Attack on Baby May Be a Call to Heal Society

After the initial shock and fleeting stare, the world has moved on from Richmond. All we’re left with is what we’ve been told by the police and prosecutor and learned from enterprising newspaper reporters:

A 6-year old “little tiny Munchkin”--as the public defender called him--broke into a neighbor’s apartment with two playmates. There, the ringleader yanked a 4-week old baby from a bassinet and punched, kicked and beat the infant with a stick before stealing a $19.99 tricycle. The baby went on life support. The kindergartner was held in juvenile hall and charged with attempted murder.

The suspect’s father is dead; beyond that, little is known of him. The 27-year-old mother often works at child care centers and her son then stays with his maternal grandmother, who is on probation for dealing cocaine.

The prosecutor said the boy had complained that the infant’s family was “harassing him--looked at him the wrong way--and he had to kill the baby.”

Also, the 6-year-old recently began wearing a hearing aid because of an impairment.

That’s basically what we know.

It’s a troubled family struggling in an economically depressed city on the east shore of San Francisco Bay, where you can get on the bridge to San Quentin. There’s a metaphor here somewhere.

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This seems like another example of both the Republicans and the Democrats being right. They often are, but are so polarized politically--so bent on exaggerating their differences in a public appeal for power--that they’re indifferent and blinded to potential solutions to societal problems.

U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich was ridiculed when he suggested placing children from dysfunctional welfare families in orphanages modeled after Father Flanagan’s Boys Town. But who’s to say this 6-year-old menace would not have fared better in an “orphanage” than with his drug-dealing granny?

On the other hand, the mother was doing what Republicans demand. She was out of the house working, trying to become self-sufficient, not producing more children and turning to her mother for help. Perhaps her child would have been better off if she’d been home caring for him while drawing welfare.

This is what Democrats have in mind when they say we should be investing in our future, not our failures; more money for schools and social programs and less for prisons. And it’s the kind of thing Republicans point to when they assert that the so-called Great Society policies have failed.

There’s truth in both views but most politicians never will admit it publicly.

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I asked two people who influence public policy what they made of this tragedy.

Republican Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren called it “a wake up call.”

“There’s greater violence and more gratuitous violence by younger and younger children,” he said. “Children do not emerge from their mother’s womb hating and killing. There’s something in our culture. We’re making it a badge of courage, a status sign to be involved in violence. It’s rampant in our movies and in our television.”

And in our everyday speech, he added. “We’re probably more uncivil in the language we use than at any time in our history. Listen to the disparaging, insulting messages . . . the shock jocks, the rap, the Saturday morning cartoons and even the Internet. We’ve debased our culture.”

Lungren also blamed sports. While college athletics has become cleaner, he said, professional basketball “is in a sorry state. They tell us these people are role models for our kids. A Lakers’ player forearms a referee who isn’t even looking and gets a few days [suspension]. They make sure he’s back for the playoffs. Give me a break.”

His reference was to Nick Van Exel. A few weeks earlier, Dennis Rodman of the Chicago Bulls headed-butted a referee. Later, the Lakers’ Magic Johnson bumped a ref.

Eloise Anderson, director of the State Department of Social Services, theorized that the child may have had deep-seated anger for a couple of reasons: He didn’t have a father and was jealous because the baby did; also, perhaps other children were teasing him about the hearing aid.

Whatever, Anderson said, there needs to be better training of social workers and more emphasis on foster homes. This little boy, she added, should now go into one--either that or a specialized group home--and avoid formal punishment.

“How do you punish him for this? You going to beat him up? Remove him from society? He doesn’t know about that. He’s already removed. We need to talk about healing this kid. Because someday he’s going to be back with us.”

Hopefully he’ll be off of the bridge to San Quentin.