His father worked as a railway laborer, and the family practiced Catholicism.
From the outside, it seemed like a typical working-class upbringing in the American Southwest.But behind closed doors, this child’s world was far from ordinary.
His father was a violent alcoholic prone to fits of rage that resulted in frequent physical abuse.
The boy suffered multiple head injuries before the age of six, knocked unconscious so many times that he later developed temporal lobe epilepsy.As punishment, his father would sometimes tie him to a crucifix in a cemetery overnight, leaving the frightened child alone in the darkness among the tombstones.
