When Jasmine Bolden broke the rules, she paid the price.
If she was caught playing with the detergent or splashing in the toilet, police reports show, the 21-month-old girl was beaten with a thin brown belt that left purple welts on her skin.
On Aug. 19, Jasmine’s mother, Sharon Jamison, and her boyfriend Mardell Traylor, spent hours drinking beer and cheap whiskey as Jasmine played nearby. Jamison said she also had given Traylor a $10 rock of cocaine she bought with part of her public aid check.
When Jasmine tugged on the refrigerator door, according to police reports, Traylor, a stocky man with broad shoulders and a linebacker’s neck, cocked his left arm and unleashed a vicious blow to the girl’s back.
Afterward, Jamison said, she bathed her daughter and then fell asleep watching television with Traylor. Jasmine, wearing a diaper, a red T-shirt, and yellow barrettes, stretched out atop her soiled mattress. By the next morning, she was dead.
Traylor was charged with murder. Jamison was not charged with any crime.
The route taken by police and prosecutors following Jasmine’s death illustrates the thorny issue of how blame is assigned for one of society’s most savage crimes. Though Jamison did nothing to stop Traylor that night and also admits she had long neglected her responsibilities as a parent, whether she was guilty of a crime may never be considered by a judge or jury.
“I could have been charged too,” Jamison said on a recent after-noon as she walked a beaten stretch of West Monroe Street where she grew up. A crude tattoo Traylor had burned into her arm with a sewing needle immortalized their affair-“Sharon and Mardell.”
“I didn’t protect my child like I was supposed to.”
There is some evidence that more criminal charges are being brought for fatal child abuse, and that penalties are getting harsher, in light of more sophisticated investigative techniques and growing public anger over child abuse.
But there remains one particularly vexing legal question: whether to charge the mother who may have allowed her child to be abused.
There are several possible explanations for declining to prosecute. Often, the mother is the only witness and may be the prosecution’s key to convicting the alleged abuser.
“You want to build your best case against your defendant,” said Deborah Daro, research director for the National Committee for the Prevention of Child Abuse. “All your actions are governed by how you can get a conviction.”
Moreover, many such women are themselves victims of abuse and have suffered emotional and physical trauma at the hands of the men who beat their children. Fathers are often nowhere to be found, having abandoned all responsibility as parents. Imprisoning the mother often would mean severing ties with whatever remains of the family, though most surviving children become wards of the state at least temporarily.
As deaths like Jasmine’s wind their way through the criminal justice system, an emerging body of law is redefining the point at which bad parenting becomes a crime. In some instances, mothers have been convicted of murder even though there was no conclusive evidence they were present for the fatal blow.
“The level of responsibility of the non-inflicting parent has been changing,” said Paul Derohannesian, Albany County, N.Y., assistant district attorney, and head of the special assault unit. “There are some cases where the homicide is really an isolated act, someone gets so upset with a child and kills a child, and there are no cases of prior abuse. But there are plenty of parents who are aware of a pattern.”
In 1992, the Illinois Supreme Court, reiterating a century-old law, upheld the murder convictions of Violetta Burgos and Barbara Peters, whose boyfriends fatally abused their children. The court concluded that the women, who denied they aided in a pattern of abuse, and neither of whom was alleged to have struck the fatal blow, “either knew or should have known of the serious nature of the injuries which the victims were sustaining. . . . Rather than fulfill that obligation, the defendants entirely ignored the danger. . . .”
Although lawyers say the ruling opened the door to more aggressive criminal prosecutions of certain types of fatal abuse cases, few have been pursued in the Chicago area this year.
All but one of the nine mothers this year whose children were allegedly fatally abused by their boyfriends have not been prosecuted in criminal court. Their boyfriends, on the other hand, face decades of incarceration, or possibly the death penalty, if they are convicted of murder.
In some of the cases, the women had done all they could to protect their children and in no way could be held responsible for a crime, even by the strictest legal standard. But other cases are more ambiguous: The slaying of a child occurred after a mother was alerted to previous abuse by her boyfriend, or in some instances, participated in non-fatal beatings of her child.
Forensic techniques, new laws and increased societal awareness of the perils children face in their own homes, have made the adjudication of abuse-related homicides more efficient and, some statistics suggest, more successful.
According to the Los Angeles Inter-Agency Council on Child Abuse and Neglect, 75 percent of 40 child abuse deaths in Los Angeles County last year resulted in murder charges, a 40 percent increase in four years. In addition, a greater percentage of suspects are receiving longer prison sentences upon conviction. One-third of the convicted murderers received prison terms of 10 years or more.
“We’re using more experts who can describe what injuries were inflicted and how they were inflicted,” said Scott Nelson, chief of the felony trial division for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. “It’s always hard to read (a defendant’s) mind to tell what they intended to do. But we can tell what they’ve done.”
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Forensic pathologists document old injuries as well as new ones. And they have developed a jarring but persuasive vocabulary to describe these injuries to jurors. Abuse-related wounds are compared to the severe injuries suffered in car crashes or falls from great heights, which can undercut attempts to explain injuries as results of simple household accidents.
Improved forensics also enable doctors to medically determine a case of Shaken Infant Syndrome instead of the inconclusive Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. And autopsies of children who die unexpectedly are required in a handful of states, including Illinois.
The laws themselves have made it easier to fix blame. About a dozen states have special murder laws that eliminate the need to prove that someone who fatally abused a child intended to kill the child.
All of these developments came to bear on the case of Francisco Lopez, who was killed in March by his mother’s boyfriend, Helder Vasquez.
Although Vasquez admitted he had struck the boy on two separate occasions, prosecutors produced evidence of 103 wounds. Dr. Nancy Jones, a forensic pathologist from the Cook County medical examiner’s office, testified the injuries came from “probably 30 to 40” powerful blows to Francisco on at least four occasions. When the boy died, some of the wounds were fresh, while others, like a broken rib that was healing, were older, indicating chronic abuse.
Vasquez was convicted of murder after a three-day trial. On Monday, he was sentenced to 28 years in prison.
But what of Francisco’s mother, Lorena Contreras, 19, who, according to prosecutors, was not present when the fatal blow to her son was struck, but allegedly abused him on other occasions?
“We could have charged her with murder,” said Lake County prosecutor George Strickland, who conceded that it would have been a difficult case.
Instead, prosecutors eager to win her cooperation against Vasquez, and mindful of her claims that she was abused by him, initially held off charging Contreras altogether, Strickland said. It was only after Vasquez was convicted that Contreras was charged with the lesser offense of aggravated battery. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 8 years in prison.
One of the few recent cases in Illinois in which prosecutors brought murder charges against a woman whose boyfriend had allegedly slain her son, unfolded last year Downstate.
“I had pretty good proof the boyfriend had shaken the child and threw him against the wall,” said Henry County State’s Atty. Larry Vandersnick, who prosecuted the murder of Jerry Nelson. “I had some evidence the mother was in the apartment. I had some evidence of prior abuse.”
Although Vandersnick was at first skeptical that he could win a case against the boy’s mother, Tonya Nelson, he went ahead with the prosecution after heeding public outcries that Nelson was accountable even though there was no evidence she struck the fatal blow. After a bench trial, the judge sentenced Nelson to 75 years in prison.
“What my case did was send a strong message,” Vandersnick said. “Just because you don’t pull the trigger and you allow this to happen, you’re just as guilty.”
Several cases in the Chicago area this year illuminate the complexities of assessing the mother’s role prior to the death of a child.
– Tracy King said she saw her 3-year-old son, Deon, beaten with a belt wielded by her boyfriend and was informed of a similar beating at his hands. Though “she was feeling funny,” about her boyfriend’s actions, King continued to leave the boy in his care, even while he was under house arrest for drug chages.
“There’s stuff I seen, but I didn’t pay attention,” King said.
In April, according to police, the boyfriend, Darryl Williams, beat the child to death for playing with the television set.
– This summer, Kim Billups noticed two black eyes on her 4-year-old son, Jeravious, but says she accepted his implausible explanation that he had gotten them by walking into a door. Three weeks later, Jeravious was allegedly beaten to death by Billups’ boyfriend, Lawrence Mars, after Jeravious wet his pants.
In interviews with the Tribune, Billups and Mars admitted they beat the child with a belt.
An autopsy performed on Jeravious showed that in addition to the blunt trauma that caused his death, he had previously suffered broken ribs-injuries Billups says she cannot explain.
– A month and a half before her daughter was allegedly killed by her boyfriend, Michelle Hughes said she had witnessed the pair locked in a violent embrace.
“I heard a high-pitched scream,” Hughes said. “He had both arms wrapped around her. His body was shaking. It was like a bear hug. Their chests were touching. I asked him, `What are you doing?’ He said he was trying to get her to go to the bathroom.”
“I looked at it as stupidity,” Hughes added. “After that I was watching him.”
On a Sunday morning in July, Hughes trusted her boyfriend, David Lightsey, to baby-sit her daughter while she shopped at a nearby flea market. By the time she returned home several hours later, Lightsey, according to police, had fatally beaten the girl.
– When Dewayne Mitchell allegedly killed his girlfriend’s 3-week-old daughter in January by throwing her into a wall, it wasn’t the first time he had been accused of abuse.
Two years ago, Mitchell’s girlfriend, Lavercheray Johnson, said she was told by one of her daughters that Mitchell had beaten her sibling. Still, Johnson remained with Mitchell, even when he resumed his drinking, a habit she blames for his violent behavior.
“All the signs were coming to me,” Johnson said.
But she denied she bears responsibility for the slaying of her daughter.
“I did not commit the abuse,” Johnson said. “I didn’t kill her. . . . How could you feel guilty about something you didn’t do?”
Then there is the case of Jasmine Bolden.
While her slaying was swiftly solved with Traylor’s arrest, the murder charges against him do not explain the questionable role that Jamison played in her daughter’s short, tragic life.
Interviews with Jamison, her relatives and neighbors, and case reports filed by DCFS, indicate Jamison had a history of neglect toward her children.
In 1992, Jamison was cited by the agency for having left her children unattended in an apartment on West Monroe Street until relatives kicked in a door to get them. Concluding that Jamison’s parenting skills were deficient, DCFS placed her in Family First, a remedial program. DCFS caseworkers stressed basic survival skills, imploring Jamison not to turn over any money to her boyfriend, who, at the time, appeared to be using the cash to buy drugs, according to reports.
Jamison’s past was a painful one. She said she was abused as a child, and in police and DCFS reports says she was continually involved in abusive relationships with men, including Traylor.
After showing some improvement in the Family First program, Jamison allowed Traylor to live with her on and off in her 49th Street apartment.
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Jamison told police that she and Traylor beat the children when they misbehaved, although she denied the beatings were excessive.
“I don’t whup my kids for every little thing they do,” she said. “Only when they really do something, something they got no business doing. If they curse, or if they get smart with me.”
In an interview from Cook County Jail, Traylor denied any wrongdoing, claiming Jamison had beaten the girl the night before she died.
The conflicting accounts, and the lack of a confession by Traylor, makes Jamison’s testimony especially important for any trial, police say.
Jamison’s surviving children are living with their father, Edward Felton, because of a preliminary finding that Jamison kept them in an “injurious environment.”
Jamison visits her two daughters about once every three weeks, Felton said.
“They’re glad to see her,” he said.
“The last time she was over here she said she was going to the graveyard to put some flowers on Jasmine’s grave.”