Between her daughter’s hugs and the aromas of homemade food, Ashley Marie Torres Feliciano reboots her life outside of prison

Since Monday, Ashley has embraced freedom again, but – better yet – she once again held onto the little girl she had to move from when she was two years old. The Governor Wanda Vazquez Garced He accepted his request for clemency and granted him parole for a term of 10 years, a period during which he will have to meet a series of conditions, such as a year of electronic supervision.

“I went to bed with my daughter to talk and she was close to me, smiling, sharing …” she told me what happened last night when she returned home with her daughter and mother, Lucrecia Feliciano, who spent the last decade he was strongly in the defense of his daughter.

Complicity to his daughter

Despite the long distance, the complicity between Ashley and her daughter Nashaliz is natural. It was she who held her up in anticipation of that new opportunity that had been denied her until last week. “Most motivating to me at the moment? My daughter and faith, because I used to say to my baby, ‘together we’re going to achieve it and together we’re going to throw the 111 balloons,’ ‘she said.

At home, you breathed in the joy that the arrival of a loved one brings after years of absence. For Ashley, there is a new view of the mountains, the feeling of fresh air, the smell of home-cooked food and the warmth of a mother and daughter, among many other loved ones.

The ceremony to launch the 111 balloons, representing each of the years she was sentenced to, is on the agenda. He also has to visit the cemetery where his brother and a cousin who died while serving his sentence. “I want to study, work… when I was little, I wanted to be a nurse, in the high (High school) I wanted to become a lawyer, but now I want to experience different things to see what I like or dislike, ”she said, admitting that she has been thinking about studying criminal justice to help people like her find a new opportunity requirements.

Sharing his testimony with young people, through lectures and a book, is also on his priority list. ‘The prison is bad. There are two options, imprisonment or death and yes, one can divide and empty one’s mind, but all with a certain limit. I started at 16 (years old) and I am 28 (years old), that is, lost 11 years. I can’t think like I thought before and that’s what they need to understand, ”he said.

Never lost the faith

He stated that he had never lost the faith to return home, despite the fact that that freedom seemed to disappear at times. But one day he knocked on Proyecto Inocencia’s door, directed by the lawyer Julio Fontanet, through a loved one, and that illusion took hold. “I’ve always had faith because I’ve always been innocent … I’ve always prayed and trusted in the Lord. It was like an (internal) battle, but I’ve always had faith and I knew it was in God’s time. “, Hero.

When the Innocence Project took over Ashley’s representation, they found that the Justice Department was suppressing exculpatory evidence and asked for a retrial. This request reached the Supreme Court, which in a divided decision understood that the evidence in the controversy was cumulative, so it was not enough to allow a retrial.

The events for which Ashley was prosecuted date back to February 21, 2009, when her partner and father of her daughter, Steven Quirindongo, hit her several times in the middle of a family activity as part of a pattern of violence. When her brothers heard what was happening, they confront the aggressor and the fight that caused the death of one of them, Nelson Torres Feliciano, was generated.