Children Who Kill : Boy, 9, Lives With Horror of Killing Father

The boy was 8 years old when he killed his father, plunging a kitchen knife into the back of the man who had taken him fishing and taught him how to play baseball.

He is 9 years old now, and though he remembers every moment of that horrible night--how his father attacked his mother, how he went to the kitchen to get the knife, how his father cried out when he was stabbed--the child does not quite believe that his father is dead.

“He kept repeating recently he’s not coming back like he was hoping he might,” said his psychiatrist, Dr. Marianne Krouk.

“He’s not emotionally ready to come to terms with the loss. He still has fantasies about going to reunions with his dad. He’s trying to step back from that by saying he was a no-good alcoholic and should have been gone.”

At a time when he should be accumulating childhood memories of school days and favorite pets, this light-haired, slightly built boy--his name is being withheld because of his age--is saddled with memories of patricide that will scar him for life.

“I think there are great consequences for the future even if he . . . manages to . . . do well in his daily life,” Krouk said. “I think he’s at risk for suicide, just by overwhelming guilt and coming to terms that he took his father’s life and maybe he doesn’t deserve to live.”

It happened on March 31. The boy’s mother, Monica Jones, 36, testified before a coroner’s inquest that her 59-year-old husband, William, choked her in bed while accusing her of “running around.” She denied it.

“I’m going to kill you tonight,” he told her.

They drove to the home of a man who, the husband said, had told him he was being cuckolded. The man denied saying it, and before the Joneses left, Monica Jones told the man her husband was going to kill her.

“We went home,” Monica Jones said. “He threw the keys at me, wanted me to put the key in the lock and I wouldn’t. He choked me. He said: ‘You want to put the key in,’ and I shook my head yes. He let me up. I screamed hard and he grabbed me again and we were on the glider and he choked me again.”

His mother’s screams awakened the boy from a couch in the living room.

He told police he thought that “she was going to get hurt or something. I thought he was going to get the gun like he did last time,” when Jones pointed a rifle at his wife’s head last September while the boy watched.

The boy said he did not look outside to see what was happening but ran into the kitchen and got an 8 1/2-inch filet knife.

“My mom was sitting on the glider and my dad was about to choke her when I put the knife in his back.” He said he feared for his own safety as well as his mother’s: “I didn’t want him to hurt me.”

“He said: ‘Ow.’ He said: ‘Mom, he put a knife in my back,’ ” the boy told police in a taped statement.

Monica Jones recalled that she looked up and told her son to get help. She picked up a baseball bat and hit her husband across the shoulders so he couldn’t go after the boy. “He was going to get up,” she said.

The boy ran to a neighbor’s house. “I ran because I didn’t want him to come after me. I saw the light over there so I went there and said: ‘My dad was beating up my mom,’ and they let me in so I could call the police. I didn’t want to go back outside because I thought he still might be out there.”

Jones was dead at the scene.

The coroner’s jury cleared the boy in the stabbing; authorities urged a finding of justifiable homicide, and the stories told by the boy and his mother were corroborated by a pathologist’s testimony that Jones was legally intoxicated and by the fact that Monica Jones had bruises on her neck and chin.

Seeing his father in death at the funeral home, the boy said he looked as he did all the time. Krouk recalled that the boy “kept saying: ‘He just looked like he was sleeping,’ like he was wishing he would get up.”

That the boy would grieve for such a father might be surprising to some. But there is evidence that William Jones was not always a monster; Monica Jones testified that her marriage had gone downhill just in the last two years, when her husband’s drinking had increased.

Baseball tied father and son together. They had planned for the father to coach his son’s Little League team this season, and the boy still regrets that it never came to pass.

But he also remembers the time he tried to explain to his father how to play a Nintendo game. Apparently threatened by his son’s facility with the game, the father did not want to hear about it. He slapped the boy.

“He can’t understand why he would hurt him,” Krouk said.

The killing and its aftermath have been especially hard for this little boy because he wants most of all to do well. His third-grade teacher, Vada Damaska, says he is an avid reader who loves baseball and football stories, a well-liked, clean-cut boy who made all A’s and Bs.

“I used to tease him that he could take over for me,” she said. “He knew what was going on in the classroom because he always paid close attention.”

“He’s very concerned about getting A’s, doing well, and he doesn’t enjoy being perceived as a bad kid . . . “ Krouk said. “He has a well-developed conscience” and “is going to suffer, I think, with recurring depression.”

After his father’s death, the boy acted up in ways he had never done before. He screamed at his mother and was unwilling to do daily chores.

“He does have a lot of anger that borders on rage,” Krouk said.

Eventually, the doctor says, he may revile his mother because she did not shield him from a “situation where he was forced to witness abuse and violence and hear a lot of things that a kid his age shouldn’t have to deal with.”

And eventually, Krouk says, the boy will ask himself: “How could I take another life?” He is at risk for suicidal depression on the one hand, and alcoholism and antisocial behavior on the other, Krouk says.

For now, he is trying to get on with his life. He joined that Little League team that his father had intended to coach; his new coach told the other kids that he was there to play ball and that was all they were going to talk to him about. Talk of the stabbing would mean dismissal from the team.