Five adult sisters have now come forward to discuss how a pedophile abused them when they were children. They even say that he was bailed out of jail by a nonprofit in the Bronx, only to abuse more children.
According to the sisters, they were raped prior to being 18 years old and were as young as six when they were forced to perform oral sex. At one point, the oldest sister said that she sacrificed herself to Luis Olivo, their stepdad when she was 10 years old. She wanted him to leave the younger sisters alone.
Now that she is 48, Elba Garrison is coming forward with more information. She said: “This has been killing me my whole life.”
Eventually, she learned that her 59-year-old former stepfather never stopped abusing her siblings, as well as other children. This includes a little girl that got molested after he was released with the assistance of a bail reform group.
Olivo had molested the three-year-old boy in Queens when he was released with the help of the Bronx Freedom Fund. That nonprofit posted a $2000 bail and he was then free to molest the little boy, as well as an eight-year-old girl two months later.
After they found out that Olivo was still committing the crimes, the sisters opened up to each other about what happened when they were children.
Heiddis Olivo, his 35-year-old daughter, said “We learned to survive and be OK with it — but it destroys you on the inside.” She and all four of her half-sister share the same mother and they all suffered from the father’s perversions.
They came forward in the hope that it would help others.
“You don’t ever think anyone would ever believe you,” Garrison said. “But when we found out he had been arrested, we thought, ‘He really never changed, and there must be more victims.’”
After Olivo started to live with him in 1983 in Bushwick, Brooklyn, he started to perform sex acts on the young girls. He and their mother broke up in 1992, and then he left home.
The daughters don’t feel that the mother knew about the abuse when it was happening. Evelyn Vazquez, their mother, says the same. When Garrison was 19, she told her mother about it but her mother went to church instead of the police.
Kathy King is one of the siblings who is now 45 years old and she said that her stepdad started molesting her when she was nine but it got worse over time.
“I wasn’t even a teen yet, and that’s when he did the bad deed and pushed me down on the bed and told me not to say anything. He said, ‘This is just between you and me,’ ” King said.
“It was just terrible — I still remember the color of my underwear,” King said, breaking into sobs. “He raped me on my mother’s bed. It happened multiple times.”
Tahsha Hernandez said that she had to perform oral sex on her stepdad when she was between 6 and 8 years old.
“I always did what he said because I didn’t want to get in trouble [with Olivo]. I knew my mom loved him,’’ Hernandez said.
“It happened several times a week, probably for a year. For me, it felt like forever.”
Garrison ran away when she was 15, saying that the abuse had taken place in multiple ways for years. She finally made a deal with him because she thought she was “keeping my sisters safe.”
Jocelyn Hernandez said that Olivo started playing touching ‘games’ when she was about six years old. She ran into her stepdad in 1996 on the M train and he tried to make up.
“He said he found God and was really sorry about what he did to us when we were kids,’’ Jocelyn said. “I told him I forgave him, and he broke down crying.’’
“I now feel [his apology] wasn’t true,’’ she said.
Heiddis eventually came to the realization that the ‘horsey’ games her father played when she was so young included him rubbing up against her. She learned that he continued to molest children when a three-year-old boy was lured into a laundromat with a balloon and candy.
“It’s beyond sad to learn he continued to do this,” Heiddis said.
After being arrested in 2019, he was set free with help from the Bronx Freedom Fund. He was back in jail again not long after for putting his hands under the skirt of an eight-year-old girl and groping her.
“The non-profit should really be caring about these poor, defenseless children. [Luis] doesn’t deserve any help from anyone,” Heiddis said.
“I know because he did the same to me, he did it all my sisters.’’
That isn’t the first pedophile that was helped out of prison. They also helped Randy Santos in August 2019, and he went on to kill four homeless men three months later in Chinatown.
Luis Olivo is now serving a five-year sentence at the Marcy Correctional Facility in upstate Oneida County after pleading guilty to sex crimes.
The girls didn’t come forward when they were younger because they felt intimidated and frightened. Heiddis has recently tried to bring her former stepdad up on criminal charges but the district attorney told her that the crimes were beyond the statute of limitations.
“Jail is the safest place for him,” Heiddis said.”We just want that time extended as long as possible.”