Well, well, well. Lookie here, would ya...
[[[Later, she said, she even acquired a Medicaid card, which for pregnant women in New York City is relatively easy to obtain without official documentation.]]]
This explains the 6 billion dollar hole NYS is in.
I seem to recall a story sometime back about a pet parrot that disappeared for a couple of years and returned one day speaking Spanish....
When she was 9, she recalled, a neighbor began sexually assaulting her, and for the next few years, it happened so much that it seemed to be almost normal. She never told anyone about it, but when she became a teenager, she began to suspect there wasn't anything normal about it. The abuse by then had gone on for so long that, she said, she'd begun to think her mother had to have known - a suspicion that solidified into belief. Her mother called it ridiculous and untrue. “What kind of mother would do that?” Cynthia said.
After getting her milk and cereal from the grocery store that spring Saturday in 1997, Crystal did not stay at home as her mother had requested. She went to hang out with friends for hours. She knew her mother would be mad, so decided to stay out even longer. “And then it was 12 [a.m.], and I wasn't going back,” she said.
She boarded a bus to New York, she said, and recalls walking the streets of the city as morning broke, seeing Statue of Liberty license plates. She didn't have anything with her, but remembers feeling little fear. Those first few nights, she slept outside, homeless, until she made it up to Upper Manhattan, where she introduced the world to a new person: Crystal Saunders, a 23-year-old woman, though she now doesn't remember why she chose that name.
Soon she was cleaning houses and apartments, living in a heavily Dominican neighborhood, pregnant with her first child by a local man and equipped with a fake drivers’ license. Later, she said, she even acquired a Medicaid card, which for pregnant women in New York City is relatively easy to obtain without official documentation.
The new identity at first was easy to remember, she said, because she had changed only small details. The last name. The age - believable because she looked so much older than she was. As for her family? She told people she didn't have one, and often they didn't press the issue. “It's not a rare thing to not have a family,” she said.
But over time, as Crystal learned fluent Spanish, birthed four children, immersed herself in the Dominican community and even adopted new relatives - people she referred to as “grandpa,” “grandma” and “cousin” on social media - she didn't have to remember anymore. Her new identity had subsumed the old.
It is worth following the link to read the rest of the story.
bump