By Maurice Chammah, Photo: Filmrise, The Marshall Project, February 24, 2022
The detective handed Melissa Lucio a plastic doll and asked her to spank it. “Do it real hard,” he said.
Lucio had already spent five hours that night, in February 2007, answering questions about the death of her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah Alvarez. She initially said Mariah had fallen down a staircase outside the family’s apartment in Harlingen, Texas, a small city near the Mexico border. But Mariah had bruises, bite marks and other injuries. One of the detectives, a Texas Ranger named Victor Escalon Jr., zeroed in on Lucio’s slumped posture and lack of eye contact. “Right there and then, I knew she did something,” he later testified.
The Rangers are famous for their unorthodox interrogation methods, as The Marshall Project reported recently. Around 3 a.m., Escalon handed Lucio the doll, showing her the locations of the bruises and asking her to hit those spots. She admitted to hitting her daughter — “I just did it,” she said at one point — but not to killing her. At her trial, prosecutors framed her admissions as a full confession.
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