INTERLUDE

Law enforcement, frustrated for months in their search for Ivy and Pedro, finally catches a break. Someone—no one knows who—has tipped off the cops that they are in Tijuana. All the media reports is that an anonymous source is set to receive $20,000 as a reward for the information and that an arrest warrant has been issued. In February, almost four months after the shooting, Ivy and Pedro are found in Mexico and extradited back to Los Angeles.

At Homegirl, the women wonder why Ivy got involved with Pedro. She’d always been so strong. Ivy hadn’t known Pedro for very long before the deacon was murdered. Pedro was a few years younger than she, and most of her friends considered him immature, beneath her. And he was abusive—Ivy had confided in some of the women in the café that the beatings were getting worse. They saw the bruises. They couldn’t understand why Ivy stayed. Still, one of the women at the café, Adela Juarez, understood. “Ivy never faced her trauma. She always got involved with men who were abusive. They were cruel. That’s all she thought she deserved—these were men who beat her over and over again. She couldn’t escape.” Ivy had turned her back on gangbanging, but Pedro was still active—he’d just gotten out of prison and rejected the idea of accessing any services at Homeboy when the two of them hooked up. Ivy always insisted their relationship was casual. But Adela knew more than anyone about the vectors of the relationship. “Ivy just couldn’t escape. She was still scared no one would want her, no one would take care of her. She knew Pedro was bad, but her fear was worse.”

Now, when Adela visits her at jail, Ivy explains how she told Pedro, “We gotta turn ourselves in because I can’t deal with this.” Adela knows that “they had nobody in TJ; they were running out of money.” She says, “I’m sure Pedro was abusing her and Ivy couldn’t take it anymore. So, they were coming back, and when they came across the border, that’s when they got arrested.”

It doesn’t matter now why Ivy got together with Pedro or how he abused her, or if she started using drugs again, with her trauma increasing. Law enforcement wasn’t thinking about her trauma when they brought the couple back to Los Angeles and locked them up in different facilities. In Lynwood, in the women’s county jail, Janeth and Ivy are finally reunited, facing multiple charges and unaffordable bail; all they have are the services of two court-appointed attorneys.