As Johanna Orozco removed the bandana she wore to hide her scarred face, the courtroom gasped.
As Johanna Orozco removed the bandana she wore to hide her scarred face, the courtroom gasped.
Johanna ignored their reaction. She wanted the man who had raped and shot her in the face two years earlier to see the damage he’d done.
That man was her ex-boyfriend, Juan Ruiz. His dangerous obsession with Johanna had ended their relationship, and nearly ended her life.
Johanna, 21, had been a happy teenager, who hoped to have a career as a hairdresser, but getting involved with Juan ended all that.
Her shattered face has been rebuilt in a series of traumatic operations, she has had to learn to eat and talk again – and she knows her life will never be the same again.
She had been the envy of all her classmates. She seemed to have everything a teenage girl could want – including a good-looking boyfriend.
She met Juan Ruiz Jr. at school in her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, in the US, and by the time she was 16 they were dating.
Their relationship went from strength to strength, with walks, family dinners and movies.
“I was certain he was going to be the man I married but then, about a year and a half later, Juan started to change,” Johanna recalls. “There were rumours going round school that I was cheating on him. I told Juan it wasn’t true, but he didn’t believe me.” Juan’s suspicions provoked tension between them, until one day after school he confronted Johanna.
“He was furious and said he knew I was cheating. He was trying to get me to admit to something I hadn’t done.
“He was becoming insanely jealous and I was starting to get scared. He’d already hit me for laughing with some of my male friends.
Johanna, who’d lost both her parents young, lived with her grandma, Juanita Orozco, and said she felt too ashamed to confide in her elderly relative that Juan was hitting her.
Juan’s vicious beatings were becoming more frequent but Johanna loved him and hoped he would change. She kept the beatings secret. “I was too scared and embarrassed to tell anyone,” she says. “Juan said he’d hurt my family, or kill himself if I told anyone.
“I begged Juan to stop, but because the bruises didn’t show our secret stayed hidden.”
But the beatings were occurring two or three times a week. The chilling pattern was the same: Juan would beat Johanna then beg her forgiveness, and she’d take him back.
Johanna began documenting her feelings in a diary.
In April 2006 she wrote: “My heart is really sad now. Today Juan pushed me and called me a bitch. It hurt me so much. I don’t understand why he turned out to be this way.”
By February 2007 Johanna had had enough. “I rang Juan – I was afraid he’d beat me if I did it in person – and told him I was done with him but I would always love him.”
Then, on February 15, 2007, Johanna was in bed when she heard a knock on the window. She looked out to see Juan standing in the darkness.
“I opened the window and asked what he wanted. He said he needed to talk to me and he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so eventually I let him into my room.”
Juan begged her for another chance.
“Then he suddenly took off his jacket and pulled out a knife. He pressed it against my chest and I begged him not to hurt me. He said: ‘If you don’t take me back I’m going to kill you and myself’. I felt I had no choice.”
Juan lay down beside Johanna then leaned over and kissed her.
“He wanted to make love but I told him I was tired. He snarled at me, asking why I wouldn’t have sex with him.”
Then he raped Johanna at knifepoint, and threatened to kill her and her family if she told anyone.
Terrified, Johanna tried to stay silent about the rape, but broke down, and told her two best friends. The police were called, and Juan was arrested and charged with rape.
Johanna felt an immense sense of relief that she’d finally escaped Juan’s violent clutches. Now he was in jail awaiting trial, she thought she was safe.
But four days later Juan was released from the overcrowded detention centre, tagged, and put under house arrest at his family home.
Johanna didn’t know Juan was out of prison. She left home around 1pm on March 5, 2007, and as she sat on the driveway in her truck, Juan marched towards her with a sawn-off shotgun and shot her once in the face.
He was wearing a mask, but Johanna recognised Juan’s eyes.
“We stared at each other for about 10 seconds, but I don’t remember anything after that. He pulled the trigger and everything faded to white,” she recalls.
A neighbour heard a gunshot and found Johanna slumped in a pool of blood, with her grandmother screaming beside her. Unable to get through to 999, the neighbour drove Johanna to the hospital herself.
“Grandma said she pulled back my hair and I didn’t have a face,” recalls Johanna.
Doctors there said it was a miracle Johanna had made it to the hospital alive. She was missing her chin, upper neck and most of her lower lip.
“There was blood everywhere and what was left of Johanna’s face was shredded, it was destroyed,” says Dr. Michael Fritz, who was Johanna’s plastic surgeon.
Johanna’s injuries were horrific. Her entire chin, neck and most of her lower lip had been shattered by the gun blast.
“I felt like a monster,” she says now. Johanna had several operations to rebuild her face over the following months. In one, which lasted 13 hours, Dr. Fritz created a new jaw using skin and bone from Johanna’s leg.
It took months for her to regain basic functions like talking and eating. Since then, Dr. Fritz has carried out nine more operations to help reduce scarring and improve Johanna’s speech.
“Those two months in hospital are a really hazy time for me,” says Johanna. “I kept thinking, ‘Why did this happen to me?’ The life I knew was over. But I knew that wouldn’t help me.”
Johanna decided to properly look at her face six weeks after the shooting.
“I knew what had happened but nothing prepared me for how bad the damage was. I saw my face, then looked away and started sobbing. I wasn’t Johanna anymore.”
Dr Fritz admits he will never be able to make Johanna look like she looked before the shooting.
But slowly with the love and support of her family, Johanna has begun healing.
And remarkably Johanna says she has forgiven her ex-boyfriend for what he did. “If I hold on to all that anger and hate, Juan will always have a part of me,” says Johanna. “He is nothing to me now and doesn’t deserve a moments thought from me.”
In August 2007, Juan, 17, pleaded guilty to charges of rape and attempted murder. He was later sentenced to 27 years in prison. Johanna has now closed the door on that part of her life.
“This happened for a reason,” she says. “Right now it is terrible, horrible, but there is a good reason why it happened.
She has turned her own story into an inspiration for others, and now works at a domestic violence centre in Cleveland.
“Before I wanted to be a hairdresser, now I work with battered women. And I love myself for who I am.”
Johanna also speaks at seminars on teenage violence and urges teenage girls to seek help if they are in an abusive relationship, and is lobbying for state legislation to provide protection orders for threatened teenagers.
“I’m a stronger person now,” she says.
Source: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/ive-gone-through-hell-to-look-192161
