Death took people that Kim Landers loved, so she took heroin to cope. When the money ran out, she sold herself on the street.
Then in late March, her oldest daughter, Aida Bergfeld, stumbled outside the front door of their Denver apartment.
“I can’t breathe, Mommy. I’ve done too much,” the young woman gasped before collapsing.
Aida had survived a three-day ordeal with Brent J. Brents, a serial rapist who she said kidnapped her, kept her in a closet and raped her more than a dozen times. But she could not overcome the cocaine and heroin she put in her body to escape those memories.
Aida, known to her family as Jaya, never woke up, dying from an overdose April 10, her 28th birthday.
Over the next several weeks, Landers, 49, learned an awful truth: No drug could dull the agony of losing her daughter.
“The deaths started it,” she said of her slide into addiction and prostitution, “and her death ended it.
“At first, I wanted to do nothing but get more messed up. I chased the dragon, and it chased me back, but it didn’t bite me; it bit my child. And nothing else would suffice but to quit.”
Landers is now part of Chrysalis, a new drug-court initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Justice designed as a jail- diversion program for prostitutes with multiple arrests.
Arrested by Denver police for prostitution June 11, Landers has been off the street for nearly six weeks, the turning point for most women in the program. She counts the rawness of each new day as a victory.
The hardest part so far, she said, was making it through the immense publicity surrounding the July 6 Denver court appearance of Brents, the man charged with kidnapping and raping her daughter. Facing 66 charges involving a multitude of victims, including Aida, Brents pleaded guilty and was sentenced to more than 1,300 years in prison.
“I couldn’t go to the sentencing,” Landers said Tuesday to Denver County Judge John Marcucci during a Chrysalis court appointment. “I just couldn’t deal with it.”
Yet there is much she wants the world to know. Her daughter Aida was brilliant as well as beautiful, Landers said, a compassionate woman who in the end pitied Brents. The man had his own pain, Aida had told her mother.
And Landers knows about pain.
Until seven years ago, Landers said, she made a successful living as a fortuneteller and an alchemist. But within two years, she lost her husband, her mother, her grandparents, an uncle and four close friends. Someone introduced her to heroin, and two years after that, she was on Colfax Avenue, selling sex to keep up the supply.
About a year and a half ago, Aida picked up the lifestyle.
“She saw me self-medicating,” she said, “and children will follow their parents.”
Aida also followed her to Colfax, and for that, as well as the drugs, Landers said she has deep remorse.
Marcucci had seen Aida before him when she signed up for a different drug intervention program. But she left, slipping away to the street.
“Ms. Landers and her daughter, as sad as their story is, and as unbelievable as it may seem, resemble other stories of victimization that we’re beginning to see in Chrysalis every day,” the judge said. “As we explore their history, we see the depths of their despair.”
Aida met Brents, who took her to an abandoned Capitol Hill apartment in February and raped her “more times than she could count,” she told detectives. She told her mother Brents had not picked her up to buy sex.
“She said she was not prostituting; I don’t know if she was trying to comfort me,” recalled Landers.
“He didn’t beat her, like he did the others,” Landers said, “although she had marks from where he had tied her. She said she felt so sorry for him and spoke to him a lot about things.”
In turn, Landers said, Brents attended to Aida’s drug addiction.
“He would bring her heroin in the closet because he knew she was going to get drug-sick.”
For weeks afterward, Landers said, Aida was haunted by her time with Brents, and not just because of the physical trauma.
“Whatever he told her, burdened her.”
Landers wears a black strip of material wound around her left biceps, something she’ll do for the rest of the year after Aida’s death, she said.
She read Brents’ letter of apology to his victims, which says, “Each of you in your own encounters with me were courageous and brave. Some of you showed me love and kindness which I took advantage of.”
Knowing Aida, Landers said, “I knew he was talking about her.”
She does not hate Brents.
“He’s caused me pain for lifetimes,” she said. “I forgive him. I don’t hold him in malice. As much as he hurt me, hating him would only slow me down.”
Denver Post researcher Barbara Hudson contributed to this report.
Staff writer Amy Herdy can be reached at 303-820-1752 or aherdy@denverpost.com.
