COLUMN ONE : The Rise in Kids Who Kill : The number of arrests--up 60% in a decade--goes far beyond the problem of urban gangs. Many children are carrying on violence practiced in their homes, often on themselves.

Dwayne Wright was 17 when he spotted Saba Tekle on a highway in northern Virginia, decided he wanted to have sex with her and pumped a bullet into her back when she tried to run away. Wright, now 19, awaits execution on Virginia’s Death Row.

Five New Jersey teen-agers, two of them 14, allegedly strangled a pesky classmate with an electrical cord as he recited the prayer Hail Mary in his car. Three of the boys admitted to the murder in April and will testify against the others.

Two Pasadena juries Friday found teen-agers David Adkins and Vincent Hebrock guilty of murder in the shotgun slayings of three girls--including Adkins’ girlfriend--during a party at one of the girls’ homes. A witness says Hebrock, who was 17 at the time, boasted to Adkins, who was 16: “Yeah, dude, we smoked ‘em all.”

Children are killing more than ever. The number of juveniles arrested for homicide between 1981 and 1990 increased 60% nationwide, far outpacing the 5.2% increase among adults, according to the most recent FBI crime statistics.

Although juveniles are still far less likely to kill than adults, an unprecedented 2,003 youths were arrested for murder and non-negligent manslaughter in 1990, according to federal statistics. In 1981, one in every 10 people arrested in the United States for murder was under 18; by 1990, it was one in six.

“Ten years ago, it was a rarity to have kids in Juvenile Hall charged with murder,” said Rod Speer of the Orange County Probation Department, which has recorded a 130% rise in juvenile homicide arrests since 1982. “Now it is not so.”

In Los Angeles County, murder charges were filed against 357 juveniles in 1990, compared to 171 in 1983, when statistics included murder and attempted murder. Last year, the number of juvenile murder cases dropped to 301 countywide, but law enforcement officials attribute the downturn to a change in reporting procedures, not a lessening of the bloodshed.

Neither local nor federal statistics differentiate between gang-related and other juvenile homicides, but authorities say some of the nationwide increase can be explained by an explosion in gang- and drug-related violence in large metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles.

But the numbers go far beyond the problem of urban gang violence, many law enforcement officials and psychologists say. The escalating juvenile murder rate reflects a widespread--and perhaps more disturbing--penetration of violence into the lives of young people from all walks of life, they say.

Child abuse, television and movies, pop youth culture (the Ice-T album that features the controversial “Cop Killer” song also includes the tune “Momma’s Gotta Die Tonight”) and the prevalence of handguns have made violence and images of violence staples in the diet of many young Americans, they say.

“I have a real grim outlook on this,” said Charles Patrick Ewing, a clinical and forensic psychologist in New York who has studied the subject extensively. “I don’t see it getting any better. Kids learn to kill. They learn to be violent.” And they learn, he said, from their adult abusers.

Soaring Murder Rate

The skyrocketing juvenile murder rate is all the more alarming, some psychologists say, because it mirrors an overall increase in violent crime by adolescents. Forcible rape by juveniles rose 28% between 1981 and 1990, while aggravated assaults jumped 57%, according to the FBI statistics. Throughout the period, the number of Americans under 18 decreased.

“Homicide is not only bad in itself, it is an index for the aggressiveness of a particular group,” said Dewey Cornell, a psychologist at the University of Virginia who conducts clinical evaluations of violent youths. “For every juvenile arrested for homicide, there are about 50 arrested for other types of violent crime. After all, often the difference between a homicide and an assault is how quickly the (paramedics) arrive or how well the youth aimed the weapon.”

Mitch Robins, a homicide detective for the Devonshire Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, has been leading the investigation into the brutal stabbing death last November of 62-year-old Meta Frances Murphy. Three teen-age sisters who lived next door were charged in June with killing the Northridge librarian, allegedly stabbing her as she unloaded groceries, dragging her bloodied body upstairs and stashing it in a closet.

When he started looking into the case, Robins said he never suspected the girls next door, who had befriended the woman and sometimes drove with her to school. Robins focused on the sisters only when a teen-age informant reported that they had boasted about the murder at school, an increasingly common form of bravado among many teen-age killers, authorities say.

“The trend that we see in most juvenile suspects is a lack of respect for human life and property,” said Robins, an 18-year veteran of the department. “It is not being taught in the home. . . . Society doesn’t know how to get along. The only way they know how is to beat, stab and shoot people.”

The Murphy murder points to a subtle--and authorities say disturbing--development in juvenile homicides over the past several years: Once a peculiarly male phenomenon, murder by adolescents has begun to shed its gender bias, particularly in brutal slayings. Although boys kill far more frequently than girls, law enforcement officials are no longer apt to routinely dismiss girls as suspects.

Girl’s Torture Slaying

In Madison, Ind., four teen-age girls allegedly tortured and killed a 12-year-old girlfriend last January, luring her into a car, sodomizing her with a tire iron and slicing her legs with a knife. The girls, reportedly upset because Shanda Renee Sharer was “trying to steal” the affections of another girl, allegedly doused her with gasoline and burned her alive.

A 14-year-old Sacramento girl and her 17-year-old boyfriend allegedly shot and killed the girl’s father last summer when he arrived home from work. Robert D. Davis, a widower, had called the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department the day before his murder asking for help in controlling his daughter, who was a high-school dropout and chronic runaway.

A gang of teen-age girls killed another girl on a New York City subway last September after the 15-year-old Brooklyn youth refused to hand over her gold earrings.

“The simplistic explanation is that just as women are becoming more like men, girls are becoming more like boys--in many ways, including the bad ways,” said Ewing, a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “There is this notion that aggressiveness and violence are acceptable, or even to be encouraged.”

The most perplexing questions facing law enforcement officials, psychologists and relatives of adolescent murderers of both sexes deal with motive. Why do kids kill? Where do they learn to kill? Why do they see no other alternatives?

Stephen Williams, whose 14-year-old niece has been charged in the June slaying of the girl’s Highland Park father, said the girl had been known to fight with her father, but no one suspected she would resort to murder.

The niece and two teen-age friends--including her 17-year-old boyfriend--allegedly poisoned, shot and burned the girl’s well-meaning but strict father. The girl recorded the murder plan in her diary days before the slaying.

“Why did they feel that there was no other option?” Williams asked after the killing. “Why did they feel there was no other way out?”

In suburban New York City, police have been unable to come up with a clear motive for the ritualistic strangulation of Robert A. Solimine, 17, except to say that Robert’s teen-age friends grew tired of his pestering.

Margaret Yakal Chircop, Robert’s mother, blames the boys’ parents as much as the teen-agers.

“What are 14-year-olds doing out with 18- and 17-year-olds? What are they doing out at 11 o’clock?” asked Chircop, of Clifton, N.J. “This is a lot about parents not giving a hoot about their kids, just wanting to get rid of them.”

Home Influences Cited

Several recent studies of adolescent killers point to family influences among the possible causes of the violence. By and large, the studies dismiss the widespread popular belief that juvenile murderers are usually psychotic or kill because of bizarre mental health problems, concluding instead that many young murderers have been victims themselves.

A psychiatric study published in 1988 of 14 juveniles condemned to death found that 12 had been “brutally, physically abused” in their homes and five had been sodomized by older male relatives. The physical abuse ranged from being hit on the head with a hammer to being placed on a hot stove top.

The study, based on psychiatric tests and interviews with the youths, also showed that all but one of the condemned killers had grown up in households rife with violence. One father beat his pregnant wife, and a stepfather “preferred hunting men to animals.” The parents also had histories of alcoholism, drug abuse and psychiatric treatment.

“Not only did older family members fail to protect these adolescents, but they also often used the subjects to vent their rages and to satisfy their sexual appetites,” concluded the study, which was prepared for the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

A separate study of 72 youths charged with murder in Michigan found that only five were psychotic when they committed the crime, but more than one-third had alcohol and drug abuse problems, and most of them had parents who were divorced.

Elissa P. Benedek, the center’s director of research, said the 1987 study revealed that youngsters who kill are not all alike. For some, murder was the culmination of years of criminal acts, while for others, killing came as an uncontrolled impulse during a heated family argument.

More and more kids are solving problems through violence, Benedek said. “There are more guns, more violence in our society in general, more child abuse, more violence on TV and in movies, more drugs and more people inured to violence.”

Paul Mones, a Santa Monica attorney who specializes in parricide cases, said his experience has shown that most adolescent murderers learn about--and become desensitized--to violence in the home. Mones, who recently wrote a book on parricide, “When a Child Kills,” has been involved in about 200 parricide trials.

The violence does not necessarily have to be directed against the child, Mones said. Many children who kill have learned about violence by watching their parents, aunts, uncles and siblings. In the case of Dwayne Wright, the teen-ager on Virginia’s Death Row, the boy’s mother testified that her son began having behavior problems shortly after his older brother was fatally shot.

Wright, who also has been convicted of murder and attempted murder in Maryland, showed little emotion during the Tekle trial but reportedly broke into tears when his mother discussed his despair over his brother’s death.

“When kids are born there is this giant jar of morality and respect for fellow human beings,” Mones said. “In a good family, that giant jar is filled to the top and a lot of good things are done to kids to keep the level up there. The single greatest factor that puts fissures in that giant jar, and makes it leak out, is violence in the home.”

Look at TV Violence

Robert F. Horan Jr., who prosecuted Wright in the Tekle murder, was less inclined to search for answers in Wright’s troubled family than in the availability of handguns and the prevalence of violence on TV and in movies.

Wright killed Tekle during a two-day rampage that left two people shot to death and one seriously injured. Wright has admitted to occasional drug dealing--he claims one of the shootings was related to a deal gone sour--but prosecutors believe that his outburst of violence was random--and made possible primarily by his ability to possess (albeit illegally) a handgun.

“Fifteen or 20 years ago, juveniles fought with their fists, or sometimes with a stick,” said Horan. “But the notion of tracking someone down and going after them with a gun, that was a very seldom thing. Nowadays, it is perceived as macho in a lot of circles to be armed.”

A recent study of homicides in Washington, D.C., by the federal Office of Criminal Justice Plans and Analysis found that 18 of 19 youths serving time for murder in the city had carried guns before their arrest.

While the study may be skewed by the realities of life on the city’s toughest streets, other research supports the contention that guns are widely available to youths everywhere.

A survey of high school students nationwide by the Centers for Disease Control found that one in 25 students had carried a gun in 1990, while a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. in June found that 34% of urban high school students perceived handguns to be easily accessible.

In an editorial accompanying the study, and several others on violence in America, the medical journal said the studies “paint a grotesque picture of society steeped in violence, especially by firearms, and so numbed by the ubiquity and prevalence of violence as to seemingly accept it as inevitable.”

Many law enforcement officials and academicians who have taken an interest in juvenile killers see a strong--if unproven--relationship between the influences of handguns and television and movie violence.

Horan, the Virginia prosecutor, and others blame television for blurring the distinction between justifiable violence and violence for violence’s sake. Cornell, the University of Virginia psychologist, said Hollywood no longer “sanitizes” violence or tries to balance it with other messages. “Just compare Rambo to any of the John Wayne characters,” Cornell said.

“Violence used to be for a just cause,” he said. “To defeat the Nazis, or protect the women and children from the Indians. Now the distinction between good guys and bad guys is passe.”

There is a broad consensus in the scientific community that exposure to television and movie violence increases the physical aggressiveness of children, but there has been less agreement about whether that aggressiveness translates into increased violence, let alone a greater likelihood to commit murder.

Ewing, who has written two books on adolescent killers, said television violence alone will not turn a child into a murderer. While the vast majority of children watch television regularly, he said, only a fraction commit homicide. Family influences--perhaps reinforced by a steady dose of violence on television--are the real culprit, he said.

“Violence on TV or in movies doesn’t make kids violent, but it makes them more willing to accept violence from other people, and that is more frightening in a way,” Ewing said. “We have kids growing up who treat violence as if it is an ordinary fact of life, from Ninja Turtles to Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.”

What to do with adolescent criminals has always been a difficult issue for the criminal justice system, but even more so with the growing number of juvenile murderers. Many states, including California, allow--some even encourage--prosecutors to treat violent youths as adults. Under California law, children over 15 can be transferred to Superior Court and be tried and sentenced as adults, meaning they are eligible for much harsher punishment.

Last year in Los Angeles County, prosecutors asked the court to transfer 575 youths from juvenile to adult court. The court agreed in 486 cases, nearly double the number of five years earlier.

Punishment at Issue

The trend, mirrored in counties nationwide, has come under criticism by some groups that believe juvenile offenders should be rehabilitated, not punished. The 1988 study of 14 youths condemned to death pointed to a “paradoxical set of traditions” in American criminal justice.

On one hand, the authors note, the juvenile justice system recognizes the immaturity of youngsters and holds them less culpable than adults, but on the other hand, it metes out punishments in cases of serious offenses “as though juveniles were as responsible as adults.”

Mones, the parricide attorney, said some juvenile killers belong in the adult penal system, but argues that children who kill relatives or friends after years of abuse or in an act of passion should not be treated the same as other young killers. In large part, however, society has not been willing to make exceptions for these murderers, he said.

“There is a lot more compassion in society for battered women than for battered children,” Mones said. “Unless you believe in the notion of original sin, you have to believe that society is creating some of these people who are killing.”

Mones recently received a letter from a teen-age boy in Florida who, at age 15, shot his father in the head with a shotgun while the man was cooking dinner. The boy was tried as an adult and is serving a life sentence. Mones said the teen-ager had been physically abused by his father, had run away several times, but had been returned home by police.

“It’s still a hard question of why I did it,” the teen-ager wrote. “I sincerely hope that other kids out there will have someone to talk to like I have. If it’s possible, maybe we can set up a correspondence net throughout the United States for kids like us. Who knows, it just might help in getting over the guilt I know we all feel.”

Accused Adolescent Killers

Children in the United States are killing more than ever, with arrests for murder and non-negligent manslaughter reaching a record level in 1990. The growth in these juvenile arrests nationwide far outpaced that of adults. In the Southland, where more recent statistics are available, all counties recorded a major increase in juvenile arrests for the same offenses. NATIONWIDE ARRESTS

1981 1990 % CHANGE Under 18 years of age 1,251 2,003 +60.1 18 years of age and over 12,064 12,686 +5.2

JUVENILE SOUTHLAND ARRESTS

COUNTY 1982 1991 % CHANGE Los Angeles 286 387 35 Orange 10 23 130 San Bernardino 9 17 89 San Diego 10 80 700 Ventura 2* 8 300

* Represents arrests in 1981. Statistics for 1982 not available.

SOURCES: Federal Bureau of Investigation, California Department of Justice