TV REVIEW : Chronicles of Random Violence

In April, 1989, 74-year-old Emily Stuart was fatally knifed in the basement of her Princeton, N.J., home. In April, 1991, 15-year-old Korey Grant and 11-year-old Charles Copney Jr. were gunned down on a rough inner-city Boston street. The slayings are the subject of separate TV documentaries tonight that share some discomforting conclusions.

While the two reports--”My Mother’s Murder” (at 10 on HBO) on the Stuart tragedy and “A Kid Kills” from “Frontline” (at 9 on KCET-TV Channel 28 and KPBS-TV Channel 15; at 8 on KVCR-TV Channel 24)--attempt to make sense of the slayings, they become unified by a slowly dawning realization that the acts were disturbingly, profoundly senseless.

These are filmed exhumations of the last thing of which television wants to remind us: life’s randomness, and proof for some of a godless universe.

Emily’s son, Charles, narrates and directs “My Mother’s Murder,” and reporter June Cross tells the story of “A Kid Kills” from a first-person point of view. Both of them, veteran reporters, venture over the line separating distanced journalist from involved participant. It’s a violation that makes the films special: Call them report-diaries, auto-portraits in the face of a violent world.

Cross has a more difficult time justifying her case for going over the line than Stuart; after all, Stuart was directly involved as a grieving family member. Cross, on the other hand, is investigating why 15-year-old Damien Bynoe killed one bystander (Copney) and a rival gang member (Grant), seemingly out of nowhere. This would seem to be the story of the Bynoe family and what went wrong.

It is that--but it’s also more. Cross finds that the Bynoes boast many successful people--one co-owns the Denver Nuggets--but that the family has fragmented, with some left behind in Boston’s forlorn Orchard Park neighborhood. Cross also reflects on the painful fact that African-Americans professionals like herself, having left the inner city, tend not to give back to the place they came from. “A Kid Kills” could be one of the first films that document middle-class black guilt.

This is underneath the surface, but it’s why Cross keeps inserting herself into the story, and why the film sometimes feels as if it’s unraveling before our eyes. It wanders from a group of “good kids”--school peer counselors urging teens to stay in class--to the local Trail Blazers gang that Damien had joined, to the Bynoes, to a group of Massachusetts mothers of victims of juvenile murders who have successfully campaigned for stiffer sentences for such crimes.

“A Kid Kills” wants to be many reports at once, but never gets to the bottom of its many disparate stories. Why, for instance, Damien, the gunman, receives a far lighter sentence than his two buddies could have been the basis of a full study of the flawed juvenile justice system. Cross’ ambition to be a video Zola provides a huge panorama of the internal and social forces driving young men to kill, but Damien’s act remains pointless.

Cross’ solution is simply to spend more time in Orchard Park (“my way of chipping in”), but Stuart has no such out. Raised in a loving but stoic, stiff-upper-lip family, he uses his camera as a way of getting his feelings out about his revered mother’s horrible end. When the film is over, though, the silence of God is deafening.

Emily Stuart’s slaying was the first in Princeton in 11 years and, as a community pillar living quietly in an idyllic two-story house, she seemed to be the least likely victim. The town, even more than the family, can’t accept it: Rumors fly that Charles or his brother was the killer. No evidence emerges, and when other subsequent stabbings in town lead to an arrest, the suspect is never linked to the Stuart case.

Cheated of any satisfying conclusion, Charles pores through letters and photos, constructing an affecting memoir of a mother with a mind of her own who nevertheless couldn’t accept a painful divorce. She seemed to record her life in photos just as Charles records the family tragedy on film, although it’s a little unnerving to consider how Stuart made plans to film while enduring the sudden loss. The reporter in him never quite disappears, making “My Mother’s Murder” a remarkably cool, yet emotionally honest self-reflection of what it is to confront violence with no purpose.