Marina’s two-year-old daughter wakes up from her nap and snuggles next to her mom on the sofa. After a few minutes, she brings out a toy tea set and takes pretend sips while her eldest sister makes faces into the camera of their mom’s phone. Elsewhere, two other sisters are still napping. Their home is filled with plants and wooden toys; a wall of children’s art fills one side of the living room.
Marina and her husband, Igor, have been building this home together on a leafy street in Decatur for the last seven years. Everything had been going well. “We have a nice car, pay rent. He has a good job. My daughter goes to private school,” Marina says. But that changed on March 27: “I woke up in a different world.”
Marina had just come home after dropping her daughter off at the Waldorf school a few miles down the road when she tried calling Igor over FaceTime. He didn’t answer. Instead, he texted her a picture of a police car and said he’d been pulled over. Thirty minutes later, he called her back.
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