GREENFIELD — From the age of 2 until she was 9, Crystal had a good, structured and loving life with her maternal grandmother. But when her mother fought for and won custody of her and her two siblings, that all changed forever.
Forced to live with her mother and step-father, Leo Fugler III — who is now serving a 30- to 45-year sentence in state prison — Crystal, her brother and her sister were repeatedly physically, verbally and sexually abused by the couple between 1995 and 1998. Crystal’s full name has been withheld to protect her privacy.
Crystal and her siblings stayed silent on their abuse behind the closed doors of their home for more than a decade before contacting the police.
“During those years, we were told what happens in the house stays in the house,” she told a packed room at Terrazza in Greenfield as she delivered the keynote speech at the Child Advocacy Center’s annual Hope and Healing Breakfast Friday morning. “We were hit with metal spoons, belts, punched, beaten. Furniture slammed into us. We were just too scared to tell.”
She said the existence of a Child Advocacy Center, like the one recently opened on Wisdom Way in Greenfield and another in Northampton, could have made a big difference: it would have given them a safe place, away from the prying ears and influence of their abusers, to tell their story to law enforcement without fear, and it could have ended the abuse years sooner. That, she said, may have saved her brother’s life, which he took by his own hand shortly after Fugler’s sentencing.
The Child Advocacy Center offers a comfortable, bright and calming space for children to be interviewed while a multi-disciplinary team of police, prosecutors, medical professionals and social workers watch from a separate room. That means one interview, one time, without the chance for abusers to intimidate a child and reducing the risk of retraumatizing those who have been the victims of abuse.
“The children wouldn’t have all these adults asking them questions over and over again,” she said.”
The Franklin County center has already received 39 cases since opening in February.
“When I watch the kids come in and I hear them, I know that all of them have a had a positive experience, and any kid (traumatized by abuse) who’s had one positive experience, they set off on a whole different course and make different decisions,” the center’s executive director, Irene Woods, said. “And we’ve been able to do that.”
You can reach Tom Relihan at:
trelihan@recorder.com
or 413-772-0261, ext. 264
On Twitter: @RecorderTom