Child welfare workers have questioned a 4-year-old boy in the investigation of the beating death of a 3-week-old girl, a police spokesman said Tuesday.
The welfare officials were called after the boy’s mother told police investigators that the boy, while alone with her, threw a doll against a wall to demonstrate how he had killed the infant, the spokesman told the Tribune Tuesday morning.
At a news conference later Tuesday, however, Chicago police disputed a published report in the Chicago Sun-Times that the boy confessed to their own investigators that he beat the infant girl to death.
“There have been no determinations made and most certainly no confessions, most certainly not from a 4-year-old,” Chicago Police Deputy Supt. Harvey Radney said.
The report of a young child’s supposed admission resurrected images of the Ryan Harris murder investigation, which tarnished the public image of Chicago police. In that case, two boys, ages 7 and 8, initially were charged with killing 11-year-old Ryan after allegedly confessing to police. Physical evidence later cleared them, and the case prompted controversy over how children so young are interrogated and whether they fully understand their rights and the consequences of what they tell police.
While the thought that a 4-year-old boy could kill seems abhorrent, experts say violent acts by toddlers or preschoolers have occurred.
The complicated case began Thursday, when 3-week-old Timiah Martin was rushed to Children’s Memorial Hospital from her home in a North Side public housing complex. The infant died Saturday from severe trauma to her head, liver and spleen, and the death was ruled a homicide, a spokesman for the Cook County medical examiner’s office said. The child also had bite marks that appeared to come from another child, the spokesman said.
On Saturday, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services placed the infant’s two siblings–a 2-year-old sister and a 7-year-old brother–with relatives while they investigate allegations that their 30-year-old mother abused them, DCFS spokeswoman Audrey Finkel said.
Finkel would not release details of the alleged abuse of the children, or say who made the allegations against the mother.
Timiah’s injuries were inflicted while the 4-year-old boy was with Timiah and her 2-year-old sister in the Lathrop Homes public housing complex in the 2900 block of North Clybourn Avenue, the infant’s aunt said. The aunt, Gail Thomas, told WGN-TV that she had been baby-sitting the three children when she left them alone to run an errand. When she returned, she said police were there.
“That’s when [police] told me they think the little boy did it,” Thomas told WGN.
Details of the infant’s death, however, remain sketchy, and police did not disclose who summoned them to the home last week.
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Relatives and neighbors said it is unthinkable that Timiah’s mother, a school bus attendant, hurt her own baby.
“She’s a good mother to her children,” said Lasonya Thomas, another sister of Timiah’s mother. “It’s not her fault this happened. She didn’t do it. It’s a tragic incident.”
Lasonya Thomas baby-sat for the 4-year-old boy, who is not related to Timiah, for a few months last year and started caring for him again on the Tuesday before the incident. She said her sister told her: The 4-year-old “did this to my baby. I didn’t do this.”
A neighbor and former baby-sitter of the 4-year-old boy, Judy Givens, said the child was suspended from his day-care center last year after he hit other children. Mary Beltran, the director of the Mary Crane Center, would not confirm the suspension, but said that the child attended the center from February 1999 to April 2000.
Givens also said the boy, whom she described as small for his age, had some speech problems and was hyperactive. Still, Givens, 38, who lives in the same apartment building as the boy and his mother, added, “He was hyper but never got angry. He’s a normal baby to me.”
Though this case involves a child who is among the youngest to be publicly connected to the violent death of an infant, such cases have occurred before, said Carl Bell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago who leads Chicago’s Community Mental Health Council.
A combination of factors makes these cases more prevalent than people may think: Infants are fragile and young children can be violent without understanding the risks of their behavior, Bell said.
Few draw public attention because very young children cannot be held legally liable for their actions. In most cases, the concept of the “infancy defense”–with roots in English common law–prevents children under age 7 from being found criminally responsible.
“People can’t form criminal intent before 6 or 7–everyone agrees on that,” said Laurence Steinberg, a professor at Temple University and director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice.