When 17-year-old Katherine Silva Lopez tried to flee the gang members who robbed her daily on her way to school in Honduras, they stabbed her in the arm and threatened to kill her.
In San Pedro Sula, one of the world’s most violent cities, it was no idle threat. There were 1,200 homicides last year in the city of 437,000, where gangs prey on teens.
“They force you to kill, to steal, to sell drugs, to do prostitution,” Lopez told The Post in Spanish outside federal court in lower Manhattan. “I was really scared.”
Lopez’s parents decided she’d be safer with relatives in Brooklyn.
Her 70-year-old grandmother, who had also been targeted by gangs, had made the treacherous, 1,400-mile journey to the United States last November.
At dawn on May 29, 2014, Lopez set out on the first of five buses. Her 25-year-old brother, Hector, went along for protection, depositing her at the US-Mexico border after four days and nights of teeth-rattling rides. She squeezed onto an inflatable raft with about 20 others to cross the Rio Grande.
On the other side, Lopez was immediately arrested by US Border Patrol agents. Forced to give up everything they were carrying, including shoelaces and baby clothes, the illegal immigrants were packed into vans and transported to a Texas detention center. Dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, Lopez waited more than a week before she was allowed to bathe or take a change of clothes.
“People were sick, babies were crying, kids had diarrhea, lice and were vomiting on the floor, and there was nowhere to lie down if you wanted to sleep,” said Lopez, adding that the babies’ mothers were as young as 16 and, like her, had entered as unaccompanied minors. “Some people started sleeping in the bathrooms, which were a disaster.”
Twice a day, detainees were given sandwiches and water.
“The water tasted like chlorine, and the sandwiches were baloney and frozen lettuce,” she said.
“I thought that I was saving my life and so it was better to suffer in the US than to be in Honduras.”
Lopez spent more than a month shuttled among detention centers in Texas, Arizona and Oklahoma. In Arizona, she was given a pregnancy test and pills to combat intestinal worms.
“The guards would sit and eat hamburgers in front of us, taunting us,” she said.
More than a month after her journey, Lopez was put on a Delta flight to La Guardia Airport, where she was met by her aunt Alida, also in the country illegally. They hadn’t seen each other in 12 years.
Now living in Bensonhurst with her aunt and grandmother, Lopez is a sophomore at James Madison HS, where her favorite subject is math.
“I love math because you don’t have to speak English,” she said. “When I first went to school, I understood nothing. I used to point to my schedule and ask people to take me to my classes.”
On Friday, she took the day off school to go to immigration court in lower Manhattan, where she is seeking asylum. She fears she will be killed if she returns to Honduras. With President Obama easing restrictions on unaccompanied minors, her family is hopeful.
A month after her arrival in the US, her stepfather, Olbin Rolando Mejia Cruz, was gunned down by gang members for her escape.