TWO LOST DAUGHTERS SPUR PAINFUL QUESTIONS FOR FAMILIES

For two mothers who lost their daughters, amidst the grief persist painful
questions.

A week after Maria Pesantez and Mellie Carballo died, apparently from a
lethal overdose of heroin and cocaine in a Lower East Side apartment, the
families of the girls continue to agonize over how such a tragedy could
have occurred.

Both were 18 and college students. Neither had a history of using drugs,
said their relatives.

Over the past week, both families have struggled to reconcile the images
they have of their daughters with the still-sketchy details of their final
hours.

"She was a family person. She wasn't a street kid," said Maria's mother
Marcia Pesantez, 41, who lives in Jackson Heights. "This was a crime, a
murder. Somebody killed my daughter."

"I don't know anything about that day," said Mellie's mother, Mariel
Carballo, 41, of midtown Manhattan. "This was not Mellie."

The two girls ended up dead after an all-day binge Aug. 12 on alcohol,
heroin and cocaine with two men, identified by police as Alfredo Morales,
33, and Roberto Martinez, 41. Police responding to a 911 call from the
Lillian Wald Houses found the girls passed out in Morales' apartment at
about 6 p.m. that day.

Carballo was pronounced dead 20 minutes later at Cabrini Medical Center;
Pesantez died last Sunday at Bellevue Hospital Center. The medical
examiner's office is awaiting results of toxicology tests to determine what
caused the girls' deaths.

Marcia Pesantez said the headlines she has seen about her daughter's death
do not represent her Maria, a National Honor Society student who turned
down offers from Harvard University and Columbia University to attend NYU
on a full scholarship starting last fall. Maria did not need to be pushed
to study; she pushed herself.

Maria was a computer science major, loved photography and was a talented
piano player.

"When I went to sleep, I used to tell Maria please play Mozart for me,"
said Pesantez, who emigrated from Ecuador with her husband, Juan Carlos,
when Maria was seven years old.

The family of Mellie Carballo described her as creative and vivacious, with
a keen fashion sense. Her interests were diverse, from an internship at MTV
to wanting to enlist in the Marines after high school. Her family convinced
her to go to college first, and she had just completed her first semester
at Hunter College in the spring.

The two girls became friends while attending St. Vincent Ferrer High School
in Manhattan. One of Carballo's other friends, Valerie Ponelli, 17,
described Carballo as a social butterfly who liked going to parties and
punk rock shows. But she didn't lose sight of her goals.

"Mellie just liked having a good time," Ponelli said. "But even when she
was out all night, she managed to get up early and get her homework done
and go to school."

Both of the men who were with Pesantez and Carballo that evening had prior
drug offenses. The two were arrested last week, Morales charged with
third-degree criminal sale of a controlled substance for allegedly giving
the girls cocaine, and Martinez on a parole violation for failing a urine
test. Morales did not enter a plea at his arraignment Thursday and was held
on $50,000 bond.

Ponelli said Carballo met Morales sometime this summer and quickly got in
over her head. She said Carballo told her that on several occasions Morales
gave her 15 grams of cocaine.

"He was just throwing drugs at her," Ponelli said. "He had a crush on her,
I think."

Carballo's mother said she believes her daughter and friend were preyed
upon by Morales and Martinez.

"What were they doing with these young girls?" she asked.

She said she feels frustrated that she could not protect her daughter.

"At a certain point I can't take care of my daughter the way she was when
she was a child, but she was still vulnerable," she said. "An 18-year-old
is as vulnerable as a 16- or 10-year-old."

Pesantez' mother, too, feels frustration -- mostly because of what has been
lost with Maria's death.

"She had big dreams," she said. "She had a potential to get all that she
wanted."

And she is also left only with questions.

"She was tricked and I want to get to the truth," she said. "What did they
do to my daughter?"

Petra Bartosiewicz is a freelance writer.