'My Name is Not Girl X'
By Carlos Sadovi, Staff Reporter
Originally published in the Chicago Sun-Times, February 10, 2002
Mention boys to Toya Currie and a shy smile washes over her face like a night light in a youngster's room.
Ask if she has a boyfriend and she squeals with laughter, her ponytail bobbing up and down.
As any teenaged girl would.
Even Girl X.
Toya has lived with that label—Girl X—for five years now. That was the pseudonym given to her by newspapers and attorneys, to protect her identity, after she was raped, beaten, strangled and poisoned, and left for dead in a stairwell of the Cabrini-Green public housing project. The horror of the attack left all of Chicago—all of the Midwest—stunned, and her story swept around the world.
Girl X was 9 years old. She was just walking to school. Today, she is blind, paralyzed and unable to speak for life.
Now Toya is 14, and she wants her real name back, even though she will never have her old life back.
"T-o-y-a C-u-r-r-i-e.'' She spells out her name by blinking her large brown eyes in a painstakingly slow language she has had to learn.
Every blink must be coached and interpreted by a speech therapist at her side. It will always be this way.
But the dark days ahead rarely flash across her face. She smiles as she struggles over the simplest words and is known for pulling jokes on her aides, purposely misspelling words to get a laugh.
"She's a lot of fun, she's very much with it," says social worker Mary Bruno. "She is one of the cool kids, she is one of the most popular kids here."
"Here" is the Illinois Center for Rehabilitation and Education, on the Near West Side, where Toya has lived with other disabled students for the last four years.
The center recently was saved from being forced to close because of state cuts in funding—saved for now—but Toya's family still worries about its future. The family agreed to this interview with Toya—the first she has given since her attack—in the hope of building public support for the facility.
Toya and her family would like to demystify her life, to reintroduce her to the world not as a tragic victim, but as a lovely girl with a real name and real dreams.
"I-t-s h-a-r-d," she says, blinking out each letter. But then goes on to describe what might be a typical teen's life.
She stays up late to hear the TV show, "Moesha." She likes hot wings—in fact just about anything with hot sauce.
"She's creative with junk food," says her speech therapist, Barbara Robinson. "She'll have Fritos with cheese dip with hot sauce and potato chips. She even puts hot sauce on Oreos."
She listens to audio tapes of books, or gets others to read them to her as she lies in the bed she shares with a large stuffed bumblebee.
Her favorites? Romance novels filled with tales of love and care and devotion, qualities that have come to mean so much more to her.
"She's very special,'' her mother, Belinda Bohlar, says. "We are encouraged and impressed by her strength and her courage. Through all this we have become a closer family. She means the world to me."
The horror
On Jan. 9, 1997, Toya was a fourth-grader on her way to school. Walking down the stairwell, she was lured into an apartment by a man, Patrick Sykes, who asked, "Do you want a banana?" In the apartment, Sykes raped, strangled and poisoned her with roach spray. Sykes was convicted of the crime on May 4 of last year, two days before Toya's 14th birthday. He was sentenced to 120 years in prison.
Toya will never again walk, never talk, never see. Even her hands—fingernails covered with pink polish she asks friends and family to brush on—remain scrunched up against her chest, useless.
Her condition will grow only worse with age, said Sandy Selakovich, one of her physical therapists at the center.
"Toya is totally dependent, physically. You can't ask her to comb her hair, you can't ask her to fix her shirt, you can't ask her to do anything,'' Selakovich said. "The problem with her disability is that she is going to get progressively worse. If she walks again, it would be a miracle.''
Asked if she might ever forgive the man who did this to her, Toya simply shakes her head no.
During Toya's first two years at the center, her painful cries echoed at night down the linoleum-floor hallways. Because she couldn't speak, her doctors couldn't be sure if she was in pain or reliving the attack.
It took two years before a state-of-the art pump was implanted in her body that shoots a muscle relaxant to her spinal cord. As her body continued to grow, her spine bowed, and a second operation became necessary. In November, surgeons installed metal rods along her back to help prop up her spine. Toya now wears a plastic brace that runs from her chest to the middle of her left thigh.
"She had such a bad curve it compromised her breathing and her organs,'' Selakovich said. "If you've ever had a muscle spasm or a charlie horse, imagine that all over your body, 24 hours a day.''
When Toya arrived at the center, therapists worked to teach her to eat and communicate because she had lost the use of her neck muscles.
Toya and Robinson, the speech therapist, divided the alphabet into three sections—A to H, I to Q and R to Z. When Toya has something to say, Robinson asks if the first letter of the first word is in the beginning, middle or end of the alphabet. When Robinson picks the right section, Toya signifies yes by throwing her head back and raising her eyebrows. The process continues letter by letter.
What, we ask, would Toya like people to know about her?
Robinson begins, "Is it in the beginning, middle . . . '' Toya lifts her head back and Robinson stops. Then Robinson calls out the letter I. She looks up, meaning yes.
"Same word or different word,'' Robinson asks, and Toya signals it's a different word.
Finally, after about three minutes, Toya's message is clear: "I-'m s-m-a-r-t.''
Teaching Toya a new way to eat was another struggle.
Shortly after her attack, a feeding tube was installed in her body to pump nutrients directly into her stomach. Then began the long process of training her to drink and eat without the tube. Tiny amounts of liquid were fed into her mouth with a teaspoon, as would be done to a nursing kitten.
After liquids came pureed food until, two years ago, when she began to eat solid foods again. Food and drinks must be given to her by aides in the center's cafeteria.
Asked her favorite flavor of ice cream, she blinks, "V-a-n-i-l-l-a."
The Cool Kid
Toya lives at the center, but routinely goes home during holidays to spend time with her two younger brothers and two younger sisters. Cook County Assistant State's Attorneys William O'Brien and Anita Alvarez—who prosecuted the case against Sykes and often visit Toya—arranged for union contractors to make the family's home handicapped-accessible, free of charge.
Toya leaves the center daily at 10:30 a.m. and rides a bus to a high school, where she takes algebra, English and physical education classes. An aide at the school must assist her in each class. She returns to the center at 3:30 p.m.
Of the center's 47 residents, Toya is among the most popular. "Hey Toya,'' several friends talking among themselves in the hallway call out as she is wheeled past them, a yellow Tweety Bird backpack hanging off her wheelchair. She responds with a loud laugh.
She has Christmas cards from friends and a class photo pinned to a bulletin board over her bed.
Hers is a difficult life, physically and emotionally.
Yet, the only time Robinson and other caregivers say they have seen Toya get down about her situation is when it comes to music. Before the attack, Toya had wanted to be a dancer someday.
"She's said, 'I wish I could dance,' '' Robinson said.
But Toya has come up with another way to be creative. She wants to be a writer when she grows up.
What would she write about?
"M-y s-t-o-r-y,'' she spelled out. "L-i-f-e i-s h-a-r-d-e-r n-o-w.''
