The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Column: Giving the victims a voice in the courtroom
Beata Bagi says that ever since she was a child, “I had a desire to help people, to right things for people who are hurt.”
There could be no better place to do this, no site where she was more needed, than the New Haven Superior Court building on Church Street.
Here you will see, day after day, an unending stream of sad, anguished victims of violence done to them or to their family members.
For the past 20 years, Bagi has counseled, consoled and comforted thousands of these people as the state victim services advocate there. But on Aug. 1, she retired, at age 56.
This is a huge loss and I know it from experience. Over the last decade, as the New Haven Register’s Superior Court reporter, I have watched Bagi in the courtrooms, guiding victims through the complex legal and emotional process. Many times during sentencing hearings, because the victims were too upset to speak, she read aloud their statements describing what the nearby defendant had done to them and their families. At other times, she stood beside them, patting their slumped shoulders and handing them tissues, as they struggled to read through their tears.
Those are wrenching experiences for any participant or observer. Often, I have staggered out of that courthouse, seeking at least a quick hit of therapy: a cup of coffee across the street at Willoughby’s, and a chocolate chip cookie.
Bagi had it much worse. For days, weeks, months or sometimes years, she had to stand by those victims, some of them children who had been sexually abused. And because she is only human, inevitably, it took a toll on her.
When I met Bagi last Tuesday at the courthouse, where she no longer works but still feels at home, she handed me a brilliant fourpage description of what she has accomplished and endured.
“So many children hurt by people that should protect them, so many unnecessary deaths of young people through guns and violence,” she wrote.
“So many stories that working as a victim advocate became part of me,” she added. “So many sad stories, so much grief and sadness.”
“It feels like no matter how hard you try to compartmentalize and remind yourself that by doing your job you are helping people and making this world a better place, slowly your soul is heavier and heavier,” she wrote.
“I reached a point that instead of looking forward to helping people, I started worrying how will I face this beautiful child if the
jury does not convict the person who hurt them? The concept of jurors not bringing a guilty verdict because they felt the case was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt is close to impossible to explain to a young child.”
Bagi noted that in her parting letter to the other state victim advocates, “I advised them that no one can do what we do without ending with scars on their soul. And the important thing is to recognize when the scars are becoming too deep and to leave before the scars start to bleed.”
When I asked Bagi about this during our interview, she said, “I didn’t want to feel I’m not 100 percent for these people because I’m carrying too much pain. You feel: ‘OK, I’m trying my best to make this world a better place. But it’s getting harder not to hurt.’ ”
She pointed to a bookcase lined with giant file folders, labeled year by year. She picked one up and opened it. “Each case is a story. And each story is heartbreaking.”
Bagi sighed and said, “So many sexual assault cases. I would say: ‘Oh my God, not again. Not another child.’ ”
Whenever a child victim was getting ready to testify at a trial, Bagi read to him or her a quote by Christopher Robin from “Winnie the Pooh:” “Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem and smarter than you think.”
Bagi told me: “People who repeatedly sexually abuse young children, night after night — I have no mercy for those people.”
And then of course there was what she and everybody else calls “the Cheshire case.” After Jennifer Hawke-Petit and her daughters, Michaela, 11, and Hayley, 17, were tied to their beds and killed in their Cheshire home in July 2007, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky were put on trial for multiple murder
counts, arson and other charges. They were tried separately, in 2010 and 2011. Both were convicted and sentenced to be executed but the state Supreme Court later ruled the death penalty is unconstitutional. Instead they are serving lifetime sentences.
Bagi was there in that courtroom for both of those trials, consoling and supporting the lone survivor of the crime, Dr. William Petit Jr., who had been severely beaten with a baseball bat. Bagi also helped his parents and Hawke-Petit’s relatives, who were there during most of the graphic testimony.
Bagi calls those trials her most challenging times. In her statement for me, she wrote: “Those trials went on for months and I tried very hard not only to help the Petit family but also to be available and do a good job for all the other victims and cases I was handling. I will never stop admiring the Petit family for their grace and perseverance, their dignity and poise in dealing with the press and while listening to the horrific evidence.”
When I asked Bagi about her opinion of the death penalty, she replied, “Some crimes are so heinous that they deserve the death penalty. The Cheshire case was one of those.”
As for how she got through those two trials and the other difficult cases, Bagi said, “What gave me strength to carry on with my emotionally hard job was my faith.” She kept posted on the wall of her office some of her favorite quotes from the Bible. They included this from Isaiah Chapter 50: “The Lord God has given me a well-trained tongue, that I might know how to answer the weary a word that will waken them. Morning after morning he wakens my ear to hear.”
Bagi said she has always believed those words described the work of victim advocates.
Before she came to New Haven Superior Court to do this work, she was a rape crisis advocate in Palo Alto, Calif., where she and her husband, Chedo Bagi, lived about 35 years ago.
At that time, she was heartbroken reading about the atrocities, including rapes, occurring in her native Croatia and Bosnia. “The war in our country was a motivation for why I got seriously involved with helping victims of crime.”
The civil war there helped convince Bagi and her husband to remain in America, where he had come to pursue his career in science. She had accompanied him despite having to give up her own career path toward becoming a judge in Croatia. She was a judge in training when they left that country.
In 1995, he received a good job offer in Connecticut and they moved to Branford with their daughter and son. She obtained a master’s degree from the University of New Haven in criminal justice advanced investigation. Then she saw an ad for a job with the state’s Office of Victim Services.
Bagi said she and several others who were hired then were the first state victim services advocates to work in GA courts.
“I worked very hard to establish this office and to show everyone how valuable and necessary victim advocates are,” she said. “Now, they have a voice. They can be heard in front of the judge and they are asked about the pleas and dispositions.”
Bagi said it’s easier leaving her job knowing that her successor, Christie Ciancola, is also “passionate, hard-working and dedicated to helping crime victims.”
Although Bagi’s husband has not yet retired, they are looking forward to dividing their time between Croatia and a planned second home in Florida.
She told me, “I would like to buy a little boat so we can go fishing. I’d like to climb in without breaking my hip. If I wait too long, that might happen!”