And then we started discussing the case, and I remembered then, and
what happened then is I felt, you know, it was a kind of a numb
feeling, because you know about it and could not know what to do with
it. I was a probation officer and despite the fact that I was no longer
one, I still felt that this was a kind of a ticklish situation, about
something that I knew that no one else knew, and I went upstairs and I
told the press secretary to the mayor. I told him the information that
had just been relayed to me that I had been Oswald's P.O. and that I
should tell the mayor about it, and the mayor had gone to Washington,
so he told me, "Just sit tight and don't say anything."
The story didn't break in the papers--this was on a Tuesday or
Wednesday--until Saturday when someone found out, went to Judge Kelley,
and then there were stories Friday, Saturday, and the Post reporter
showed up to my house on a Sunday evening. I don't know how he found
out where I lived or anything else, but once he got there, I called
city hall again, "Look, I got this reporter over here. What do I do
with him?"
They said, "So apparently the story has broken. So talk to him."
But the reporter it seemed, had more information than I had. He was
actually clarifying my mind, because you can understand that you're
not going to quote, you know, paraphrase 13 years later what happened.
I have worked with a great many children during that time, and I have
done a great deal of work with youth. What did stand out, you know,
that I really recall as a recollection of my own was this fact, that
this was a small boy. Most of the boys that I had on probation were
Puerto Rican or Negro, and they were New York type of youngsters who
spoke in the same slang, who came from the Bronx whom I knew how to
relate to because I knew the areas where they came from, and this boy
was different only in two or three respects. One, that I was a Catholic
probation officer and this boy was a Lutheran, which was strange to
begin with, because you normally carry youth of your own background.
And secondly that he did dress in a western style with the levis, and
he spoke with this southwestern accent which made him different from
the average boy that I had on probation.
And, as I said, my own reaction then was that he seemed like a likable
boy who did not seem mentally retarded or anything. He seemed fairly
bright, and once spoken to, asked anything, he replied. He was somewhat
guarded, but he did reply, and my own reaction in speaking to him was
one of concern, because he did not want to play with anybody, he did
not care to go to school; he said he wasn't really learning anything;
he had brothers, but he didn't miss them or anything. He seems to have
liked his stay at Youth House, and this is not--how do you call it--not
odd, because in Youth House they did show the movies and give candy
bars and this and the other, and they were paid attention, and this is
a boy who is virtually alone all day, and only in that respect did it
mean anything to me.
As I told reporters at the time there was no indicia that this boy had
any Marxist leanings or that he had any tendencies at that age that I
was able to view that would lead him into future difficulty.
Actually he came before the court with no prior record, with just the
fact that he was not going to school, and the other thing that touched
me was that the mother at that time seemed overprotective; she just
seemed to think that there was nothing wrong with the boy, and that
once we got him back to school, which I told him in no uncertain terms
he would have to go back because he was just too young to decide he
would not go to school any more, that all his problems were resolved.
I think it may have been a threat to her to want to involve her in the
treatment for the boy, because I did make a recommendation that he--it
seemed to me that he needed help, that he needed to relate to some
adult, that he needed to be brought out of this kind of a shell that he
was retreating to, and not wanting friends, not wanting to go out, and
not wanting to relate to anyone, and that I thought he had the capacity
for doing this, and the psychiatric report sort of bore this out in
perhaps much more medical terms, and they recommended that he either
receive this kind of a support of therapeutic group work treatment at
home, if it were possible, or, if not, in an institution.
Now, the situation in this kind of case is that treatment has to
involve the parent, you know, the whole family setup, not just the
child, and I think this is where the mother sort of felt threatened
herself. People do not always understand what group work and treatment
and psychiatric treatment means. There are all kinds of connotations to
it, and she resisted this.
We tried--or even before we came into the case, before the case came to
court, I think she had been referred to the Salvation Army, I believe
it was, and she had not responded. Actually, when the boy came back
with all these reports to the court, he was not put on supervision
per se to me. The matter was sort of up in the air where it would be
brought back every month while we made referral to various agencies, to
see if they would take him into Children's Village or Harriman Farms,
and whatever it was, and it was just looking around, shopping around
for placement for him. And the mother, I think, felt threatened about
that time, that the boy was back in school, we were looking to get him
psychiatric treatment, and she came in and wanted to take the boy out
of the State, and we told her she could not take him out without the
court's OK.
As a matter of fact, I recall the case was put on the calendar before
Judge Sicher in November of that year, 1953, when she was told, yes,
that it was necessary to have the boy remain here, and that that is
when the judge ordered a referral to the psychiatric clinic of the
court, and to the Big Brothers who subsequently accepted the boy for
working with. With that the mother took off in January, without letting
us know, and just never came back.
Mr. LIEBELER. Did you have the impression that Mrs. Oswald had the idea
that you were going to take the boy and place him?
Mr. CARRO. I think she might have had the idea because we certainly
were coming back to court each month, you know, with the judge saying,
"Well, try Children's Village. Try Harriman Farms, try this place and
try that."
I think she was threatened, that there was a plan afoot, that if the
boy would not work out, that he would be placed. This was one of the
recommendations that I felt he should be placed, and the court also;
something could be worked out, because, incidentally, when he did go
back to school he did go to school, but he was presenting, you know,
marginal problems in school, and he was not doing as well as expected.
Mr. LIEBELER. There is a summary report in the file that he had been
elected president of his class; that the court had been given a report
to that effect. Do you recall anything about that?
Mr. CARRO. No. As a matter of fact, the one that I recall is that he
neglected to salute the American flag in class, and the reason I never
said anything of that to the newspapers is because I figured they would
pick this up and say, you know, "See, 15 years ago he refused to salute
the American flag. This is proof." And I did not want a newspaper
headline, you know, "Oswald at the age of 12 refused to salute the
American flag."
Mr. LIEBELER. That happens from time to time, I suppose, in children
that age?
Mr. CARRO. The kind of reports that came back, he was a little
disruptive in class, but nothing of any nature that I would, you know,
singly point out. He did not become president of the class that I
recall.
Mr. LIEBELER. You indicated that you had the feeling that the
possibility of Lee Oswald being involved with psychiatric treatment,
which would also involve his mother, whole family group, constituted a
threat to or threatened the mother. What did you mean by that?
Mr. CARRO. Well, there was a reluctance in her to get involved in the
boy's treatment process. She saw herself as removed, as this having
nothing to do with her. Furthermore, she saw the boy's problem as
the only problem being he did not go to school, and once we insisted
that he go back to school her attitude was, "Why are you bothering
me? You're harassing me. He's back in school. Why do you want him to
go to the clinic for? Why should I go with him? Why do we have to see
the Protestant Big Brothers for? He has brothers. What does he need
brothers for? Leave us alone. I don't like New York. I was a woman of
means in Louisiana when my husband was alive."
Here in New York she just felt that people were--this was just
bothering her; she couldn't understand that in helping the boy you need
to have the help of the parent because this is a young boy, and if he
is going to go to a court clinic, for example, she has to take him
there, and her own attitude toward the help he is receiving, unless it
is one that will support whatever we are trying to do for him, if it is
negative, and she is rejecting, and she is resisting, the boy himself
will resist whatever kind involvement you are doing for him, and we
needed her to see this, and did go along with the plan. Or she may
have been as disturbed as the boy but we were just trying to get her
involved in whatever plan we had for the boy.
Mr. LIEBELER. I wanted to seek your opinion on that.
Mr. CARRO. I think she was. Even at that time I said that she was so
self-involved in her own situation that she tended to blame everything,
and yet say it was nothing, for the boy's problems. The fact that a
boy could stay out of school, I think it was 47 days before he went
to this new school and not report at all, and have a parent whom the
attendance officer and the bureau of education, bureau of attendance is
getting after, and the parent admits that she cannot control or cannot
do anything about her boy not going to school, is significant of her
inability to cope with this situation.
Then this plus, this idea--I don't know if she, in fact, came from
wealth or not; this giving you this idea that where she came from she
was a woman of means and all that, but in New York here, she had been
downgraded to this kind of a thing. She mentioned that part of his
problem was that when he first came to live here in the Bronx, they
lived around the Grand Concourse, and I don't know if you are familiar
with the Bronx, but Grand Concourse is an area of fairly middle class
Jewish community, and she felt this, that the boy was dressed in a
little below the level of the children up there. He did dress in levis
and I think his reaction in not going to school was in part the fact
that some of the children had poked fun both at his dress and his
manner of speech, and he had retreated from this, and this is why he
would not mix and why he became a loner, and she reacted in the same
way, and she was working, as I think I recall it, in a department
store, and she was very unhappy about the whole situation, and she was
really in no position to be with this boy any length of time, and she
seemed so preoccupied with her own problems at the time that I do not
think she really had an awareness as to the boy's own problem and fears.
Mr. LIEBELER. Did you get the feeling that Mrs. Oswald felt that if--I
can say this because I have lived in New York for the last 7 years
myself, so it doesn't bother me too much to bring it out. I am really a
New Yorker. Did she have the feeling, do you think, that if these nosey
New Yorkers would just leave her alone and keep out of her business
everything would be all right? In other words, it was just a kind of
situation that exists here in this city because of the nature of the
city that was different from the way things were in Texas, maybe, or
Louisiana, that this had----
Mr. CARRO. I don't have any doubt about it. I think she must have
thought that we were making a mountain out of a molehill, and that
in some other States--I was brought up in Puerto Rico, myself; if a
boy didn't go to school or so nobody saw to it that he was brought to
court, that he was sent to a psychiatrist, that the Big Brothers got
involved in it, that you referred him here and there, and this is why I
said she must have been threatened by this whole process; there is no
question about it in my mind, that she could not see what all this fuss
was all about. She said so, too. No question in my mind about that.
I am sure that this had an effect on her decision to leave the State
and take off, and particularly when she came to see us and we told her
she could not go without the OK of the court, that the boy was under
the supervision of the court, and he would have to remain so until the
court felt that it was OK.
Mr. LIEBELER. She did advise you, however, before leaving the State,
that she did intend to leave the State of New York, did she not?
Mr. CARRO. Well, she advised my colleague, Timothy Dunn, I was on
vacation I think that month of January, she came in to see him, she was
referred by the Big Brothers, who told her she could not leave without
coming to see us, and she came in to tell him, and he told her before
she did we would have to put the matter on the calendar and that it
would be up to the judge.
You see, normally it is not that we don't allow it, that we prohibit
it. Routinely, even if a boy is under supervision or probation, what
you do is, if the parent comes in, you put it on the calendar, you
go up and report to the judge, and the judge will ask the parent, or
you will have the information, and the parent wants to go to Newark,
N.J., or, you know, Louisiana, that they are going to live with
such-and-such a person over there and the court may ask you to write
to that jurisdiction, to go out and make a visit to that home to see
if it is a worthwhile home, and to see if there is a realistic plan
or just not an effort on the part of the parents to take the boy out
of the jurisdiction of the court, and you know if such a plan in
reality exists and how feasible and how good is it in the interests
of the welfare of the child, because for all the court may know, this
is just a fiction on the part of the person to say, "I am moving out
to Philadelphia," and they may not be moving at all. You go up to the
court, get the child discharged, and they just remain where they are.
And this way the boy doesn't have to report to the court any more and
the parent doesn't have to bother herself with this sort of thing.
So she came in to tell us, and she was told that the matter would have
to be put on the calendar and that the judge would have to pass on this.
Mr. LIEBELER. But despite that fact she left the jurisdiction?
Mr. CARRO. I wrote to her to come in, having heard, and the letter was
returned "Moved, address unknown." I was asked about what happens then,
and, well, there is very little that one can really do. We don't have
extra-state jurisdiction, and we didn't even know where she had gone.
This is about the sum total of what happened there.
Mr. LIEBELER. Did you yourself try to find a place to place this boy?
Mr. CARRO. Yes; from the very time that we had the recommendations of
the psychiatrist, those that I had made were before the judge, and he
went along and felt that this boy should be helped, and the next almost
9 months I spent in making referral after referral to the various
institutions, the various clinics, to see if they would be able to
service this boy either at home or within the institutional confines,
because the psychiatric report was very distinctive in the fact that
this boy did need this kind of help; and I mentioned that the tragedy
of the whole thing was in this instance that because of his tender age
and his religion, the facilities that we had here in New York were
taxed, and somehow one factor or the other kept us from getting him the
kind of help that he needed. It was either that it was a Protestant
place and he was--well, he was a Lutheran, it was either a Catholic and
he was a Lutheran, or one thing or another, but something mitigated
their being able to service him.
I remember, for example, that the Salvation Army got a referral, and
they felt they just didn't have the facility to give this boy the
intensive treatment he needed. This was their reason for turning him
down.
Children's village at the time, which could have given service to
this boy and had the kind of setup, did not have any vacancies at
this particular time of the year for this particular age boy; and so
on down the line. Finally, the only recourse we had was to send it to
our own psychiatric clinic, where we would do both, have him seen by a
psychiatrist at our clinic, which normally we didn't even do, and at
the same time receive the support of help from the Big Brothers, which
was one of the recommendations that he should be seen by a male figure
preferably because of the fact that he lacked a father, and we were
actually complementing both without removing the boy from the home, and
this is actually when the mother left. So that the boy was not going to
be taken away; we were going to try to work out within, you know, the
limits of the situation we had with the boy at home.
Mr. LIEBELER. You mentioned that the boy was going to go to your own
psychiatric clinic. That is a different proposition from the Youth
House, is it not?
Mr. CARRO. Yes. This is the psychiatric court clinic, that is on 22d
Street, which in some instances, where we are not able to effect the
kind of placing we need or so, we will utilize that as a last resort,
and the boy would go there periodically and be seen by the psychiatrist.
Mr. LIEBELER. It would be an outpatient-type situation?
Mr. CARRO. An outpatient-type of situation, yes.
Mr. LIEBELER. He never actually did do that, however, because he left
the State?
Mr. CARRO. No; because of the mother's own resistance to the thing and
having left the jurisdiction. I don't think they got to see him once.
Mr. LIEBELER. Would you say that Oswald was more mentally disturbed
than most of the boys that you had under your supervision at that time?
Mr. CARRO. Not at all, actually. I have handled cases of boys who
committed murders, burglaries, and I have had some extremely disturbed
boys, and this was one of the problems, this was just initially a
truancy situation, not one of real disruptive or acting out delinquent
behavior. No; I would definitely not put him among those who acted
as--I also have had boys whom we have placed who turned out to be
mentally defective, mentally retarded, quite psychotic, and who really
had gradations of mental illness, of disturbances that were far, you
know, greater in depth than those displayed by Oswald; and the behavior
which brought them before the court was certainly of a much more
extreme nature.
Mr. LIEBELER. Than his?
Mr. CARRO. Yes.
Mr. LIEBELER. He did not in fact appear to you at that time to be a
real mental problem or prone to violence or----
Mr. CARRO. No. He appeared to have problems, but one of the problems
in the situation seems to be, why wasn't this boy sent to the New York
Training School for Boys at Warwick? And the fact is that the New
York Training School for Boys at Warwick is for delinquent boys who
commit crimes, really, and whose behavior is such that it is really
criminal behavior; and you brand it delinquency because of the tag that
attaches because he is under 16. You don't normally send a boy who just
stays out of school. It is for boys who commit serious acts. And as a
matter of fact, Warwick did not have what this boy needed: extensive
psychiatric help. And that is why he was not sent to the only school
we have in the city, which is Warwick, for the more serious boy. More
seriously, it is even a drastic action to place a boy away who comes
in for truancy, because truancy is itself a passive delinquent act.
It is not an act which vitiates against society or mores or does harm
to other people. It is an act of omission, a failure to go to school
rather than an aggressive acting out, where you are destroying property
or injurying persons or other things. And this is one of the factors in
here.
It was surprising in this instance that we wanted placement and the
reason we felt placement was needed in this instance was because
although you may get boys acting out in other areas, there is always
someone in the community who can help out, and the court will hesitate
to put a boy away if some plan can be formulated within, because the
court in social work feels that there is no substitute for love and
parents, even in the best of institutions that you can place children.
But here the boy had no parents; he had no father; he wasn't going
to school; he had no friends; he had--no agency was working with the
family. He was on his own. He was just watching television all day. He
wasn't mixing with anybody. He was an extremely introverted young man.
He didn't want to go to school. So that in effect he had nothing going
for him outside.
Mr. LIEBELER. And in addition to all that, that his mother didn't show
any inclination to cooperate.
Mr. CARRO. She was ineffectual. She didn't want to cooperate and there
was nothing that I as a probation officer could hang my hat on to say,
"Keep him here in New York City. The mother will see him through,
between his mother and I, this agency and I." There was nothing there
out of the total community that would be a prop or a crutch to help him
see these things through.
Mr. LIEBELER. And it was these reasons that prompted you to recommend
placement rather than a peculiar extreme mental disturbance in the boy
himself, you would say?
Mr. CARRO. Yes; it was just the sum total of the environmental factors
rather than the boy's own inward manifestations of mental disturbance
or psychotic disorder.
Mr. LIEBELER. You mentioned before that his particular type of truancy
was different from the kind of truancy that you many times run into
where the kids will just take off and go fishing or just go out----
Mr. CARRO. Fly kites or pigeons, you know.
Mr. LIEBELER. Did you think it was different because Oswald just had a
tendency to stay home and watch television?