text: When Linda Hooper met her son, Cruz, in the fall of 1981, she loathed him. 
   
   A veteran elementary teacher, Hooper's conscience told her it was wrong to hate a child, especially a student. But Cruz Riojas' tendency toward frequent, violent outbursts made it difficult for Hooper to think of him as anything other than a "holy terror." 
   
   In the 33 years following that school year at Brown Elementary School, however, Riojas would not only change Hooper's opinion of him forever - he would also change his last name. 
   
   Infamous classroom legend 
   
   "There evidently is a very thin line between love and hate," Hooper said during an hourlong interview at her home last week. Cruz, who lives in San Antonio, was in West Texas visiting family for the Fourth of July weekend. 
   
   It's a long, emotional story of how teacher and pupil became mother and son, and one they chose to tell for the first time in almost 35 years. 
   
   "What had happened was for like about five years before I got him, I was warned, 'You don't want that child,' because he was really a holy terror," Hooper, 68, said. "He had a reputation, and he intended to live up to it." 
   
   Sometimes Cruz misbehaved, using his still-prevalent sense of dry humor to distract the class from the teacher's lesson. Other times, he threw chairs or stabbed his peers. His academic standing made for an extra challenge. He had dyslexia and was two grade levels behind in reading, so he was considered a special education student. 
   
   By the time Cruz reached sixth grade, he had become a Brown 
   
   Elementary legend. His notorious antics led Hooper to tell her principal, "If you put that Riojas kid in my class, I'm going to quit." 
   
   Though she never made good on that promise, Hooper said she wasn't joking. 
   
   "I really had hoped that he'd be put in another person's room, but at that time I was the only one who could really handle the hard discipline problems," she said. 
   
   'Total squalor' 
   
   Cruz, now 45, said when he was growing up he did anything to get attention. The violence stemmed from a constant need to defend himself at home. 
   
   During his sixth-grade year with the woman he once called Mrs. Hooper, Cruz's biological mother was on husband No. 5 - an abusive, tyrannical man Cruz doesn't like to talk about. 
   
   Cruz, his four half-siblings, their mother and "No. 5" lived in a one-room lean-to on a turnrow in the middle of a field. 
   
   He wore the same green pants and striped shirt to school every day, Hooper remembers, and the only shoes he had to wear were his sister's. He and his siblings were sent home with lice 12 times that year. 
   
   "It was total squalor," Hooper said. "I would not let my animals live the way they had to live." 
   
   Cruz described it this way: "We slept on the floor and ate ----." 
   
   That's all one needs to know to understand the situation, he said. 
   
   Change of heart 
   
   In December of that school year, Cruz changed, Hooper said. He starting asking if he could help around the classroom, and it wasn't long before Hooper and her husband, Gale, hired him to do odd jobs at their home and rental properties for cash - money his stepfather didn't let him keep. 
   
   As a healthier relationship developed between Cruz and his teacher, the Hoopers' home became a refuge for the troubled student. Whenever he and No. 5 fought, Cruz ran 7.5 miles from his house to theirs. 
   
   His home life worsened as he entered seventh grade at Atkins Junior High School. 
   
   One cold, snowy day in February 1983, Cruz had the last fight he would have with his stepfather - one in which he told the man in no uncertain terms he would beat him up when he got older. 
   
   No. 5 kicked him out. He was 12. 
   
   Cruz's mom packed everything he owned in a cardboard box, called Hooper and took her son to hide at a nearby truck stop. When Hooper arrived, she found the two behind an 18-wheeler, and Cruz's mom asked if Hooper could keep him for the weekend - just until things at home calmed down. 
   
   "He never left," Hooper said. "I had him from then on." 
   
   From student to son 
   
   Neither Cruz nor Hooper thought his stay would be long term, but neither complained as the days, months and years went by. 
   
   "If it was an hour, it was an hour I didn't have to spend there," Cruz said. "You think, 'Hey, lunch? Lunch is great.' Lunch worked its way into dinner, and here we are 35 years later." 
   
   Hooper said her husband, a retired firefighter, never questioned her decision to let Cruz stay, which she admires him for to this day. Gale and Cruz formed a bond of mutual respect Cruz had never experienced with the other father figures in his life. 
   
   As Cruz settled into his new life, the Hoopers bought him a new wardrobe and helped him get his first job, an Avalanche-Journal paper route, so he could make his own money and buy things he'd never had. 
   
   Cruz also started performing better in school - credit that goes to retired special education teacher James Harris, Hooper said, who became another positive influence in Cruz's life. Under Harris' instruction, Cruz tested out of special education by his high school graduation. 
   
   Everything was going well for the family until Cruz hurt his knee at school. Emergency room doctors would not give him stitches without a parent or legal guardian present. 
   
   "That was the first catalyst of my going to his mother and asking for permission, No. 1, to be able to give him stitches," Hooper said. They also wanted to take Cruz on vacation to Fun Valley, Colorado, but would again need her signature. 
   
   They got it, and Hooper carried that paper everywhere, eventually laminating it to keep it from fraying. 
   
   "I lived in fear every single day that they would just come jerk the whole thing away from me," Hooper said. "Until he was about 16, I lived in absolute total fear that there would be a knock on the door saying, 'He is not yours. We want him back. There's nothing you can do about it.' And I would've had to give him up. I had no rights at that time." 
   
   Hooper said by the time Cruz was 16, she thought if someone did try to take him away, she could take the matter to court and keep it there until he turned 18. 
   
   "He was obviously mine by then," she said. "After you show somebody what they can have, when they've got their own bedroom, when they've got their own clothes, when they've got a reason to get up in the morning and they change their whole attitude - he was no longer chip-on-his-shoulder anymore and happy all the time - then going back would be worse. It would be worse than if I had never shown him any of it." 
   
   Hooper's choice to claim him as her own didn't come without opposition. Her mother and friends - who now love Cruz, Hooper said - thought she had lost her mind. 
   
   "It was a different era," Cruz said. "Back in the early '80s, white people didn't adopt Mexican kids. It just didn't happen." 
   
   There was no formal adoption, however. At least not for a while. 
   
   "He had asked many, many times to change his name to ours," Hooper said. "We were afraid that he was young, that he might not understand what he was getting into, that you cannot change your ethnicity by changing your name, and all these things. We never said no, but we just never did it." 
   
   Hooper said she was on a school trip in Dallas when she got a phone call - her "biggest joy" - shortly before Cruz's 30th birthday. He wanted to be adopted. 
   
   Becoming Cruz Hooper 
   
   Cruz said he had thought about legally changing his name since he was 18, but for one reason or another, it never happened. When he got married, he and his wife went by the surname Riojas. 
   
   At age 29, however, Cruz decided to go through with it, and his attorney-aunt told him the easiest way would be to have the Hoopers adopt him. 
   
   Cruz said at first he thought he was a little old for that, but decided it was the best option. 
   
   "I just thought it would honor my parents," he said, holding back tears. 
   
   In a formal adoption ceremony Jan. 5, 1998, Cruz and his wife, Anel, legally became part of the family - last name and all. 
   
   "This was such a joy because we had four girls so there was not going to be a boy that would carry our name," Hooper said. "When he asked us it was such a joy to us. Gale was so thrilled. Because see, now we have a son, and he will carry our name, and our grandchildren's names are Hooper. It was such a blessing to me even to be asked." 
   
   But Hooper didn't need legal papers to prove what she had known in her heart for so long. 
   
   "He was my son from the day I kept him," she said. "In December of that year ... he was such a brat, I had already started loving him." 
   
   Cruz does well in his job for payroll company Corporate Solutions in San Antonio, and the Hoopers joke he could buy and sell them any day. He generally keeps quiet about his past - Hooper recalled a time recently when someone told him, "You wouldn't understand. You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth," and Cruz said nothing - choosing rather to focus on the present. 
   
   Gale, a man of few words, didn't say much as he listened to his wife and son tell their story, but did interject one time to add, "He's made me very proud." 
   
   Cruz changed their lives, Hooper said, and in doing so, he changed the way she taught for 18 years after he left her classroom. She looked at students differently, thinking of them all as her Cruzes. 
   
   As the interview neared the end, Hooper wanted to make sure she said one more thing about her son, the boy who once caused her so much grief - the man who's now her pride and joy. 
   
   With tears filling her eyes, Hooper paused. 
   
   "I think he's really the one thing in my life I've done right." 
   
   natalie.gross@lubbockonline.com 
   
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   @AJ_NatalieGross ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| moms Classroom ‘terror’ adopted by loving teacher: ‘She just wouldn’t give up’ July 15, 2014 at 2:54 PM ET 
   
   Teacher Linda Hooper had been warned about a “holy terror” of a student rising up through Brown Elementary School in Lubbock, Texas. So by the time Cruz Riojas was set to enter the sixth grade, she issued a warning to the school’s principal: “I will quit if I have him in my class.” 
   
   
   
   Courtesy of Linda Hooper 
   
   But then the story, as first reported in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, began to change. Sure enough, it was Hooper's classroom that the 12-year-old walked into in August 1980. He was far behind in academics — two years behind in reading and classified as special ed — and she quickly experienced his troubling behavior. 
   
   “He had outbursts, threw chairs," Linda, now 68, told TODAY. "If a child touched him, they’d be down on the floor in two seconds.” 
   
   
   
   Cruz, who is only now opening up about his story, lived with his mother, stepfather and five half-siblings, and suffered years of physical abuse at the hands of his stepfather. He was bused to Linda’s school wearing the same clothes every day, and he brought his troubling homelife with him. 
   
   “I made a joke about everything,” Cruz, now 45, told TODAY. “I wouldn’t let my stepfather see me cry, and I carried that with me to school.” 
   
   Cruz’s sixth-grade year included frequent clashes with his physical-education teacher, who sent him to Linda. “Every day (that teacher would) send him in and say, 'I’m not dealing with this kid, he’s yours,'" she recalls. "I didn’t know what to do, but he was in there, so I started letting him help me. I had him reshelving books, grading papers, to make that period go by. And he began to like to do stuff.” 
   
   And the student recognized that his teacher cared about him. “I saw that she just wouldn’t give up," Cruz said. "She said, 'This persona that you project isn’t who you really are.' ” 
   
   Linda started having Cruz come to the home she shared with her husband Gale, a firefighter, and their four daughters. She’d give him money for small household chores, and arranged for his first job, a paper route. 
   
   Courtesy of Linda Hooper 
   
   Cruz developed a particularly remarkable relationship with his teacher's husband. “He never had a man in his life that was worth anything and he respected Gale," Linda said. 
   
   He began spending more and more time at the Hooper home, and would frequently run the 7.5 miles between his home and theirs when he had a fight with his stepfather. But one day in February 1982, Linda received a call from Cruz’s mother that would change all of their lives. 
   
   “His stepfather had beaten him, so she called me and asked, can I keep him until things blew over?” Linda recalls. “She put everything he owned in a cardboard box, and they huddled behind an 18-wheeler until I came to meet them.” 
   
   Cruz thought he'd only be staying with his teacher's family for an hour, but that hour turned into days, months, and then years. 
   
   Linda recalls the first time Cruz stopped calling her "Mrs. Hooper." “We were in a grocery store, and he wanted everyone to know I was his mother, because people would look at us funny. He said, 'MOTHER can I have this?' He was getting everyone’s attention, to say, 'Everybody look, this is my mom.'" 
   
   Courtesy Linda Hooper 
   
   Thanks to the Hoopers and another dedicated teacher, Cruz moved out of the special-education program and graduated with his peers. He went on to study at Texas Tech University and later met Anel Montemayor, his future wife. And just before his 30th birthday, Cruz called Linda to ask if she and Gale would officially adopt him. The answer was obvious. 
   
   “He said he wanted to honor us, and it was a big honor," Linda said. "I’ve always known he loved me, but this really showed he loved us.” 
   
   Cruz and Anel Riojas became Cruz Riojas Hooper and Anel Montemayor-Hooper. They now live in San Antonio with their two children, Hannah, 13, and Greyson, 9. 
   
   Cruz is careful to teach his children about their Mexican roots while also honoring the traditions and cultures from the Hooper side. He hasn’t yet shared with them the full story of his journey, but he’s getting there. 
   
   “My parents taught me to never give up. Just persevere," he said. "My father would always say, 'The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t always a train. It’s a light, and move toward it.'" 
   
   
   
  
target: – Cruz Riojas came from a troubled home: He was reportedly beaten by his stepfather, lived in a decrepit one-room lean-to with six other family members, and wore the same clothes to school every day, according to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. He also caused trouble in school and was known as a “holy terror,” says Linda Hooper, a teacher who first encountered Cruz in the early ‘80s, when he was 12 years old. But then an amazing thing happened: He started spending more time with Hooper, who would give him tasks to do around the classroom. He eventually began coming for visits at her home, where she lived with her husband and four daughters, often running the nearly eight miles between their two houses to get away from his stepfather. After an incident with his stepfather in 1983, Cruz’s mother asked if he could stay with the Hoopers for a few days till everything blew over. "He never left" after that, Hooper says. "I had him from then on." He became a part of the Hooper family, taking on a paper route to make money and doing better in school, placing out of special education classes by the time he graduated. More than a decade later, he was still part of the Hooper family—but he wanted to make it official by asking the Hoopers to adopt him right before his 30th birthday. “He said he wanted to honor us, and it was a big honor," Hooper tells Today. "I’ve always known he loved me, but this really showed he loved us.” The adoption went through in 1998, but Cruz "was my son from the day I kept him,” Hooper says. The family is just now telling their story for the first time. (Click for the full article, or read the story of a police officer who found a baby alive at a murder scene—and adopted her 30 years later.)