Daughter unravels disabled mom’s rape

Magdalena Cruz grew up knowing she owed her very life to a horrid crime.

She was born in 1986 to a mom who couldn’t care for her, or for herself. For a decade, Cruz’s mother had been a resident of a state facility for severely disabled people in Rochester, New York. She was nonverbal. She was 30 but had the mental acuity of a 2-year-old, wore diapers and needed constant care. She couldn’t consent to sex, so when she was discovered to be pregnant, it was obvious she must have been raped.

Facility administrators told the woman’s family another resident was likely responsible and said they would file a police report and undertake an internal investigation.

Nearly four decades later, Cruz says she has solved the mystery of her father’s identity herself, partly by using a mail-order DNA test and a popular genealogy database. He was an employee of the facility, not a resident, according to a lawsuit she filed this week against the Office for People with Developmental Disabilities, the state agency that oversees state-run facilities.

Moreover, Cruz also learned through her own sleuthing that no police report was ever filed, no employees were interviewed and no action was ever taken by administrators, the lawsuit said. Criminal charges are no longer possible because of legal deadlines that long ago expired. The lawsuit was only possible because New York enacted a law last year temporarily setting aside the statute of limitations for litigation over sexual assaults from long ago.

Cruz’s search for her birth story began about four years ago. Her lawyers said she started by requesting records from municipalities and the state regarding her mother’s care. She received progress notes from her mother’s time at Monroe Developmental Center, which revealed a series of injuries before and during the pregnancy — a bite mark on her breast, cross-shaped bruise on her shoulder blade, a 9-inch abrasion on her back, the lawsuit said.

“Likes men of color, strips, sometimes yells, jumps, eats very fast,” wrote one caretaker — the man Cruz now believes to be her father.

Infuriated, Cruz undertook genetic testing and matched with biological relatives on her father’s side in Virginia. She scoured photos of the family online. One of them showed a girl whose eyes resembled her own. She identified the girl’s father and found through searching online that he had lived in Rochester, not far from the Monroe Developmental Center, at the time of her birth.

In 2019, she brought her findings to police, who confirmed the man had worked at the facility but said too much time had passed to bring charges. In the 1980s, the family had no idea the Monroe Developmental Center, which closed in 2013, had multiple incidents of resident abuse. At least 10 staff members had been identified as pedophiles and rapists from 1976-1985.

Cruz’s mother, referred to in the lawsuit as I.C., is living in a different facility today.