By the time Lorena Lopez ran out of her Waukegan home earlier this week and handed her son to paramedics, 2-year-old Francisco already had joined a grim category of the Chicago area’s youngest murder victims.
His death, pronounced just minutes later at St. Therese Medical Center, evoked the case of Samantha Jo Haight, the 4-year-old Aurora girl who died Feb. 10 after being beaten for wetting her bed and talking back.
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It also recalled the fate of 8-month-old Shahon Mighty, fatally beaten Dec. 13 in Matteson.
And that of Mikita Burrow, a 4-month-old from Chicago who died of massive head trauma from being shaken and struck Dec. 8.
And Quincy King-Sanders, another 4-month-old from Waukegan shaken to death Nov. 20 because he was crying.
The homes of Francisco, Samantha, Shahon, Mikita and Quincy ranged from a well-kept neighborhood in Aurora to a cramped apartment on a rundown Waukegan street. But the kids themselves all had one thing in common: They died at the hands of their mothers’ boyfriends, authorities charge.
Nationally, the boyfriend or girlfriend of a parent is responsible in about 1 out of 4 physical child abuses cases where the perpetrator is known, according to figures from the National Incidence Study by Westat, a private research firm based in Rockville, Md.
Boyfriends were charged in connection with seven of the 60 child homicides in the Chicago area last year. Francisco Lopez is the ninth child to be slain in 1993. Five of the deaths were the result of child abuse, two involving the mother’s boyfriend, authorities said.
Experts who deal with the issue point out that parents account for most cases of abuse. But the five cases in the past four months involving boyfriends suggest another troubling and often deadly pattern.
Why does it happen? The reasons are as varied as the cases of abuse. But certain ones are most common.
“They may well be jealous of the attention their girlfriend is giving to these kids,” said Anne Cohn Donnelly, executive director of the Chicago-based National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse. “Maybe the child reminds them of someone they don’t like. Maybe the child just has a way about them.”
The issue is further complicated by a trend in many states, including Illinois, to hold mothers responsible if they don’t step in to stop the abuse of their children.
Many of those difficult issues have been left in the wake of Francisco Lopez’s death. His lifeless body was brought to the hospital with 74 bruises from head to toe in what prosecutors said was one of Lake County’s worst child abuse cases.
Helder Vazquez, 20, the boyfriend of Lorena, has been charged with beating the boy repeatedly over the last several months until fatally injuring him in a violent outburst Saturday, according to authorities. Francisco Lopez was the son of Lorena and her ex-husband.
Lorena Lopez, 19, has not been charged, prosecutors say, because she also was allegedly abused by Vazquez.
In addition, she didn’t speak English and is an illegal immigrant from Mexico, so she was reluctant to seek the help of authorities, said Lake County State’s Atty. Michael Waller.
But in not being charged, Lopez may become the exception rather than the rule. The Illinois Supreme Court last November upheld the convictions of two women who were charged with murder for failing to protect their children from abuse inflicted on them by the mothers’ boyfriends.
Charles Patrick Ewing, professor of law and clinical psychology at the State University of New York-Buffalo, said the Illinois ruling reflects a national trend toward more prosecutions and convictions of women in so-called “failure to protect” cases.
“There’s an attitude that while we’ve become more sympathetic to the plight of battered women,” Ewing said, “this is one area where we’ve chosen to draw the line and say collectively, `We don’t have any sympathy for women who don’t protect their children.’ “
Ewing said women who are abused themselves should be spared such criminal prosecution, but other experts disagree.
“Along the way we got into this thing that . . . the mom is just as much a victim as the child,” said Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy. “No, she’s not. She could have picked up the phone and called the police. She could have done a lot of things.
“I don’t think we should hold someone to a lower standard just because they happen to be poor or they were battered women.”
Experts say that abuse of children by boyfriends is far more common than abuse by girlfriends, although exact figures are elusive.
“We’re sure that it occurs, that females are part of the issue, but we can’t substantiate it with statistics,” said Joy Byers, associate director of public awareness for the committee for child-abuse prevention.
Waller estimates that at least half of the child abuse cases that cross his desk are the result of a boyfriend abusing his lover’s child from a previous marriage or relationship.
“One element is that the child is the reminder of the woman’s prior relationship and he resents that,” said Waller. “And often it’s not just child abuse; it’s family abuse. The woman is also a victim, like in the Lopez case.”
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But if the mother doesn’t call police and no one else intervenes, the abuse continues and will likely escalate, Waller said.
“We have a good reporting system with hospitals and schools, but in the recent cases, the children are too young for school or preschool, and nobody objects, and we wind up with dead kids,” Waller said.
And often the toll doesn’t end with the initial tragedy. In Lopez’s case, she has been taken to a “safe house” for fear that friends of Vazquez would retaliate, said a family friend. On top of that, Lopez’s family has blamed her for allowing Vazquez to allegedly harm the baby. “She thinks everyone is against her,” the friend said.
Dale Weigand handled scores of child abuse cases during the 11 years he worked as a prosecutor in Cook County.
“I’d say it’s the boyfriend in about 95 percent of the child abuse cases,” said Weigand, who successfully prosecuted Violetta Burgos in 1987 for aiding her boyfriend in the fatal abuse of her 3-year-old daughter, Eleticia Asbury, on Chicago’s North Side. The Burgos case was one of those which resulted in the state high court’s November ruling.
“Sometimes you have resentment of the real father. Or other times what you have is the mother’s affection being divided between the boyfriend and the child, and as a result he takes away the competition (by killing the child),” said Weigand, now in private practice in the Loop.
In the Lopez case and many others, there isn’t a single incident that triggers the final and fatal abuse, prosecutors say.
Weigand said that many of the boyfriends, or “play husbands” as they are called on the street, need little excuse to knock a child into a wall.
“Maybe he’s not eating, or soiled himself, or is crying,” Weigand said. “It doesn’t make much difference. Nothing that the kid does will be right for him.”