The Little Kid Who Became A Monster
I first heard of the incident the other day when my grandson took me to the market and a woman was talking about what kind of a monster he must be. I ease-dropped in on the details and had to admit that it certainly described someone who had stepped beyond the pale. The woman said the name of the nineteen year old and I did not realize that I knew him from the park years before.
He was never what you would call a sweet kid. His tool set for gaining attention seemed to be limited to the act of lashing out. I remember him wanting to show me something while I was talking to his mother, who was a young woman, who always tried to wear a smile and want you to believe that life was a fine thing, a notion that I am a sucker for. One day I was talking to the mother and did not immediately respond to the kid, so he took the toy he wanted to show me and busted it, and then presented it to me as though the busted item was every bit as fine as the item that had moments before been whole. His happiness was not at all derived from the item but from my attention. I remember his mother trying to explain to him that breaking his toy had not been necessary, but his eyes and attention were glued on me and he hadn't heard a word. It was this sort of thing that would happen frequently enough to leave you no doubts about the limits of his ability to interact with either his fellow kids or adults.
Then several times the mother and the kid came to the park and they both had bruises on them, bullseye black and blue marks. I did not ask. But let her know that there were places that would listen to what she might want to say about it. The mother was stuck in her life is fine world and saw no good purpose served in reminding her that maybe it wasn't so. Then from time to time the father would come. He might be drunk or he might be sober, but the results didn't change. The mother was quiet and to her self, if she was there, and the kid was hiding in a shell of his own making. The father would try to play with the boy in a rough and awkward fashion and get all upset that he had put all this effort into what these days they call quality time I suppose, and he would holler at the kid for not wanting to come out of his shell to spend it with the old man. Later I saw them at the Vincent DePaul's food kitchen where I washed dishes for something to do. She was trying to leave the old man, but she didn't come for long and I never did get the rest of the story.
The kid got older, and like each four or five year generation that came before and after, they stopped coming to the park. I had completely forgotten about him until I saw the picture of the kid at his arraignment, with the worried mother caught at the very edge of the photo. He is nineteen now. He was standing by his lawyer because he had taken the six month old son of his girl friend and stuck him in the trunk of his car and rode around town maybe just trying to figure out what he was supposed to do next. The infant came to no harm beyond the experience of being driven around in the trunk of a car, which who is to know what harm might come of.
I believe the kid knew that what he was doing was wrong. What I doubt is that he knew it was as wrong as it was. I doubt that in the mind of this "monster" he believed he was treating the child in a monstrous fashion at all, if his life experience was taken into account as part of the judgment. I called the lawyer and told him what I knew about the kid. I doubt it will make a difference. The tears we readily shed for children are rarely extended to what they become.
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