Fate, Folly Conspire as Paths Collide

Trudi Nadel settled in behind the reel-to-reel recorder at Insight for the Blind’s Studio 4 and placed the headphones over her ears.

For years, she had volunteered several hours a week making audio books for the Library of Congress, working as a producer while others recorded. She still had a strong Bavarian accent, having fled Nazi Germany as a girl.

This particular day -- May 13, 1983 -- the text was a collection of essays by Loren Eiseley. In one, “The Chresmologue,” named for the Greek oracles who sang their prophecies for a fee, the essayist ruminated on how the smallest of acts or choices can change the future.

“Who knows, through the course of unimaginable eons, how the great living web may vibrate slightly and give out a note from the hand that plucked it long ago?” Eiseley wrote.

That same day, a few miles away at Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital, Luis Andres Montanez came screaming into this world.

Trudi Nadel was a superstitious woman. When she sat down at her diary that long-ago night, she underlined the “Friday” and colored in the “13” with blue ink.

Twenty years later, the paths of Trudi Nadel and Luis Montanez would cross with tragic results.

Of course, neither she nor anyone could have foreseen that, as Eiseley well knew.

“The gods do not reveal their every secret to men,” he wrote. “They only open a way and wait for mortal nobility or depravity to take its natural course.”

*

Gertrude Nadel’s story began 66 years before Luis Montanez’s, in the southern German city of Nuremberg. Had her father not had a knack for seeing the future, it might have ended there.

Ludwig Frank was a physician, as well as a talented poet and pianist. During World War I, he had served in the Kaiser’s army.

But when Hitler came to power in 1933, Frank could tell that the winds had changed. The family emigrated, finding its way to New York City in 1938. A grandmother who stayed behind died in a concentration camp.

In the ensuing years, Trudi attended nursing school and served in the U.S. Army in World War II. She married and, in 1948, gave birth to a son, Richard. She was widowed, married again and moved to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Widowed once more, she threw herself into volunteerism.

Her father had gone blind late in life, and Trudi wanted to help the sightless.

“When I found Insight, it answered my prayers,” she once said.

It was 1976 when she put in the first of what would eventually become 20,000 volunteer hours there. That same year, Richard persuaded his mother to keep a diary as therapy to get over her second husband’s recent death.

*

Even as an infant, Luis Montanez was trouble. “He always wanted everything right there and then,” recalled his mother, Elizabeth Mendez.

At a Miami elementary school, he once locked his teacher out of the classroom and smashed everything he could lay his hands on. A psychiatrist diagnosed him with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and prescribed Ritalin, but it didn’t improve his behavior.

In 1995, at age 12, Luis was arrested for the first time -- on suspicion of grand theft auto. On his 14th birthday, he was charged with carrying a concealed firearm.

One night, he climbed out his bedroom window and didn’t come back. Over the next few years, Luis, now homeless, racked up burglary and auto-theft charges.

Three years later, after several visits to juvenile detention, Luis was arrested for the 28th time -- burglarizing an unoccupied home. By then the father of a toddler son, he says he had developed a costly crack cocaine habit. But now he was 19 -- an adult.

Luis was sentenced to five months. The date was April 29, 2003.

*

In her diary, Trudi noted April 29, drawing a box around the date.

It was Holocaust Remembrance Day.

*

When Luis was released from jail Aug. 6, he felt better than he had in years. He thought about enlisting in the Army and getting his high school equivalency certificate.

As a condition of his release, he was supposed to report monthly to his probation officer. A counselor referred him to an outpatient drug-treatment program but told him to call her or his probation officer if he felt that he was slipping back into drugs.

Luis moved in with the mother of his son and took a job washing cars at a Nissan dealership. But when his first paycheck was less than he’d expected, things fell apart.

His aunt, Migdalia Mendez, gave him $50 for his drug-treatment program. He took it to his “dope hole.”

The next two weeks were a blur. He was stealing to feed his crack habit, he says. He barely slept.

One day, his aunt opened the door to find Luis standing there. He asked if he could use her phone to call his probation officer.

“I have relapsed back on crack and I need you to help me,” he told the officer’s answering machine, leaving his aunt’s address and phone number. He never heard back.

On Oct. 8, he cruised the streets of Miami in a stolen white Chevy Astro van. That day alone, he says he snatched nearly a dozen purses.

Most of his targets were elderly women.

*

That day, Trudi worked at Insight, as usual.

“Had fish filet at McDonald’s and was too tired to go shopping or to the bank,” she wrote in her diary that night. “Will do it tomorrow.”

*

Around 10:30 a.m. Oct. 9, Luis pulled the van into the parking lot of a pharmacy on Route 7 in Lauderdale Lakes and called out to a frail-looking woman for directions. Trudi had barely opened her mouth to answer, he says, when he reached out with his left arm -- the one tattooed with the word “Luis” -- and grabbed her purse.

But the 86-year-old woman did something he wasn’t expecting -- she resisted.

“Please stop, please stop,” she screamed, the strap looped tightly around her arm and shoulder. “Thief! Thief!”

Then the van’s motor died. Trudi’s screams were attracting attention. Luis panicked.

“Go ahead,” he told Trudi, shoving the purse toward her while shifting the van into neutral. “Take the purse.”

The van’s motor roared to life again. Luis put it in gear and hit the accelerator. But he says his hand was still wrapped around the purse. He didn’t look back.

“God’s going to punish you for this,” he mumbled to himself as he sped off.

Four days later, Luis was sitting in a police interrogation room. Exhausted and strung out, he spilled his guts about the string of purse snatchings. He was especially eager to apologize to Trudi.

When the taped statement was finished, the detective called Luis a murderer.

“I didn’t kill nobody,” he shouted.

The detective produced a newspaper. Luis began to cry.

*

As the van had sped away, Trudi was dragged briefly, then fell and struck her head on the pavement.

By the time her son Richard reached Broward General Medical Center, she didn’t recognize him.

Not long after Trudi’s death, a woman showed up on Migdalia Mendez’s doorstep. It was Luis’ probation officer. Mendez says the woman was there to arrest her nephew for violating his parole.

*

Luis Montanez is scheduled to stand trial March 15, charged with first-degree murder.

He knows that people are looking at his short life of crime and weighing it against Trudi’s long life of generosity. He wants them, especially Richard Nadel, to know that he did not set out that day to hurt anyone.

“I just wanted money to get high on crack,” he said in a telephone interview.

Richard doesn’t care what Luis did or did not mean to do. But he does want to know why someone with such a long record was walking the streets.

Luis thinks the system failed him too. If only someone had noticed that he wasn’t attending his court-ordered drug treatment. If only his probation officer had called him back.

“Who do I blame?” Luis asked. “I really don’t know. I guess life. Destiny.”

In the essay Trudi was taping the day Luis was born, Eiseley came to a similar conclusion.

“The future,” he wrote, “is neither ahead nor behind, on one side or another. Nor is it dark or light. It is contained within ourselves; its evil and good are perpetually within us.”

*

This story is based on four telephone interviews with Luis Montanez from jail, as well as interviews with his mother and aunt; a review of criminal and civil court records; excerpts from Trudi Nadel’s diaries and a biographical sketch that she wrote about herself; interviews with Richard Nadel; a review of notes kept by Montanez’s probation officer, who declined to be interviewed, as well as interviews with the Florida Department of Corrections.