Is This Woman a Monster Mom? : One of her children drowned. Three others are in the custody of relatives. Now the state wants to take Crystal Jones’ baby. And her neighbors are asking a judge to order her sterilization.

Crystal Jones doesn’t look like one of America’s most abusive parents.

She’s sitting in a booth at a Famous Amos restaurant on the north side of Jacksonville, eating butter beans and biscuits and sipping from a tall glass of sweetened tea. In a red print dress, a leopard-skin cloth coat and fresh makeup, she looks relaxed and happy.

Beside her in a plastic infant seat is her 7-week-old son, Stephen Shane Jones, and he looks contented, too, stirring only occasionally from a drowsy sleep to take formula from a bottle decorated with cartoon characters. During lunch the waitress coos over the child’s pale, oval face, and on the way in and out of the restaurant other diners offer up admiring smiles as Jones and her son pass by.

At one point in a long conversation Jones says: “I think I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I was not a good mother. I was neglectful, didn’t pay enough attention to my children. But that was in the past. I love my children. And I’m a good mother now.”

Two weeks ago, Crystal Jones, 36, boarded an airplane for the first time in her life so she could travel to New York, and then to Los Angeles, where she heard herself introduced on two daytime TV talk shows as a monster mom--an ogre so unfit to be a parent that she should be prevented from ever conceiving life again.

Here’s how the host of the “Faith Daniels Show” put it: “My guest today is a bad mother, so bad a mother that some people want to sterilize her. And one of those people is her husband.”

For 90 minutes, before millions of viewers and studio audiences that at times gasped in unison, Jones held Stephen Shane in her arms and listened as her husband, former neighbors and the head of a local child advocacy group recounted what one called her 14-year history of “breeding children to abuse.”

It wasn’t pretty: The drowning death of Jones’ firstborn, Bobby. The burns suffered by Thomas, now 10, when as a toddler he got stuck behind the refrigerator. The near-drowning last year of 3-year-old Crystal Gayle. Pictures of the filthy, roach-infested mobile home in Middleburg, Fla., where Jones lived with Crystal Gayle and her 2-year-old son, Shawn.

The three eldest of Jones’ four surviving children have been taken from her and put into the custody of relatives. Now Florida’s Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services wants to take the baby, too.

Some who know Crystal Jones want to go even further and have asked a Circuit Court judge to order her sterilization. Says Sondra Scitticat, a former trailer park neighbor who drew up one of two sterilization petitions and got 300 people to sign it: “I am not mad at Crystal. I could take you out in (our community) and show you worse cases. But you have to start somewhere. She has a baby who needs to be out of her care, and no one is doing anything about it.”

Terrance A. Jones, Crystal Jones’ court-appointed attorney, says the idea that his client could be sterilized against her will not only is unprecedented, it’s an outrage.

“The right to procreate is fundamental,” says the lawyer, who is no relation to Crystal Jones, “and if this were allowed, it could lead to whole races or peoples being wiped out. There is no law in Florida that allows it. It is just not going to happen.”

Nonetheless, the two petitions calling for sterilization have been added to Jones’ court file, and on Friday, Clay County Circuit Judge William A. Wilkes, hearing the state’s request to have Jones’ baby declared its ward, is to decide if the petitioners have standing. A scheduled decision on custody of Stephen has been put off until Dec. 18.

In Florida, almost 10,000 children are in foster care, and the state annually investigates thousands of complaints of cruelty and abuse involving minors. But, says Health and Rehabilitative Services spokeswoman Catherine Deans, “This is the first case where sterilization has been mentioned. We’ve never seen this happen before.”

How did it happen? Dean Tong, who heads the local chapter of VOCAL (Valuing Our Children and Laws), a child advocacy and family rights group, insists that Crystal Jones should be institutionalized for psychiatric treatment and then sterilized.

“She is turning kids out like they were on a conveyor belt, and she is nowhere near ready to care for them,” contends Tong, who was asked to get involved in the case by Jones’ estranged husband, Norman Dale Jones. “Sterilization is extreme, but what she’s done to her children is extreme. Any child in her custody is in harm’s way.”

Says Crystal Jones of sterilization: “That’s a little much. It’s my body, and I have right to do with it as I want to. If you can kill, you can certainly give life.”

The part of Clay County called Clay Hill is a rolling, rural area of tall pines, small farms and Southern ways that lies a few miles southwest of Jacksonville. It was here that Crystal was born in 1955 to a young couple who had migrated from their native Tennessee.

The youngest of three children, Crystal said she had a normal, happy childhood, marred only by one accident. At age 8, while she was playing on a U-Haul trailer, the tongue slipped off a block and smashed her left hand. She lost a little finger.

Crystal became pregnant while in the 11th grade, dropped out of high school and gave birth to Bobby in 1973. She was 18.

She later married a high school classmate, but he was abusive, she says, and they were soon divorced.

In the late 1970s she married a merchant seaman named Bill Butts, who, when not at sea, operated the Sleepy Lagoon Fish Camp, a couple of wood-frame cabins and a few boats for rent on Black Creek, a popular spot for bass and crappie. And it was here that Crystal Jones turned her back one day and 4-year-old Bobby slipped away beneath the dark waters of the creek.

The boy had been playing outside one Saturday afternoon in 1978, with cousins barely older than he was, while 10 or more adults sat inside the house talking. Jones says she remembers her niece running in to yell, “Bobby’s under the water.” It took Jones and her husband 20 minutes to find his body.

Bobby’s death, ruled an accident, affected Crystal Jones in a way she doesn’t yet understand. But months later, with her husband away, she set fire to the fish camp and burned down all the buildings. It didn’t help the way she felt. She was accused of arson, a charge later reduced to criminal mischief, and placed on probation.

Four years after Bobby’s death, when Crystal was pregnant with her second child, Bill Butts died of cancer. At that point, Jones says, she stopped caring.

“I got depressed,” she recalls. “I started drinking. My whole life was buried under a cloud, and I felt like I didn’t have anything to live for.”

Even after Butts’ son, Thomas, was born in November, 1982, Jones admits she was neglectful, of herself and the boy. Her teeth went bad. When Thomas was a toddler, he got stuck behind the refrigerator coil and was severely burned on the arm.

Health and Rehabilitative Services social workers investigated and found Crystal to be incapable of caring for her son. He was placed with her 65-year-old mother, who runs a small plumbing supply business in Jacksonville.

Over the next few years Crystal Jones sank deeper into the abyss of apathy. She was arrested numerous times, for marijuana possession, petty theft, being drunk and disorderly. She had several miscarriages. She has no formal job skills and lives primarily on the $132 monthly seaman’s pension she receives from her marriage to Butts.

Crystal met her current husband, a 36-year-old laborer, in 1985, and she and Jones were married two years later. Their daughter, Crystal Gayle, was born in April, 1989. Fifteen months later Shawn was born.

Health and Rehabilitative Services came for those two children after Crystal Gayle wandered from Jones’ mobile home in August, 1991, and almost drowned in a nearby pond. Scitticat and other neighbors say Jones was inattentive, slovenly in appearance and housekeeping and would wander up and down the road in a nightgown. They said she hung out at the Jiffy Mart, soliciting men for sex.

Jones says she sometimes went to the Jiffy Mart to sell Avon products.

After Crystal Gayle’s close call, Crystal Jones was found guilty on a charge relating to negligence and placed on a year’s probation.

Her two children were put in the custody of Dale Jones’ mother, Thelma, who lives in Baker County, well west of Jacksonville. Crystal Jones was given twice-weekly visitation, and when she lost her driver’s license after a traffic accident, she hitchhiked to keep her appointments to see the children.

As one of the conditions set by the court and Health and Rehabilitative Services under which Jones could regain custody, she was ordered to undergo drug and alcohol counseling and to attend classes in parenting and anger control. She has done that and learned, she says, “to be more alert and aware.”

Her attorney says she also has plans to earn a high school diploma, get her driver’s license back and show her Health and Rehabilitative Services caseworker that she is taking good care of Stephen in her mother’s home.

“I’m going to get them back,” vows Jones of her other three children. “I didn’t watch them close enough, is what I did wrong. I didn’t abuse them.”

Critics say that although Jones may not have struck her children, neglect is abuse.

“I’m not a nosy neighbor,” says Scitticat, 31. “I am intervening because I was an abused child. I gave birth to my stepfather’s child at age 13. People could have saved me many times but didn’t. There was no voice for me, but I’ll be damned if I’ll stand back and let Crystal’s children suffer.”

Terrance Jones, Crystal’s attorney, contends that Scitticat’s concern is misplaced and disingenuous. “They are playing God, and these are not people we want speaking on who can have children or not,” he says. “We’re going to see more of this, in part out of fear of where tax dollars are being spent. That’s what scares me.”

During her recent appearance on the “Montel Williams Show,” Crystal Jones was asked by one member of the audience: “Why don’t you take care of those babies you have rather than making new ones?”

Responded Jones: “That’s a good question, isn’t it?”

Even though they have been separated for more than a year, and though Dale has filed for divorce and custody of Stephen, he and Crystal still see each other and occasionally sleep together. They don’t practice birth control. Says Crystal: “I may have been a bad mother, but I guess I was a good lover.”

Dale Jones admits that he has been less than the perfect father. He also lived in a home that was charitably described as squalid. He has a spotty work history and a criminal record. In fact, as his wife was lunching last Saturday at the Famous Amos, he was in the Duval County Jail on bad-check charges.

Indeed, no one defends his parenting abilities either. “I don’t support her or her husband being able to take care of (Stephen Shane). My ultimate goal is to have the baby taken away from both,” Tong says.

Dale Jones says he does not love his wife, but he doesn’t hate her either. Although he has signed a petition urging that she be sterilized, he also has said that the procedure should be reversible “to give her a chance.”

Despite the humiliation of sitting beside her husband while he criticized her on national television, and despite the fact that he left her, filed for divorce and pays no child support, Crystal Jones says she still cares for Dale.

“He’s the father of my children,” she explains. “Even though he has only held this baby once, Stephen can tell that his father is not around.

“I guess I still love him. I try to hide it, but everyone can see that I do care. He gave me what I want--children. When I care for someone, it takes a lot to kill it.”

Crystal Jones admits she harbors a hope that she and Dale one day will live together as one happy family--a mother, a father and four well-cared-for children. Or maybe more.

“I’ve got one girl named Crystal Gale, and if I ever have another girl, she’ll be Loretta Lynn,” she says.

“I want to teach my little girls to be independent and not put up with a man if he don’t do right. They should have their own income.” Here Crystal Jones gives a little laugh, as if, perhaps, appreciating the odds of a poor woman from Clay Hill ever reaching such a lofty goal.

“But if she’s like me,” she adds, “she’ll probably just want to have a lot of children.”