Victim finds freedom in forgiveness

OLYMPIA – On a summer night two years ago, Michael Anthony Mullen showed up at a Bellingham home shared by three convicted sex offenders. Claiming to be an FBI agent, he waited until one man left for work, then gunned down the other two.

For Eve Vazquez, those pistol shots snatched away her hopes of reconciling with her 68-year-old father and childhood sexual abuser, Victor Vazquez.

Today, at 29, she still grieves for him. But she’s determinedly pulling together the threads of her long-scattered family, which is about to grow by one.

Taken from her home at 12 after years of sexual abuse by her father, Vazquez was raised in foster homes, mostly in Spokane. At 27, scared and angry, she showed up on his doorstep to confront him. He cried.

Over the ensuing months, the two met and talked, eating ice cream at a beach. He told her his life and family had fallen apart and repeatedly apologized. And after years of blaming herself for the breakup of her family, Vazquez said, “I just kind of started to feel human.”

Then along came Mullen. Reportedly a victim of childhood sex abuse himself, he found the men’s home on a sex-offender registry. After talking to the men and drinking a can of Coors Light with them, he shot both in the head at point-blank range.

In late 2005, the daughter Victor Vazquez had abused held a memorial service for him and scattered some of his ashes at the beach where they’d spent hours talking.

Vazquez still lives in Bellingham. She works as a housekeeper at a hotel and casino, a job with decent pay and good benefits, she said. And she’s taking nursing classes at a community college.

Partly as a result of the publicity of the vigilante slaying, she’s reconnected with distant sisters, a half-brother and her mother. A younger sister has moved in with her. She’s in close contact with several mother figures who helped raise her in Bellingham and Spokane.

“I’m finally figuring out what it’s like to be happy and be loved by people, by family,” she said.

She is also pregnant. The father is a friend who lives in Seattle. Although he’s supportive, she said, “I’m ready to do this by myself.” She has her sister and has surrounded herself with a large group of friends, she said. She’s saved enough from her job to take three months off to be with the infant.

For Vazquez, it feels like a second chance after giving up two children in the late 1990s, when an early marriage dissolved.

Ultrasounds indicate the baby – due in weeks – will be a daughter. Vazquez has picked out the name “Esmay.”

“It’s like I’m starting my life over and she is like a gift, a fresh start.”

She still has her father’s phone number programmed into her cell phone. She still misses him.

“It’s comforting,” she said of the phone number. “I wish my dad was here so I could talk to him.”

As for Mullen, he was eventually caught by police, charged, convicted and sentenced to 44 years in prison. From prison, he corresponded for a couple of months with a Spokesman-Review reporter.

“I have never in my life harmed an innocent person,” he wrote, saying that the Joseph Duncan murder-sex abuse case in North Idaho was “the straw that broke my back.” He said he was haunted by thoughts of the last days of the victims, particularly young Dylan Groene.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save you, Dylan. You are a hero!” Mullen wrote in parentheses in an August 2006 letter. Mullen said he was sexually abused at age 5.

Mullen said he killed Victor Vazquez and roommate Hank Eisses to send a message to sex offenders: “I want them to know that there are some of us in this World that will cross any boundry (sic) & law to stop them. This includes murder.”

Mullen sprinkled his letters with Latin phrases such as “jacta alea est,” meaning “the die is cast.”

“I am not the bad guy,” he wrote in September 2006. “I care too much if anything. I’ve always hated bullies, and pedophiles are the worst kind. (Exitus acta probat!)”

The latter phrase means “the result justifies the deed.”

“I really am sorry for the loss Eve Vazquez feels,” he wrote in another September letter. “God knows she has suffered enough loss & pain…If hating me helps, then hate me.”

In April of this year, Mullen, 36, was found unconscious and alone in his cell at Stafford Creek prison near Aberdeen, Wash. He had apparently hoarded prescription medication and committed suicide by taking all the pills at once.

Eve Vazquez says she doesn’t hate Mullen. She views him as a psychologically wounded man who was unable to escape the emotional toll of his past abuse.

“I don’t want to be a failure,” Vazquez said. “I don’t want to be a statistic: the girl who was abused and became the drug addict or failure in other people’s eyes.

“But with all my moms, I know I’m not a statistic, not an abused person. I’m me.”