The woman Andrea had interviewed was Gladys Soliz Portilla. She had been the owner of the second car that had gotten torched. It had only taken a few questions to get Gladys to open up about it. The woman, who had come from Mexico with her young son a few months ago, had her Dodge Neon towed from the apartment parking lot. When she went to get it from the tow company, they told her she had to produce a lease showing she lived at the complex. Because of her undocumented status, she hadn’t signed a lease. “Then,” Andrea said, getting into the story, “a man comes to her house and tells her that if she pays him eight hundred dollars, she can have her car back, but that’s like almost a month’s salary. She tells him that she’ll call the police. That’s when her car was torched. I guess when the people couldn’t pay, their cars were burned to send a message.” “This towing company sounds lovely,” Lucy said. “It just pisses me off that anyone would take advantage of people like this,”
