Just over a year ago, twins Jessica and John Gevas were born, only to die violently nine months later.
They died at the hands of their father, David Gevas, who was accused of throwing them against a wall in their Riverside home. The twins wouldn’t stop crying, Gevas reportedly explained.
Today, Gevas wants to die. He has pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and is seeking the maximum penalty for the October 1992 crime: death by lethal injection. “I just want to get this over with as fast as possible,” he told the court when entering his plea.
Similar cases of child murder are chillingly common. The number of children killed before age 1 nationwide rose from 182 in 1981 to 304 a decade later, according to FBI data. Many infants have been killed by a parent who could no longer handle their crying.
We can try to explain cases like this as being unpreventable, a sad fact of life. Perhaps the parents were poor, or uneducated or maybe they were mentally ill or on drugs. But I read these stories with horror and understanding. It was just six months ago that my husband and I became new parents and, shortly after the first blush of baby love, were thrust into that nightmarish twilight of coping with a screaming, colicky child.
Why doesn’t society, particularly the medical community, take more seriously the dramatic stress placed on new parents-which in the most extreme cases can lead to abuse or murder? It’s time to stop pretending that new parenthood is a rite of passage that requires little more than a few well-worn pieces of advice and empathetic smiles. Even experienced parents blessed with a content baby will have to cope with unexplained crying. And the fussiest will cry for hours on end with only intermittent bouts of sleep.
The makeshift network of informal support-grandmothers, sisters and neighbors-is diminishing. Most women can’t afford round-the-clock nurses or nannies or supplemental support and their husbands may be unwilling, unable or unavailable to help. The problem is compounded by short hospital stays, during which new parents might be asked to attend classes on infant care and nurses might offer advice.
But what happens when the parents go home? In my experience, I was wheeled out the hospital door with an armful of informational pamphlets and fliers-almost all published by makers of infant-care items and formula, touting their products. It’s a good effort, but unrealistic to think that a stressed parent will sit down to study such material. Some hospitals have started “warm-lines” to address parents’ questions and others offer in-house, informational TV programs. Even some corporations such as Aetna Life & Casualty and Gannett Co. offer workshops for employees who have become new parents. But stressed parents need automatic access to continuing help.
In the hospital, after indicating I planned to breast-feed I was assigned to a lactation consultant, a nurse who visited me every day and called me when I got home to see how things were going. Once when I didn’t return a call, I got a letter asking how I was doing and did I need any help? Would that kind of automatic follow-up, only to address parenting stress, have saved Jessica and John? Could in-person visits to new parents prevent murder?
Pediatricians are trained to look for signs of parental stress and there are established hotlines, but again, help needs to come to the stressed parent. If hospitals are unable to offer in-person visits, perhaps they could notify church or community groups, personal physicians or nurse practitioners who would in turn offer help.
It’s said you forget how tough those first months are. Perhaps that is part of the problem. In the case of colic, the crying frequently dissipates and eventually disappears around 3 months. Today our son is a happy, loving and content baby who seems too intrigued by life to waste time crying.
That is why, when I see the picture of Jessica and John Gevas, I am horrified by their violent deaths. Yet I can understand their father’s rage, even though no one could condone his actions.
We’ll never know what those babies wanted or needed. A fresh diaper or simply to be held? But we do know there are babies crying out right now. There is another parent at wit’s end, trying to make the child stop.
Why aren’t we listening?