Birth mother wants kids back
Says she's trying to redirect her life
BY EILEEN KELLEY | EKELLEY@ENQUIRER.COM



Donna Trevino wrapped her hands around a tissue as she talked about the little boy she gave away.

He was beautiful. He had striking blue eyes. He was full of life.

But he was too much for her. And now he's dead.

Marcus Fiesel's mother, 38, cries easily when she recounts the life she had with her 3-year-old son.

"I played ball with him. I played patty-cake," the Middletown woman said Friday in her first interview since Liz Carroll's murder conviction.

A judge sentenced Carroll Thursday to 54 years in prison for causing the boy's death. She and her husband, David Carroll Jr., were his foster parents.

Trevino is satisfied with the sentence.

She said she thought when she surrendered Marcus in April he would go to a better place. "What they did was cold and heartless," she said.

Less than four months after she told police and children's services Marcus was too much for her to handle, he was dead.

Trevino cried, looked stern and wrapped her arms around herself when she looked back at her own childhood - one she said forced her to run away from home at age 13.

"It was torture," she said of the physical, sexual, emotional and verbal abuse she said she suffered as a child.

She said her father, who adopted her when she was 1, would tuck money into the hands of child protective workers who came to check on her as a child.

They would go away.

"It was just terrible. The counselors say I will never forget it and you know what, they are right. I won't forget it."

Out on the streets as a teen, Trevino won't say how she survived; only that she did.

After her first child was born - one whom she hasn't seen in more than a decade - she said she vowed to get her life together.

Abuse and on-and-off homelessness followed her.

Most of the men in Trevino's life, including the fathers of her four children, she said, beat her. She had three boys and a little girl.

She lost custody of Marcus 10 months ago after he was found wandering on a Middletown street. Her 19-month-old daughter and 11-year-old son are in foster care.

She agreed to have them taken away, a decision she struggles with. "I didn't want my kids to see anything like what I saw," she said.. "That's a lot, what I saw."