Hardly free: Adrian Vasquez's story

Adrian Vasquez feels chained to his bed.

Every night, he must recharge the ankle monitor he wears.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers placed it on him in March in Columbus. The battery-powered pack gets hot and uncomfortable. His bed is a mattress on a floor in what is supposed to be a living room in an apartment in Carthage.  A cord stretches from an electrical outlet alongside the mattress.

He slowly pulls the left leg of his blue jeans up to the middle of his calf to show the device to visitors. A black band holds a bulky case of the same color against the outside of his ankle, just above a low white sock. A tiny light on the hard plastic case blinks red.

A listener does not need to speak Spanish to understand what Vasquez thinks about the ankle monitor.

"I feel like I am a criminal and I know I am not," he says. His words increase in volume and pace.

A bilingual interpreter sits beside him on a second-hand couch he's received from the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Vasquez reaches behind her and pulls an orange-and-lime colored beach towel from the back of the couch and wads into a ball on his lap. He raises it to his face to absorb his tears.

He looks down at his ankle again before lowering his pant leg.

"I want to follow the law and do what I am supposed to," he says. "It feels like I am in Guatemala. I was afraid to go anywhere there. Now I am afraid to go anywhere here. I thought I was going to be free here. I am not."

He worked as a farmer near Tectitan, about 15 miles from the Mexican border. Vasquez smiles when he talks about planting corn and beans and working in the soil. One of his older brothers, Artemio Vasquez, also farmed.

Vasquez does not know how his brother ran afoul of the Mara 18 gang. He said he guesses his brother refused to pay the money gang members tried to extort. Neither he nor his brother had much money, just enough to pay for shelter and food.

On Monday, Oct. 5, 2009, armed gang members on motorcycles surrounded Artemio Vasquez's house and took him away. The family heard nothing until Thursday that week, when late that night a gang member called the man's wife.

At the bottom of the barranca, you will encounter a bad smell. It might be your husband's body.

The next morning, they found Artemio Vazquez's body in the gully. The medical examiner ruled that he had been tortured. His eyes and tongue had been cut out while he was still alive. The gang sliced the flesh from his lower legs, one layer at a time. His widow went to police. In a rare show of justice, police arrested a gang member, who was sentenced to 18 months in jail.

The family grieved the death but lived in relative peace until the gang member's sentence ended. Then the gang started calling Vasquez's phone.

You don't know exactly how your brother died, but you are going to die the same way.

For the next three years, Vasquez moved frequently throughout the western half of Guatemala. In his final year in the country, he moved an average of once a month.

Guatemala has an estimated 12,000 gang members, according to its National Civil Police force.

The reach of the Mara 18 gang made it nearly impossible for Vasquez to hide safely in one place. Exhausted, he said, he and his son, Makferson Vasquez-Ramirez, now 8, left Guatemala on Feb. 17, 2015. The boy's mother has not been in their life since shortly after his birth.

They crossed at the Mexican town of Agua Prieta into the adjacent Arizona city of Douglas and were promptly detained. They spent less than 24 hours in detention before being allowed to travel to Cincinnati, where his adult son, now 33, has lived with his wife and children for years.

"My son had told me to just come live with them," Vasquez said.

He arrived with his son in March 2015 and kept his first appointment with the federal immigration office in Columbus.

His son is in the second grade at a nearby public school. Vasquez walks to the bus stop to pick him up. Sometimes, the ankle monitor goes off on the walk. The device flashes and speaks to him in Spanish – "You're going out of your primary zone." It has even gone off when he's been attending Mass at San Carlos Borromeo Church. When he goes home, the device says, "You're returning to your primary zone."

The focal points of his life are his son and the restaurant some of his relatives own and operate in Carthage.

Vasquez and Makferson share the mattress on the floor. They wake up at 6:30 on school mornings and eat breakfast, and father walks son four blocks to the bus stop by 7:30 a.m. Vasquez walks back home to bathe and then another eight blocks to the Valle Verde restaurant, where he helps clean and then has lunch. He stops briefly at home before walking to the bus stop to pick up Makferson between 2:30 p.m. and 3 p.m. They walk the 12 blocks back to the restaurant. Makferson's cousins help him with his homework.

"I can't help him," Vasquez said. "Everything is in English."

They eat dinner at the restaurant and walk home to prepare for bed. Vasquez hopes to get a bed from St. Vincent de Paul in the next month so his son no longer has to sleep on the floor with him.

At times, Vasquez had grown so despondent that he's talked to his social worker about going back to Guatemala. He received some good news in a letter from the federal immigration office two weeks ago: It instructed him to have his picture taken and fingerprints registered, precursors to getting a work permit.

In the interview on the couch, his tears dry. Vasquez raises his thick, wrinkled hands beside his face. He smiles and spreads and flexes his fingers, cupping them into the shape of shovels and digging in imaginary soil.

He stands and smiles again. He shakes hands with his visitors and leads them toward the front door, walking past his mattress and the black cord running beside it from an electrical outlet.