herself in this cold drain,
11:50.620 --> 11:55.708
[SPEAKER_02]: were opportunity mingled with peril and her past traumas found fertile ground to grow.
11:56.309 --> 11:59.755
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna Cardana led a different life, post-pregnancy.
12:00.235 --> 12:04.522
[SPEAKER_02]: She was seen as a prize by the Cuban man who found success in Miami.
12:04.903 --> 12:06.385
[SPEAKER_02]: She was lavished on.
12:06.365 --> 12:24.745
[SPEAKER_02]: repaid for a nice car purchased, and had grown into someone that was considered a beauty among her peers, and she was quick to take advantage of her status as Arm Candy, then came the excess, partying late into the night became a common activity, and she was not unfamiliar with cocaine.
12:25.146 --> 12:30.111
[SPEAKER_02]: At first, when Anna arrived to Miami, she gave birth to her son, one point at,
12:30.091 --> 12:39.014
[SPEAKER_02]: But that original relationship fell apart when she landed in Miami, and eventually became the girlfriend of Fidel Figaroa, a man tied to the drug trade.
12:39.335 --> 12:45.771
[SPEAKER_02]: He fathered her daughter, Tahimi, in 1987, and it was pregnant again with his child.
12:45.751 --> 12:52.537
[SPEAKER_02]: The unborn Lazarole figure Roma could have been born into excess, the kind that insulates children from consequence.
12:52.998 --> 12:59.264
[SPEAKER_02]: He might have grown up around glass balconies and baby views, learned early that money smooths over most things.
12:59.744 --> 13:02.567
[SPEAKER_02]: The future ended before he drew his first breath.
13:03.128 --> 13:04.629
[SPEAKER_02]: Four weeks before he was born.
13:05.310 --> 13:07.792
[SPEAKER_02]: His father was executed on a Miami stream.
13:08.252 --> 13:14.138
[SPEAKER_02]: The life that had brought him all that excess was eventually the life that took it all away.
13:14.118 --> 13:17.703
[SPEAKER_02]: It happened late on a Sunday night, September 20th, 1987.
13:18.404 --> 13:23.330
[SPEAKER_02]: Outside of Riverfront Bar, were men with money and enemies tended to gather.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Fidel Figaroa was exactly the kind of man Miami rewarded in those years.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Flashy, confident, untouchable until he was not.
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[SPEAKER_02]: $10,000 Rolex caught the white on his wrist.
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[SPEAKER_02]: It drove a blue Mercedes that cost more than most people made in a year.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Bodyguards followed him everywhere in a white Cadillac, El Dorado, a rolling symbol of how badly he knew he was wanted.
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[SPEAKER_02]: As he pulled away from the bar, another car east up beside him, no warning, no exchange, a gun came out in a single shot and did everything.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Figaroa slumped in the driver's seat, blood spread quietly where confidence had been moments before.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The bodyguards did not rush into a hospital.
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[SPEAKER_02]: They lifted his body from the Mercedes, and placed it in the back seat of the Cadillac.
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[SPEAKER_02]: As if rearranging furniture, they drove a mile and a half to a restaurant, parked and called the police.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The murder was never solved, no arrests, no clear motive, drugs were assumed.
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[SPEAKER_02]: In Miami then, they always were.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Figaroa was 28 years old and already well-established.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He had come over during the Marielbo lift, just like Anna, and found his footing fast.
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[SPEAKER_02]: A North West 17th Avenue, he was known as Papito, a distributor, a familiar name, a man people recognized.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Hundreds attended his funeral, that alone told the story.
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[SPEAKER_02]: He kept two women in separate penthouse apartments at the Charter Club.
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[SPEAKER_02]: High above Biscayne Bay, one had already given him a son.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The other, Anna Maria Cardona, was pregnant.
15:02.099 --> 15:07.986
[SPEAKER_02]: She was carrying Lazaro, a boy who would be born into a world already stripped of its center.
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[SPEAKER_02]: In hindsight, they feel settled then.
15:14.673 --> 15:20.742
[SPEAKER_02]: Marked by the sound of a gunshot echoing through his ninth month, the wealth for Anna vanished quickly.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The balcony views disappeared.
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[SPEAKER_02]: The palace was gone.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Detectives saw the apartment once when they came to speak with Cardona after the murder.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Two floors, lavish.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Expensive in ways that could not last without the man who paid for it.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Rent a loan for it ran into the thousands.
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[SPEAKER_02]: for someone only a few years in the country, but life had been unreal.
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[SPEAKER_02]: She didn't even have to work, and then it was over.
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[SPEAKER_02]: I could dream you wake up from, and you close your eyes quickly, begging for that vision to return.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Babyless Arro was born on September 18th, 1987.
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[SPEAKER_02]: By then, Cardona had already two children.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Stability did not follow the birth within a year she leftless Arro and one of the others with a baby sitter.
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[SPEAKER_02]: for months at a time.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Without Fidel Figaroa, she drifted, small apartments, a trailer park, at least one of X-Shin, the penthouse of life collapsed into temporary rooms and borrowed space.
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[SPEAKER_02]: And his history with the law stretched back years.
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[SPEAKER_02]: In 1982, she was arrested alongside three men during a home invasion robbery.
16:31.476 --> 16:38.663
[SPEAKER_02]: Her attorney later said she was present, but not a participant, the charges were dismissed
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[SPEAKER_02]: She was arrested again in 1985.
16:41.448 --> 16:43.532
[SPEAKER_02]: This time for armed robbery in Berglory.
16:44.133 --> 16:46.217
[SPEAKER_02]: Those charges, too, did not stick.
16:46.577 --> 16:51.286
[SPEAKER_02]: By the time Lazaro arrived, this scaffolding holding everything up was already rotting.
16:51.867 --> 16:52.869
[SPEAKER_02]: The money was gone.
16:53.390 --> 16:55.133
[SPEAKER_02]: The protection was gone.
16:55.113 --> 16:57.235
[SPEAKER_02]: What remained was a woman with children.
16:57.756 --> 17:04.364
[SPEAKER_02]: She did not know how to carry in a boy whose life began after the bullet had already decided its shape.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Whenever Chancellor Zaro might have, at the end of that car beside the river, the rest was only after math.
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[SPEAKER_02]: Fidel's death left Anna with a $100,000 estate, and some that could have provided security, but instead fueled her to sin.
17:20.662 --> 17:26.891
[SPEAKER_02]: She squandered it on cocaine and extravagance, blaming the infant Lizaro for her fall from grace.
17:27.572 --> 17:31.877
[SPEAKER_02]: In her mind, he was the son of the devil, the reason her wife unraveled.
17:32.478 --> 17:41.230
[SPEAKER_02]: Echoes of her mother, calling her a stain, all those years ago, this was that myth festered, turning maternal instinct into malice.
17:41.751 --> 17:48.981
[SPEAKER_02]: It speaks to how laws can distort perception, transforming innocence into a scapegoat
17:48.961 --> 17:52.627
[SPEAKER_02]: From the beginning, Anna established a pattern with Ozzaro.
17:53.048 --> 17:55.873
[SPEAKER_02]: She left him in the care of others, even strangers.
17:56.454 --> 18:02.484
[SPEAKER_02]: For weeks, or even months, Martha Flightas Husband had known Fidel Figaroa back in Cuba.
18:02.785 --> 18:07.633
[SPEAKER_02]: When Ozzaro was only months old, Anna met Mrs. Flightas for the first time.
18:07.673 --> 18:13.062
[SPEAKER_02]: That same day, she left Ahimi in Ozzaro with her and it gave a phone number.
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[SPEAKER_02]: A call went unanswered.
18:14.945 --> 18:17.168
[SPEAKER_02]: Flight has kept the children for months.
18:17.688 --> 18:19.491
[SPEAKER_02]: She did the same with Carlos Lima.
18:19.911 --> 18:25.479
[SPEAKER_02]: That first, he babysat the three children overnight once a week, then two nights, then three nights.
18:26.040 --> 18:28.744
[SPEAKER_02]: When he had a said she had been evicted, he took them all in.
18:28.784 --> 18:37.075
[SPEAKER_02]: Eventually she retrieved one, but left Ahimi and Lazaro, she gave a beeper number, ignored pages for weeks on end.
18:37.055 --> 18:43.027
[SPEAKER_02]: In July 1988, Anna asked Susie Hernandez to babysit Rosarro and Tahini for a weekend.
18:43.368 --> 18:47.837
[SPEAKER_02]: Hernandez had never met Anna, a newer boyfriend from Fidel's funeral.
18:48.478 --> 18:55.873
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna did not return Sunday by August, still gone, in early September, Hernandez contacted Lima.
18:55.853 --> 19:00.399
[SPEAKER_02]: They plan to turn the children over to the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services.
19:00.880 --> 19:04.966
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna called later, asked them to go to court to help get the children back.
19:05.266 --> 19:13.317
[SPEAKER_02]: They attended the hearing, the judge placed the children with Lima and his mother, and October or November, HRS were turned them to Anna.
19:13.818 --> 19:17.744
[SPEAKER_02]: Even then, Hernandez continued babysitting, sometimes for weeks.
19:18.244 --> 19:20.848
[SPEAKER_02]: She cared for them over Christmas in New Year.
19:20.828 --> 19:36.880
[SPEAKER_02]: In July and August 1989, Anna and the children lived with Olivia Gonzalez in a Miami Beach hotel before September 1990, Anna lived in a housing development, at Northwest 7th Avenue in 14th Street, that month.
19:36.860 --> 19:45.313
[SPEAKER_02]: She, Olivia, Juan, and Tahimi moved to the Palado home at 5976 southwest third street in South Miami.
19:45.714 --> 19:53.646
[SPEAKER_02]: Louis Palado rented the efficiency in his house to Anna Cardona, in Olivia Gonzalez, from September through early November 1990.
19:54.087 --> 19:59.475
[SPEAKER_02]: He built the home himself, interior walls were hollow sheet rock over two by fours.
19:59.455 --> 20:04.404
[SPEAKER_02]: The efficiency shared a wall with his mother-in-law's room, a hollow cord door between.
20:04.444 --> 20:07.669
[SPEAKER_02]: He left a two-inch gap at the bottom for air conditioning.
20:08.010 --> 20:09.653
[SPEAKER_02]: The shower door was transparent.
20:09.913 --> 20:11.476
[SPEAKER_02]: The closet was 4 feet wide.
20:11.496 --> 20:15.102
[SPEAKER_02]: 21 inches deep with slotted doors.
20:15.082 --> 20:23.339
[SPEAKER_02]: The door opened to the backyard, and on Olivia kept it in the windows wide open, a auto had a tool shed, a few feet away.
20:23.360 --> 20:25.524
[SPEAKER_02]: It went there often for supplies.
20:26.165 --> 20:30.074
[SPEAKER_02]: He kept lovebirds in the yard, fed them twice daily with a sun.
20:30.735 --> 20:33.040
[SPEAKER_02]: He could see right into the efficiency.
20:33.020 --> 20:36.184
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna and Olivia never closed the door when he approached.
20:36.825 --> 20:38.467
[SPEAKER_02]: For problems they left word.
20:39.108 --> 20:41.551
[SPEAKER_02]: He came when he could, unannounced.
20:41.571 --> 20:50.943
[SPEAKER_02]: During that time, while I don't ever saw or heard a small boy, neither did his nine-year-old son Louis Jr., nor daughter of Marxa, who visited her two-year-old.
20:51.444 --> 20:53.847
[SPEAKER_02]: Anna and Olivia Gonzalez-Mendoza,
20:53.827 --> 20:56.851
[SPEAKER_02]: at a nightclub in Miami Beach, in March 1989.
20:57.913 --> 21:08.087
[SPEAKER_02]: Cardona was attractive and confident, partying excessively, drinking heavily using cocaine, Gonzalez was smitten, and the two began a romantic relationship.
21:08.628 --> 21:14.536
[SPEAKER_02]: As Anna's finances crumbled, Olivia became her partner in both life, and eventually, crime.
21:15.057 --> 21:17.320
[SPEAKER_02]: This union marked a turning point.
21:17.300 --> 21:22.426
[SPEAKER_02]: where Anna's personal demons found a collaborator, amplifying the cycle of abuse.
21:23.146 --> 21:34.018
[SPEAKER_02]: On the morning of November 2, 1990, a Florida power and light worker found a child's body in the yard of a wealthy Miami Beach home, bushes obscured it from the street and door.
21:34.438 --> 21:43.408
[SPEAKER_02]: Dr. Bruce Hyma examined around midday, death ate to 12 hours earlier, the body emaciated, severe abuse evident.
21:43.388 --> 22:02.967
[SPEAKER_02]: Medical Evidence revealed massive trauma, unhealed arm fracture, skull fractures with subdueral and subaract noise to hematomas, one arm immobilized, muscles ossified from a pita trauma, a diaper filled with calcified feces, wrapped many times with brown plastic packing tape.
22:02.947 --> 22:04.069
[SPEAKER_02]: to avoid changes.
22:04.570 --> 22:12.422
[SPEAKER_02]: The three-year-old Wade 18 pounds at 11 months, hit Wade 20, to fry upper teeth missing from blunt trauma.
22:12.762 --> 22:14.645
[SPEAKER_02]: Internal injuries date it back months.
22:15.466 --> 22:20.074
[SPEAKER_02]: The date County Medical Examiner called it the worst child abuse he had ever seen.
22:20.114 --> 22:24.280
[SPEAKER_02]: The child suffered torture for 18 months before death.
22:24.260 --> 22:33.966
[SPEAKER_02]: Captain Beds so long he developed Beds Source, especially on one side of the head, Wazaro had been the victim of a slow and methodical torture.
22:37.591 --> 22:41.755
[SPEAKER_02]: And that, listener, brings us to the close of this dark prelude.
22:42.476 --> 22:43.998
[SPEAKER_02]: The foundation's laid bare.
22:44.819 --> 22:53.007
[SPEAKER_02]: A life forged in abandonment, exile, and unchecked rage, spilling over into the fragile existence of an innocent boy.
22:53.588 --> 22:59.915
[SPEAKER_02]: Lizaro's story thus far is one of being where mercy evaporated long before the final blows fell.
23:00.375 --> 23:03.919
[SPEAKER_02]: But this, listener, is merely the beginning of that descent.
23:03.899 --> 23:07.346
[SPEAKER_02]: the outline of a tragedy that demands deeper excavation.
23:08.067 --> 23:14.339
[SPEAKER_02]: This concludes part one of our two part series on the murder of Azaro Figaroa.
23:14.359 --> 23:19.208
[SPEAKER_02]: In the next installment, we will delve further into the heart of darkness.
23:19.188 --> 23:23.916
[SPEAKER_02]: the precise mechanics of the abuse that twisted a mother's hand into a weapon.
23:24.377 --> 23:40.223
[SPEAKER_02]: The psychological fractures that propelled Anna Maria Cardona toward irrevocable cruelty and the reverberations that followed the crime from the fractured investigations and courtroom reckoning to the lingering scars on survivors and society alike.
23:40.663 --> 23:41.685
[SPEAKER_02]: The fallout.
23:41.665 --> 23:51.135
[SPEAKER_02]: Graham and unyielding reveals how such horrors do not end with a single death, but echo through time, questioning the very structure as meant as shielded the vulnerable.
23:51.576 --> 23:55.940
[SPEAKER_02]: Until then, I ask that you reflect on the silences that allowed this to unfold.
23:56.361 --> 23:57.883
[SPEAKER_02]: That narrowing continues.
23:58.603 --> 24:11.217
[SPEAKER_02]: Even now, if you'd like to get access to part two ahead of time, at Depatreon.com, so I substitute a
