It was on this block of New Bedford that Antolin was attacked, walking home from work at the fish house, at about 6:00 p.m. But it was December then, and it was dark. He saw five or six guys up ahead across the street as he walked, and when he got closer to them, they ran toward him and quickly encircled him – a few in front, a few behind. With their hoods pulled up over their hats, he couldn’t see their faces.
“One of them had a bat, and he hit me in the back of the head. I fell on the ground – it was like a fire in my head,” he says. He put his arms up to protect his skull, but he could still feel the bat as they battered his head again and again, and the feet and hands of the others as they struck his sides. He heard their voices, but the pain filled his mind and his head began to swim.
He heard a neighbor scream that he’d called the police, and it was then that the group of men ran – “or else I think they would have killed me there, in the street,” Antolin says. They took everything he had – about eighty dollars, his bank card, his Guatemalan passport, his cell phone, even his lunchbox. The only thing they left in his pocket were his keys.
Antolin found his way home, unsteady on his feet and groping with his hands – como un borracho – like a drunk, he says. When he got home his brother-in-law drove him to the hospital, where he stayed for four days. For two months he was in pain, unable to work – “I lost my mind,” he says.
Because he didn’t show up, he lost his job, and he was afraid to go out of the house. Playing with his kids made him forget his pain, made him feel better. But the peace didn’t last. Since then he has found work in another fish processing house, but he still feels very shaky – tembloroso, traumatized, even. His head still swims, his back still seizes with pain, people tell him things and he continues to forget them. He hasn’t had any follow-up medical care. And he says he is still so frightened, afraid to leave the house, afraid to do his errands.
Since the attack he just doesn’t feel the same.