Finding Justice in Slayings Is a Grim Task

For every crime, there is a motive. If the logic is twisted, irrational, sick , then maybe the criminal is too.

That is the only thing that can explain, to me, the slayings of Amy and Stephanie Cushing, sisters, 8 and 4 years old. Their mother, Kristine Cushing, has been charged with fatally shooting each of them in the head at the family’s home in Laguna Niguel.

When the bailiff escorted this mother into the courtroom last week, she stood, mute, behind the metal fence that separates the accused from the likes of us. Except I am a mother too.

It hurt to believe that someone like Kristine Cushing, Brownie troop leader, Sunday school teacher, classroom helper, soccer mom, stood where she did.

One wondered about the sheer horror of her crimes, about a mind that would direct anyone to such acts, about a tripwire that was somehow crossed. Would anyone hear an alarm go off?

“These are people you don’t see in jail,” Jeoffrey Robinson, the deputy district attorney, told me in an aside later on. “These are people who don’t have their children taken away from them.”

Some more of these people, Kristine’s husband, parents, sister and brothers, were looking on in court. They had come from out of town and out of state to face tragedy head on. They stuck together, grasping each other’s hands and arms.

When Robinson told the judge that the prosecution would not seek the death penalty, Kristine Cushing’s parents held on to each other tighter, squeezing their eyelids down, biting their lips. This is what passed for good news.

After the brief hearing, to be continued next month, Kristine Cushing’s people cried.

The defendant, the woman who faces the prospect of life behind bars without the possibility of parole, did not look to see who had come to see her stand accused.

Cameras bore down. She bowed her head. Most of her shoulder-length hair was held back in a ponytail; bangs fell on her face.

Kristine Cushing looked as if she hadn’t slept, as if she wanted to be anyplace else but here. She looked as if she wanted to die.

Shortly after her daughters were killed, Kristine Cushing did take a gun to her own head. The wound was superficial. The significance of this, I suppose, will be brought out at the trial.

There are only losers here; on this the defense and prosecution already agree. Finding justice in the aftermath of these slayings is a particularly grim Solomonic task.

Jeoffrey Robinson also prosecuted the case against David Brown, the Anaheim computer entrepreneur who persuaded his daughter to kill his wife and then to take full responsibility for the crime.

Robinson says that putting someone such as David Brown behind bars gave him satisfaction, that it made him feel proud. This case, he says, makes him deeply sad.

“I’m a human being. I feel that I have empathy for other people, even for criminals,” Robinson said. “But as much as I feel sorry for this mother, I think of those two children. They had the right to let God decide when they would be taken. Not her.”

Neighbors and friends say the same. They are stunned, hurt, repulsed, scared. Their feelings are torn in different ways. No explanations are good. Solace is hard to find.

At the memorial service for Amy and Stephanie Cushing, people came looking, desperate for an explanation that earthly logic could not provide.

Crowded into the multipurpose room of St. Timothy’s Catholic Church were family, friends, neighbors, people who had seen Kristine and her children at church, at school, Marines who wanted to show Lt. Col. John Cushing, who had been in the process of divorcing his wife, just how sorry they were.

Sheriff’s Deputy Jim Avant, the first officer to arrive at the death scene, was there too. He is a father of five. He cannot understand what he saw that Sunday night.

Nor can I.

I was at the memorial service, not as a journalist, but as someone seeking a salve for tragedy that has the capacity to render good people numb.

The Rev. Bruce Lavery, who recalled seeing Amy and Stephanie’s little faces at Mass, said he would try to make his remarks “up.” He smiled for the girls in Amy’s Brownie troop who were sitting in the front row, he talked about changes, about everlasting life.

The adults cried.

“Why are you here?” he asked us all.

“Because you are touched,” he said.

Father Bruce told us all to look for the good in that, to harness strength from this tragic bond.

And one of Kristine’s friends later told me that too. Amy Cushing and her daughter were friends in Brownies and at Moulton Elementary School.

The friends of the Cushing girls, she said, will be fine. They have drawn closer to each other. In a couple hours, the Brownies were heading out for “an adventure” at the pumpkin patch.

“Kristine was lonely,” said her friend. “She was depressed. She felt hopeless.”

And everybody loses when hope dies.