TUESDAY, JUNE 15, 2010


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A9 A stranger offers to help, and a nightmare is set in motion teka from A1 Why do you still have me here?


Teka would ask her sometimes. Why don’t you just drop me in front of a hospital, push me out of the car and pull off? The woman wouldn’t explain but often would begin to pace nervously. Now she was in the bedroom, talking to Teka.


What I’m getting ready to do to you is not going to kill you, the woman said.


She brought in a bowl of water and ice cubes, which she set at the end of the mattress by Teka’s feet, and towels. She got on her knees and tied a do-rag around Teka’s wrists. She stuffed a cloth in Te- ka’s mouth, told her to bite down on it if she needed to and secured it by winding duct tape around Teka’s head.


Veronica Deramous pleaded insanity.


At one point, the woman insert- ed a DVD of Michael Jack- son’s “This Is


It” — a bootleg copy, presumably, because the film had not been of- ficially released on DVD. Teka lis- tened to a series of dancers talk about how happy they were to be auditioning for Jackson’s tour. The woman had also brought


an array of box cutters and knives. She’s going to torture me, Teka thought with rising horror. But it wasn’t Teka the woman was after. It was her unborn baby. Unable to scream because of the gag, Teka watched in agony as the woman selected an instrument, made an incision in her belly and started cutting.


‘I’m liking what I see’


Just days earlier, Teka Adams had been struck by the way life seemed to be looking up for her, and she had written a poem de- scribing the changes. After years of drifting, drug use and occa- sional stints in lockup, Teka, at 29, was becoming a different person. She studied herself in the mirror — her stylish black bob; her ex- pression, happier than it had been in years — and felt satisfied. “As the sun begins to go down / I take a good look in the mirror at me,” she wrote. “Damn! I must admit. I’m liking what I see.” By that time, though, the ma-


chinery had been set in motion that would lead her to the sparse apartment where she lay tethered and terrified. Months later, Teka would recount the details of her captivity in a series of interviews for this article. Those details have been corroborated by court docu- ments and interviews with detec- tives, emergency responders, rela- tives and others involved in the case. Teka’s alleged attacker, who has pleaded “not criminally re- sponsible by reason of insanity,” declined to be interviewed. The case goes to trial in July. Teka and her captor first crossed paths in October, when Teka began getting calls from a number that registered on her cellphone caller ID as unknown. At first, she didn’t answer. She was seven months pregnant, liv- ing in the women’s quarters of the downtown D.C. shelter run by the Community for Creative Non-Vio- lence. Teka had been at the shelter for about nine months and had found more joy there than she ever expected. She met her future husband, Ronald Bell, at the shel- ter. Bell, whom everybody called P.J., had asked her to marry him, and in September they’d gone to a justice of the peace. Like Teka, P.J.


had been involved with drugs and was resolved to leave the lifestyle. Joking and laughing, the two had become inseparable. They were excited about their baby but wor- ried about where they would raise her.


One day as Teka was riding with a friend to the grocery store, the unknown caller rang again, and Teka, on a whim, answered. The caller identified herself as Stephanie Mills. She sounded friendly enough to Teka. Mills said she was connected with a company, which she did not name, that helped indigent preg- nant women. She told Teka that she had been referred to her by a CCNV staffer and offered to take Teka to a storage facility in Mary- land to pick up some baby-related items. Teka ordinarily would have been leery of accepting an offer from a stranger, but Mills sound- ed legit, and she welcomed the help. She and Mills spoke several times to finalize when to meet. The initial plan was for Mills to pick her up over the Thanksgiving holiday. But Mills said she was having car trouble, and the date was rescheduled for Dec. 2.


A fateful car ride


That morning, Teka got up about 5:30 to make sure she was ready. By then, she had moved to different lodgings. She liked CCNV and many of the people there — she and P.J. had had a wedding reception there, with much congratulation and cama- raderie — but she was unhappy with the lack of privacy, which in- cluded having to share a bath- room, especially in the last months of pregnancy. So she had jumped at the chance to move into a maternity home run by the Queen of Peace, Missionaries of Charity in a leafy old-fashioned neighborhood in Southeast. Teka had her own room with windows, a dresser and a closet with shelves. She brought in teddy bears and flowers. There were about six pregnant women in the rambling house. Nuns cooked their meals and stocked the fridge with juice and lunch meats. To Te- ka, it was heaven. P.J. called, as he regularly did,


before she left that morning. He was in a court-ordered residential therapy program, where he was working through family-related issues. He was getting out that day. Teka told P.J. about her plans. Don’t get in a car with a stran-


ger, P.J. begged her. Why can’t she bring it to you? He urged Teka to wait so he could go with her. I’ll be fine, Teka assured him. When Stephanie Mills called to say she was outside, Teka said goodbye to the maintenance man and crossed Wheeler Road. It was about 6:30. Mills was waiting in a light-colored car parked near a school. Mills seemed pleasant, if unremark- able. An extrovert, Teka kept the conversation going, chattering about her family. Raised in the Washington area, she had been a gifted, creative girl who enjoyed a sheltered childhood. Before she entered her teens, however, she learned that she had bipolar dis- order, for which she disliked tak- ing medication. Her parents split up, and Teka, rebellious, started running away when she was 14. Later in her teens, she ran away and stayed away. She lived with different people, never staying in one place for long. She fell out of touch with her parents, calling them infrequently. At 23, she had a daughter and asked her mother to take her. Now, though, she was rebuilding the relationships she had damaged. She was getting


was using a box cutter to slice one side of her abdomen. Her adrenaline surging, Teka


managed to snatch the box cutter from Deramous. She stood up and began backing toward the door, looking over her shoulder to see what locks to undo. Don’t come closer! she warned,


brandishing the box cutter. But Deramous rushed her, swinging the fire poker. Teka threw the box cutter across the room so Dera- mous couldn’t get it back. They went down fighting. First


PHOTOS BY CAROL GUZY/THE WASHINGTON POST A STRONG BOND: Teka Adams and her husband, P.J. Bell, embrace at her mother’s home in Beltsville.


Her adrenaline surging, Teka snatched the box cutter from Deramous.


along with her parents and felt proud when her daughter, Sadie, called her “mother.” She did not go into all of this with Mills, instead sharing su- perficial details. The two women also talked about how Teka’s preg- nancy was going. Then Mills said she was experiencing car trouble and needed to stop by her place in Suitland to call someone to fix it. Mills’s apartment was in a large


complex of pale brick buildings. Mills parked the car and ushered Teka into the first-floor garden apartment. They entered through a sliding glass door, which was be- side the front door, and opened directly into the living room. In the living room was a couch, with scattered boxes and blankets. Mills led Teka into the bedroom so she could sit on the mattress and watch TV while they were waiting. Before long, P.J. called Teka to


say he wanted to come fetch her. Look around and see where you


are, he told her. Teka said that she didn’t know where she was but that she was fine. As time passed, though, she began to get worried. The maternity home’s rules re- quired her to return by midday.


A troubled past


Bustling around her apart- ment, Stephanie Mills made Teka two sandwiches, which Teka ate eagerly, not having had time for breakfast. Mills put in a series of movies — two were forgettable, one was “Precious,” also, presum- ably, a bootleg. She told Teka not to mind the lack of furniture. She and her son had just moved down from New York, she said. He slept in the living room. The woman was lying to Teka about much of this. Her name was not Stephanie Mills; it was Veron- ica Deramous, although she sometimes went by Veronica Quinn, a last name from a former marriage. She had four children, only one of whom — Derek, 17 — was living with her. Police would later find that she had been in the apartment since early 2009. Dera- mous, 40, had spent at least part of her childhood in the Washing- ton area; a high school friend, speaking on the condition of ano- nymity because he didn’t want to


Deramous was on top, then Teka. Deramous opened her legs so that Teka’s pregnant belly was be- tween her knees and began squeezing Teka’s stomach with her legs. Despite her smaller stat- ure — 5-2 and usually 115 pounds —she got her hands around Dera- mous’s throat, causing her to drop the fire poker. She could hear the other woman wheezing. Then she watched in amazement as Dera- mous threw her hands back and started praying. You’re praying? she thought. Are you crazy? By now, Teka was tired and rap- idly losing strength. Afraid that she might kill Deramous — or that she herself might die — she re- leased the woman and collapsed against the wall. Please don’t hurt me no more, she begged.


I’m not going to hit you no


more, the woman replied. I’m not going to hurt you no more. Teka was bleeding from her ab- domen and her head. Deramous stretched her out on the kitchen floor, then pulled out towels and began scrubbing Teka’s blood from the walls and carpet. The woman said her son would be coming home soon. I can’t let him see my house like


PAINFUL REMINDER: Teka Adams shows the scar where her abductor cut open her abdomen to try to take her baby.


be perceived as gossiping about her, remembers that she ran track at Hayfield Secondary School in Alexandria. Sometime later, she went into the military. According to records provided by the U.S. Army, she served from 1988 to 1999, achieving the rank of corpo- ral in 1996 and working at one time as an equipment handler. She was awarded routine com- mendations. From June 1996 to June 1999,


Deramous served in a Texas Army National Guard unit stationed in Austin and spent time at Fort Hood. There, she helped pack military trucks with supplies, said Jamille Charles, 43, of Michigan, who was a neighbor when the two were in the Army in the late ’90s. Charles used to babysit Dera- mous’s children. Some of the chil- dren had different fathers. Charles later reconnected with Deramous on Facebook — Dera- mous’s Facebook page shows a long-haired woman standing as- sertively, wearing a short dress and boots — and was told by De- ramous that she was into music and would sometimes sing at a club owned by a friend. “I’m just in disbelief,” said Charles after learning of allegations against De- ramous. “We were really good friends.” As time went on, Deramous


committed crimes that required cunning and a willingness to take advantage of others. She was con- victed in 2002 of first-degree forg- ery in Georgia and spent more than two years in jail. Detectives say they think she moved around. At one time, she worked at a Bow- ie medical practice, according to court records. An administrator at the practice, Clark & Pettus- Bellamy, did not return calls. At another point, Deramous was a medical assistant at a pediatric practice in Falls Church, accord- ing to one of her co-workers.


That co-worker said she agreed to cosign for an apartment Dera- mous was renting in Annandale, then got slapped with the bill when Deramous did not pay her rent and was evicted. The two were sued by the apartment’s management company for almost $1,900, court records show. The co-worker said she paid the judg- ment. About the same time, she said, she learned that Deramous had run up several thousand dol- lars on a credit card that she had opened partly in the co-worker’s name. Deramous pleaded guilty to identity fraud in February 2009 and was sentenced to a year in jail with six months suspended, ac- cording to court records. Dera- mous, who is being held in Prince George’s County jail, has been charged with first-degree at- tempted murder, kidnapping, first- and second-degree assault, false imprisonment and reckless endangerment in the Teka Adams case. The co-worker, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect her and the practice’s privacy, said Deramous was “very close” with some of the pediatric practice’s staff members, especially those who were pregnant. By the time she made contact with Teka, De- ramous was out of jail and work- ing as a cocktail server at McCor- mick & Schmick’s on F Street NW, making $7.25 an hour, according to court records. For some time, detectives would discover, she had been telling people that she was pregnant. It was a lie.


In search of escape


Toward the end of the third movie, Teka’s purported benefac- tor rushed at her and threw a blanket over her head. Deramous began hitting Teka in the head with a fireplace poker and knocked her out. Teka came to in the kitchen, where the woman


In wake of China’s crackdown on Uighurs, fear and stifled thoughts china from A1


over a government investigation into a Uighur-Han brawl at a southern Chinese factory. Several days of violence brought the offi- cial death toll to 197, with 1,700 in- jured, though observers suspect the casualty count was much higher. Most of the dead were Han, according to authorities. The government officially ac- knowledged detaining nearly 1,500 people after the riots. As of early March, Xinjiang had offi- cially sentenced 198 people, with 25 death sentences. Of those 25, 23 were Uighur. The events forced China’s na- tional and regional governments to address, at least superficially, taboo issues of ethnic conflict, discrimination and socioeconom- ic inequality. The central govern- ment in April named a different Communist Party secretary for Xinjiang, Zhang Chunxian, who promptly announced that he had “deeply fallen in love with this land.” In May, the government an- nounced a new development strategy to pour $1.5 billion into


the region. It also restored full Internet and text-messaging ac- cess to the region after limiting or blocking it entirely for 10 months. The riots “left a huge psychic


trauma on the minds of many people of all ethnicities. This fully reflects the great harm done to the Chinese autonomous region by ‘splittist’ forces,” said Wang Baodong, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in the United States. The ability to confront what happened last July, and why, still eludes people of all ethnic groups in Xinjiang. White-knuckled, they hold their spoons above steaming bowls of mutton stew, poking nervously at the oily sur- face. They fiddle with their watchbands until they break. They repeat questions rather than answer them. They glance through doorways, distracted, and shift side to side in their chairs. Summer’s full swelter has yet to arrive, but everyone start- ing to speak to a reporter begins to sweat. One man leaves the ta- ble six times in half an hour to rinse the perspiration from his


face. He returns unrefreshed. When asked what changes the riots had brought, Mehmet, a for- mer schoolteacher who resigned last year because he opposed re- quirements that he teach his Ui- ghur students primarily in Chi- nese, took a long glance around the room before pointing half- heartedly out the door. “They built a new highway overpass,” he said.


Suspicion of fellow citizens is still common throughout China but seems especially acute here. Academics accept interviews only if they can avoid discussing the conflict’s lingering effects. An apologetic professor backed out of a planned meeting after his su- pervisor discovered his plan, called him and threatened his job. A businessman said that he believed government security agents often trained as journal- ists, and asked how he could be sure that he would not be turned in.


“We’re seeing increasingly in- trusive modes of control over reli- gious and cultural expression,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a Hong


Kong-based senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. “They live in fear of being overheard.” The Kadeer Trade Center is at the center of a protracted con- flict. The Urumqi government said that compensation talks with tenants were still ongoing, and that it had moved the tenants to a nearby location. A spokesman for Kadeer, who now lives in Fairfax, said she had not been offered compensation. Although the government says it is striving for stability, getting there is uncomfortable. On a sin- gle street near this city’s main ba- zaar, four types of uniformed po- lice were on patrol one recent day — not counting, of course, an un- known number of plainclothes security guards. They marched haphazardly along the sidewalks, the different units so numerous that they sometimes collided. Late into the evening, they perched on rickety school desk chairs placed throughout the ba- zaar, watching. On the corner outside Xinjiang Medical Univer- sity, armed police in riot gear peered out the windows of an ol-


ive green humvee or leaned on riot shields under the afternoon sun. “It’s quiet here on the surface,”


said Yu Xinqing, 35, a lifelong Han resident of Urumqi whose brother was killed by Uighurs during the riots. He now carries a knife with him everywhere, avoids Uighur businesses and rarely speaks with Uighur neigh- bors he previously considered friends. He says he is saving mon- ey to leave Xinjiang behind for good. “We don’t talk about these things, even within our families,” he said. “But our hearts are over- whelmed; we hold back rivers and overturn the seas.” Still, every once in a while, when a resident is safely alone with a neutral observer, months’ worth of stifled thinking tumbles out. That was the case for Ablat, a Uighur businessman who sells clothing near the main bazaar; he would not allow his last name to be mentioned. Ablat had been speaking in vague, evasive terms for three hours, and then — en- sconced in his car, speeding north


this, she told Teka. The woman put a wet cloth on her neck and chest. Exhausted and in pain, Te- ka allowed herself to be guided back to the bedroom, where she sank into the mattress. Deramous tucked pillows around her and covered her with a sheet. Teka asked Deramous whether she was going to let her go. I don’t know, the woman said. I have to figure out how I’m going to get out of this. As evening approached, Dera- mous began looking out the win- dow. Teka fell asleep. When she woke, it was Thursday. In the eve- ning, Deramous said she was bringing her son, Derek, into the bedroom. Teka feared that he was being brought back to rape her. Instructed by his mother, Derek


grabbed Teka’s wrists. Grip them tight because she’s a fighter, Dera- mous said when Teka resisted. She told Teka: If you scream or you do anything, then we’re going to have to hurt you. Teka stayed still while the son held her wrists, and Deramous wound duct tape around them. She also bound Teka’s ankles, then tied her wrists to her ankles. She let Teka lie there Thursday night, sometimes feeding her greens. Teka decided that the best approach was to be passive and bide her time. On Friday, Deramous un-


wrapped the duct tape and let Te- ka take a shower to wash off the blood matted in her hair. Then Deramous took her hands and be- gan cutting her fingernails. Why are you cutting my finger- nails? Teka asked.


Because my DNA is going to be in your fingernails, Deramous re- plied. To Teka, the explanation was ominous. She still had no idea what the woman had in mind. mundyl@washpost.com


zapotoskym@washpost.com


Staff researchers Meg Smith and Alice Crites contributed to this report.


The Muslim Uighurs consider Xinjiang their homeland, but now make up just 46 percent of the region’s population.


Detail XINJIANG RUSSIA Beijing CHINA Shanghai INDIA KAZAKHSTAN Urumqi KYRGYZ. XINJIANG PAK. INDIA LARIS KARKLIS/THE WASHINGTON POST


out of town — something finally released.


“Give us jobs, stop holding our passports hostage, and let us wor- ship the way we want to,” he said. “That would solve these prob- lems. That is all it would take.” lauren.keane@wpost.com


0 MILES MONGOLIA


Last July, 197 died in ethnic rioting between Uighurs and Han


CHINA Llhasa


Pacific Ocean


0 MILES 500 800 JAPAN


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