A Friendship ....
Adrian Perez met Buretta Williams in the summer of 1996 through a mutual friend. Every summer, if Perez came to Chicago, she would stay with Williams.
'Buretta was very different,' Perez said. 'I knew she had a lot of issues because I'm a very observant person. She had a lot of trust issues. She'd be so scared who's coming over. She'd sleep on the ground when she had a full-sized bed. She liked abusive relationships. She was drawn to them. She thought they loved her. Until one day I asked her, 'Girl, why do you let these boys hit on you?' She says, 'Coz they like me; there's nothing wrong with that.' I said, 'There is something wrong. You deserve better.' I was always trying to be there. I wasn't raised in a perfect family, but I had good values. I was taught don't let anybody hit on you, don't let anybody abuse you. You deserve to be treated nicely. And I was trying to give her those same values, but I could tell it was going to be hard because she'd been through a lot. I talked to one of her friends who had known her for like 15 years and he gave me sort of a summary: that she was adopted and that her adoptive parents abused her. She got molested, severely. When they found out she was different, wanted to be gay, they didn't want to bother with her no more. She didn't have any family here in Chicago. She was from Detroit, I heard. One reason she liked to sleep on the ground was because she never had a bed. She always slept on the ground when she was little and cuddled to the blanket. That was the stuff she'd been through. So she was always abused. She took this abuse from men. She'd been beat up by men, robbed by men. She'd meet these men on the streets because she was looking for love from any direction. So she'd been through a lot. I was trying to show her she was beautiful. It was hard for her to trust anybody. She'd always been let down, so she always had her guard up. Deep down inside, she didn't know what to look for. She was just hurt. I could tell in her eyes she was always hurt.'
Buretta had no family. No family attended her funeral, according to Perez.
