Paul Hernandez sits in a dimly lighted two-room apartment on the west side of Phoenix and prepares for battle. Hernandez has no accomplices. He brandishes no firearms, no blunt instruments. His only weapons are a wooden crucifix, a bottle of holy water on a corner bookshelf, and a hardbound prayer...
By Gilbert Garcia
February 8, 2001
Paul Hernandez sits in a dimly lighted two-room apartment on the west side of Phoenix and prepares for battle.
Hernandez has no accomplices. He brandishes no firearms, no blunt instruments. His only weapons are a wooden crucifix, a bottle of holy water on a corner bookshelf, and a hardbound prayer book spread out on a small Formica dining table.
The 49-year-old Hernandez isn't primed for gang warfare or a confrontation with cops. He's a self-styled exorcist, a spiritual vigilante who's spent the past 19 years trying to smack Satan into submission.
This work can get dicey, Hernandez is quick to advise you. He says he was once rushed to Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center after evil apparitions pounded his kidneys. He says that on another occasion, four cherubic-looking little demons restrained his arms and legs while he was reclining in a La-Z-Boy chair. He also recounts being plagued by a series of mysterious eye infections and foot ailments over the years.
If all this is true -- it's difficult to confirm most of his stories and those who have asked him to perform exorcisms describe much more mundane sessions than Hernandez -- why does he put himself through the aggravation? After all, he's not a priest or an appointed church official. He's a plumber by trade, better equipped to expel clogs from a drain than demons from a human body.
"It's because I hate evil that much," explains Hernandez, in a serene but dead-serious monotone voice that can get a bit spooky in big doses.
Dressed in his uniform of choice -- black tee shirt, faded blue jeans and tennis shoes -- Hernandez looks like any number of his compatriots in the local pipefitters union, a group that he himself describes as "a bunch of brawlers and bar fighters."
He has bronze skin, a bushy, black mustache and coarse, dark hair, sprinkled with gray around the temples. He's soft and pudgy in the middle, but his biceps have the ripples that come from nearly three decades of sweat-inducing manual labor.
Hernandez brings some of that brawling, pipefitter mentality to his exorcism work. Confronted with a person he believes to be demonically possessed, his first response is to disregard church piety and simply shout at the devil -- as he would at a lazy co-worker: "Hey, knock off the bullshit!"
For the past three weeks, Hernandez has been minding the home of an illegal immigrant and her young daughter. He says the woman was sɛҳuąƖly assaulted in her sleep by some unseen force, and left with bruises all over her body.
To Hernandez, her story sounded like a classic case of demonic attack. So he offered to look after her apartment while she visited relatives in Mexico, and promised to punish those evil forces when they decided they were ready to rumble.
So on a Saturday night in mid-December, while many Phoenicians are getting sloshed at Christmas parties, Hernandez sits by himself in this sparsely furnished room, with nothing but a cheap boom box and a pack of Marlboro Lights to keep him company, endlessly waiting for heaven (make that Hell) knows what. But to hear him tell it, waiting is far more pleasant than the alternative...
(The article is much longer)