Con't
At 10 years old, she was snooping through an item of Ellenette's — a portable German closet called a schrank — when she came upon a sheaf of letters. They were written to her, dated back to her infancy and signed by her biological mother. Cyntoia had always wondered about Georgina. It had hurt her that she'd never reached out. She had felt disposable.
Now she knew it wasn't true. All these years Georgina had been trying to communicate, but Ellenette wouldn't budge. In her mind, she was protecting Cyntoia from her absentee mother's chain of broken promises.
"All the years [Georgina] said, 'I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming,' and never shows up," Ellenette says. "Suppose each time she said that I said to 'Toia, 'Your mom is coming,' and she sits there waiting and she never shows up. That's horrible. I'd never do that to a child."
When Cyntoia turned 18, she could meet Georgina, Ellenette decided. In the meantime, she didn't want the impressionable girl following her mother down that self-destructive path. She didn't foresee, though, that her daughter was about to embark on her own. To Cyntoia, Ellenette's obstinacy was keeping her from her real family, the blood kin she'd never had. She withdrew into her room most days after school — less and less Mommy's girl.
Cyntoia was an exceptionally bright student, but disdainful of authority. She started smart-mouthing and cussing teachers, and she got into fights with other students. The kids at school teased her for her pale skin, her white mother. They mocked her status in a program for gifted children, as if being smart were a source of shame rather than pride.
In seventh grade, through the gifted program, Cyntoia took the ACT college entrance exam alongside high school seniors — and more than held her own. But in 2000, at the age of 12, she was picked up for a theft amounting to some $2,000 — Ellenette says it was a friend's mother's jewelry — and placed in the district's alternative school for at-risk students.
During a psychological evaluation, the examiner was troubled when the girl began speaking in a high-pitched sing-song voice, threatening to kill her father and cursing staff members. She was "completely out of touch with reality," an observer noted. Medication, likely Thorazine, was administered immediately.
Cyntoia told staff members of abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. Then she leveled a devastating accusation, that he'd raped her. Cyntoia later recanted the statement, saying she was angry with him at the time. To this day, she maintains the rape never happened. But Ellenette, who filed for divorce not long after Cyntoia's accusation, has never been able to completely dismiss the possibility.
The following April, Cyntoia violated her probation when she assaulted a teacher. That December, she was charged with escape after pulling the fire alarm at a secure juvenile detention facility and attempting to break out.
Cyntoia was exposed to a rough youth culture at the alternative schools where the district placed her. She started smoking pot regularly and skipping school. She was in and out of secure facilities: a Department of Children's Services supervisor, at whom Cyntoia once hurled a chair, would later say her record took up several pages. She ended up in a long-term juvenile facility operated by the Tennessee Department of Children's Services.
Woodland Hills Youth Development Center in Nashville was the end of the line. Less like a school and more like a prison, the facility was circled by a fence adorned with a looping tuft of razor wire. Here, away from Ellenette, plagued by internal conflict, Cyntoia spiraled out of control.
She was involved in roughly 20 assaults on other students. At 14, she was placed on a heavy-duty cocktail of psychotropic drugs for depression and anxiety, and she was entered into alcohol and drug treatment. In psychological evaluations at the time, doctors noted that Cyntoia often behaved irrationally, suffering from wild mood swings. She had little sense of self-worth, a counselor noted, and she expected others to fail or betray her. Yet she acted in ways that made those expectations reality. She was nearly incapable of trusting anyone, yet she badly desired approval.
Cyntoia spent 15 months in Woodland Hills. In April 2003, she was released. She was 15.
On the ride back to Clarksville, Cyntoia wondered where her father was. Every time she'd called home, she asked for Thomas. Each time there had been a different reason he couldn't come to the phone — he was on the road, he was out in the yard, he went to the store. With her daughter released, Ellenette told her the truth: She and Thomas had divorced more than a year-and-a-half ago, and he was now living in Virginia. She hadn't said anything about it while Cyntoia was locked up, afraid her daughter would have a meltdown and further delay her own release.
Cyntoia was stunned. Her father, for all his faults, was gone. There was a new man in Ellenette's life, an old friend named Frank, but Cyntoia couldn't stand him. She did everything she could to run him off, Ellenette says. Once, in an effort to scuttle the relationship, she told him Ellenette had another boyfriend.
Cyntoia began spending a lot of time with a girlfriend down the street. Ellenette found out they were actually hanging out at another house in the neighborhood, getting stoned and drunk. Mother and daughter clashed repeatedly. When Ellenette discovered she'd been skipping school, they parted ways.
The teenager stayed with her sister Missy and baby-sat her nephew when they both got out of school. The arrangement worked for a time, until Missy came home from work one day and found her son sitting in the house alone. Cyntoia was gone. She was missing for three days and returned with little explanation.
It was impossible for Cyntoia's family to keep tabs on her 24 hours a day, particularly when everyone had to work. In December, Cyntoia was playing hooky at her sister's house in Clarksville. She was supposed to help her decorate the tree that evening, but she was tired of waiting. In fact, she'd already made up her mind to go. She trimmed the tree herself and hung the lights and decorations.
The house, by all accounts, looked beautiful. Cyntoia Brown's years of freedom were coming to an end, but all she could see was escape. She grabbed a bag and caught a ride to Nashville, to start her new life.
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By the time Cyntoia was 16, she lived with an older woman in Nashville named Shocosha, whose home functioned as a de facto day care for children whose parents weren't providing for them. She stayed stoned on blunts — cigars gutted and stuffed with marijuana. She popped Ecstasy and snuck into nightclubs, drinking and dancing into the morning. She drifted in and out of relationships with much older men who took advantage of her youth and inexperience — men who had no qualms about hooking up with a girl barely old enough to drive.
Cyntoia says she started selling crack out of a friend's house in the Andrew Jackson housing development for a dealer who was locked up and needed the assist. When he got out, he asked her to join him on a cocaine run to Florida, offering to pay her. He picked Cyntoia up and they stopped at a motel off West End where he had a room. He claimed their bus to Atlanta had been delayed, and offered her a mixed vodka drink while they waited. She can only assume it was drugged.
She didn't know for sure how many times he raped her, or how long she was in his motel room. When she finally stumbled out and managed to call Shocosha, she received a shock. "Where have you been?" the woman asked. Cyntoia had been gone for two days.
It wouldn't be the last time. In the weeks leading up to the murder, Cyntoia says she was raped twice more. When she confided this to Shocosha, her friend would later say Cyntoia laughed. That's how she coped. She laughed when you expected her to cry.
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Cut-throat was always calling Cyntoia a slut. She shouldn't feel that bad about it, he'd say. Some people are just born that way. It was as though he'd taken a page from her father's playbook.
Cut, as she called him, wasn't a bad-looking guy — broad-shouldered, with hair worn in a thick shock of small braids. His real name was Garion McGlothen, he was 24, and at first their brief relationship had been fun. They got high all day. They had sex, much of it unforced. He even got Cyntoia to snort her first line — one of the most pleasurable highs she'd ever experienced.
And when Cyntoia was up, she was invincible. Once Cut choked her to the point that she lost consciousness. As soon as she came to, Cyntoia got right back up and started taunting him. She lost weight, though, because she often forgot to eat. Her eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with dark circles.
Sometime in July, Ellenette got an unexpected call. She hadn't heard from her daughter since May. She picked up the phone, only to hear Cyntoia calling from a bathroom in a Chattanooga motel. Ellenette begged her to come home, but Cyntoia said Cut wouldn't let her. He knew where her adoptive mother lived, she said, and he'd told her that if she left him, he'd find her. He'd done it before. Cyntoia promised that as soon as she could get away, she would.
If on some level Cyntoia feared Cut, she didn't know the half of it. For the most part, his rap sheet wasn't that extensive. He'd been popped for carrying a gun and possession of narcotics. Cyntoia knew he sometimes robbed people. It's a sure bet he sold a little coke.