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Azucena’s Way of the Cross
She believes her suffering was her road to freedom
By Dana Lorelle
Just seven days after three bullets tore through her body – fracturing her skull, shattering her sternum, breaking three ribs and puncturing both lungs – Azucena del Rio begged her mother and siblings’ help in dressing and bathing. She could do nothing herself, could barely move. Certainly she had ceased to have any control over her life; the husband she once loved was now an at-large fugitive and her children were in the custody of Social Services. In one moment, the life she was just starting to rebuild had been ripped apart.
But this was Sunday morning, and she had someplace she needed to go.
“I had to go to church,” she says. “I had to go tell God, ‘Thank you.’”
The beginning of violence
Azucena’s story is one of hope coming out of despair, of good coming out of evil. And it begins in a not-uncommon way: A teenage pregnancy, a young marriage.
His name was Joaquin Rangel Ramirez, and he slapped her for the first time two weeks into their marriage.
Her pregnancy brought out a new degree of possessiveness in Joaquin. If she needed to use the bathroom during the night, she had to wake him for permission. At the grocery store she learned to look only at the ground lest he accuse her of flirting with other men. At her work as a waitress, Joaquin would wait in the parking lot, peeking through the windows. She wasn’t allowed to leave the trailer by herself.
He was frequently drunk and often used drugs.
His final words to her every night before they went to bed were, “If you are ever with another man, I will kill you.”
On the night of Nov. 10, 2007, that’s exactly what he tried to do. She had worked all day as a translator at Betsy Johnson Regional Hospital in Dunn. It had been a nightmare day; Joaquin called her alternating between cheerful and furious, telling her he was taking their three children out for breakfast, then threatening to burn down their trailer. When work ended, she just wanted to get her kids to safety.
All day a strange sense had plagued her. “Something inside of me was telling me something bad was going to happen,” she remembered. “When something bad is going to happen to you, you sense it.” At one point, she glanced at a bed in the Emergency Ward where she was working and imagined herself lying in the bed.
He surprised her in the parking lot, his daughters with him in the pickup truck. He shot her once above the eye. She turned and ran. She saw a lady in white by the hospital. “I was thinking that if I could just get to her, I would be safe. I couldn’t see her face, just that she was head-to-toe in white,” she said.
Joaquin fired again, hitting her in the back. The bullet came out of her breast. She ran still, without falling.
He fired once more. She couldn’t breathe. She fell toward the lady, crying, “Please help me.” And she blacked out.
God was there
God was there that night. Of that, she has no doubt. She knows it because she should not have survived the shooting. She knows it because she was able to run, because two doctors from UNC Medical Centers were there that night and able to help with her stabilizing and airlifting to UNC.
Because the bullet in her forehead that fractured her skull did not so much as touch her brain.
Because miraculously, the three bullets did no permanent damage.
Because after just six days in the hospital when she should have been there for months, she went home.
When she regained consciousness minutes after collapsing, she remembers seeing a white light. She felt the urgent need to pray, and did so over and over. The phrase “Oh my God, I’m going to die,” circulated through her head. She kept saying, “God, I love you. Please leave me here for my children.”
To spare her any more trauma, family members told her that Joaquin had been caught and that her daughters were fine, while the truth was that Joaquin was – and still is – at large, and for two days her daughters were missing.
She lives every day with the knowledge that he could come back, and that she has no protection except for the grace of God.
But that was enough that night of Nov. 10.
“It was just amazing,” she says. “I got shot in the head and lungs. I should be dead. God wants me to be alive. He has a purpose for me in the world.”
She thinks often of that woman in white she saw outside the hospital. It was a nurse, she knows, and yet her vision was of a faceless, white-clothed form that represented safety.
It could just be coincidence then, that she prayed often to Mary in those days after the shooting, and that the parishioners from her home parish of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Newton Grove constantly invoked the Blessed Virgin for Azucena’s healing and protection.
The day after her release from the hospital she shuffled into church, shocking the pastor and parishioners who had been fervently praying to Nuestra Senora for her recovery.
Nor is it coincidence that the Monday morning after her release she fell to her knees praying to Mary to return her children from Social Services when the organization was refusing to release them until Joaquin was captured.
Within seconds of her desperate plea to Mary, her phone rang. Her children were coming home.
Giving thanks
What she senses that God wants her to do is to tell her story. She wants to give hope to women who are in situations that she was once in – to show them that they too have a pathway to freedom and healing.
She was enslaved in more ways than one, says Father Patrick Keane, pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Newton Grove. She was enslaved by her circumstances, by pressures both financial and cultural. Leaving an abusive husband is not as cut-and-dry as it might seem when she tells her story of abuse.
Joaquin had cut her off from her family and support. She couldn’t visit her mother unless he drove her. Whenever he would beat her, he’d threaten to kill her mother or brother if she told anyone. He said he’d commit suicide if she left him.
Now she sees it for the manipulation that it was. “I didn’t want to worry my mom,” she says. “When you go through this, you try to hide it. You tell yourself that it’s going to change, that he’ll be a good man some day. But it doesn’t change; you have to change it.”
She was working to change it when she got shot. She had taken a job as a translator and had enrolled in the nursing program at a community college – both of which made her husband furious and caused her several beatings.
One April day in 2007 he surprised her after class with a gun. He had left their children – including their four-month-old daughter – at home alone to deliver this message: “If you’d been walking with a man, you’d be dead by now.”
At that point, Azucena knew she had to get out or that he was going to kill her.
By October she and her three children were living with her mother. Scared for her life, on Oct. 8 she filed a restraining order against Joaquin.
One month later, he tried to kill her.
“Three keys to freedom”
Since the shooting, the woman who once was not allowed outside her trailer is a force in her small parish. She is a catechist for teenagers and is known to many of them as “Auntie.” Some have called her in their own times of distress, looking for hope, knowing that she has lived through the blackest night and come out with renewed life.
She lectors, helps with retreats, and gives what she can to those who need it.
All because of the bullets.
She calls the bullets her “three keys to freedom” because it is thanks to them that she is free of the abuse she suffered at Joaquin’s hands. They are her physical, emotional and spiritual freedoms, and what she wants is for other women to find their freedom without the trauma.
This November she was honored by Peace at Work, a North Carolina-based group created to prevent domestic violence in the workplace. She was given the Peace Worker award and the Workplace Compensation Award, which will help pay her medical bills.
She has volunteered as a translator at domestic violence shelters, and she speaks at churches and to groups, at radio stations and retreats. She tells women who are being abused that there is a way out, to get out at the first red flag of abuse – and that their lives depend on it.
She also tells them about God and his goodness, and how thankful she is for every moment of her life now.
“It’s amazing how (the shooting) changed my life and my way of living,” she says. “For so long I lived in depression. Now I’m so happy to be alive. I thank God for being able to move my hands and to be able to breathe. But I know that the next moment is never promised. I’m here to thank God for doing this miracle.”