Shock Haunts Children Who See Parent’s Slaying : Violence: Study finds that, without help, up to 200 minors a year in L.A. alone can suffer post-traumatic stress syndrome.
The summer began and ended with the screams of children watching their mothers die, allegedly at the hands of the fathers.
On Mother’s Day, police and paramedics found 2-year-old Michael Carasi in a Universal CityWalk parking garage, strapped into his car seat and pointing toward the crimson pools where his mother and grandmother lay with their throats slashed. “Mommy! Mommy!” he wailed.
The day before the Labor Day weekend, 6-year-old Lisa Zelig’s shrieks were equally haunting. “Dad!” she cried out, according to witnesses to the shooting of her mother, Eileen Zelig, in Downtown’s Civil Courts Building. “My dad shot my mom.” And then her words dissolved into shrieks, echoing through the corridors.
Such heart-rending sounds are heard more often than one might think.
In Los Angeles alone, as many as 200 children a year witness the slaying of a parent, according to a 1994 study by two Los Angeles psychiatrists.
The effects can be devastating, said the authors, Spencer Eth and Robert L. Pynoos, whose study of 55 children, ages 3 to 17, is considered the largest of its kind. They expressed surprise that the legacy of violence continues to be such a neglected and “relatively under-reported area of exploration in psychiatry.”
The trauma of watching a parent die violently can provoke overwhelming helplessness and prolonged memories of the most violent moments, the study found. Indelible images linger, “such as the plunge of a knife or the blast of a shotgun,” the authors said. The child’s senses are assaulted by “the sight, sound and smell of gunfire; the screams or sudden silence of the victim; the splash of blood and tissue on the child’s own clothes, the grasp of a dying parent; and the sirens of arriving police and ambulance.”
What these children experience, most researchers now agree, are classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome, a psychological state most often associated with war veterans and disaster survivors. Post-traumatic stress syndrome has been observed in children under 4, and suspected in children as young as 2.
Without assistance from therapists, Eth and Pynoos said, children who witness the murder of a parent are more likely to continue the cycle of violence, perhaps even committing or becoming victims of homicide.
Complicating the problem is the fact children seldom talk about the horrors they have witnessed. So begins what Eth calls “a conspiracy of silence not to talk about the bad event.”
Until recently, adults interpreted a child’s silence in the face of trauma as a sign that all was well--a reflection of children’s much-vaunted resiliency. In fact, it usually means the opposite.
“A child acts like nothing is wrong,” said Linda Cunningham, director of bereavement services at Kaiser-Permanente Hospital in Panorama City. But “it comes out in play. Just to be with them when they go, ‘Pow! Pow! Pow!,’ it’s very dramatic. As I’m watching, I’m thinking, ‘Good, get it out. Put it someplace appropriate.’ ”
Play and drawing have long been used by therapists to encourage children to express these feelings. On a recent Saturday in South-Central Los Angeles, Saundrea Young, one of the co-founders of Loved Ones of Homicide Victims, led half a dozen children, ages 5 to 11, through an exercise. One child had lost three relatives to the violence of the streets. Another child, a 7-year-old girl, was with her mother when a stray bullet killed the woman.
Young, whose organization is one of a handful of places that offer specialized counseling for children who have witnessed a parent’s slaying, encouraged the children to think of happy memories. She asked them to create a sort of photo album of those memories for the slain people they missed. One boy, 5, scribbled angry red lines. The 7-year-old, a bright, aggressive child, rolled her eyes and punched the boy next to her in the arm. She had been through this drill before.
She drew a house, and colored it bright yellow.
“That looks like a very happy house,” Young said encouragingly.
“It was,” the little girl said with a frown. “Until somebody came along.”
Another study of 2 1/2-year-old twins, released this summer, dispelled another myth: that very young children won’t remember or understand the violence they witness. In fact, this study concluded, the younger the child, the more profound the impact.
Three researchers in New Orleans found that the twins, who had watched their father shoot their mother, carried away vivid memories during the subsequent months, even if they could not fully articulate them. As with older children, the memories surfaced spontaneously during play; the boys grew highly aggressive with each other, scratching and frequently cursing.
Years later, after their verbal skills have developed, children can describe what they saw with gripping detail, the study said.
So it is with two other twins--now 15, living in the San Gabriel Valley--who watched a dozen years ago as their stepfather stabbed their mother to death.
While they no longer can recall their mother’s voice, her smell or her touch, the girls’ memories of her murder are vivid and clear.
“She rolled down the grass towards the car, right towards us in the car,” one twin recalled recently during an interview with The Times, speaking on the condition that neither girl be identified, “and then the guy, he ran after her. He rolled on top of her and he started stabbing her.
“And then he slit her throat.”
The twins remember crying, “Mama-bebe, mama-bebe,” one from the car seat, the other running to her mother’s side as she lay, unresponsive.
“I was standing there, right by my mom,” said one. “I just remember standing there and calling her name, and she wouldn’t answer me. And that upset me. I guess I kind of got the idea. There was blood all over.”
They remember feeling the arms of neighbors who picked them up, seeing the lights of police and rescue vehicles that swarmed on the scene, and hearing the voices of the officers who repeatedly commanded the killer, “Drop the knife.”
Psychologists call it the “flashbulb effect,” a common symptom of post-traumatic stress syndrome in children.
As 3-year-olds, the girls were unable to tell adults specifically what had happened, much less comprehend it.
“They told me they saw him hurt Mommy’s neck,” said their grandmother, who picked up the twins at the police station.
When their stepfather was sentenced a year and a half later, their grandmother told the court in a letter that even after months of therapy, “one twin still has occasional nightmares . . . and cries frequently for her mother. The other twin has become sullen and withdrawn.”
Now in high school, the twins are busy and popular. “I think we turned out pretty good,” says one.
Still, they say they want to go to their stepfather’s next parole board hearing to remind him of what he took from them.
“I still have nightmares,” one twin says. “I still think about it constantly. It will be with me until I die.”
“I feel a need for her still,” adds her sister.
Local headlines from the past summer tell the stories of half a dozen other child witnesses. Among them: The 11-year-old Van Nuys girl who cried over her mother’s death for the first time as she recounted on the witness stand how the woman was stabbed to death in a parked car; the 3-year-old Valinda boy who spontaneously blurted to an uncle that he saw a boyfriend rape and kill his mother seven months before; the 3-year-old San Bernardino boy, the only survivor of a bloodbath, who spent the night alone in his house with bodies of his mother, father, two sisters and a brother.
Those who work with traumatized children in Los Angeles long have feared that many child-witnesses who do not make the headlines have been missing out on the help they need.
That help, the research shows, is most effective if it is received quickly. Intervention can spare a child from delinquency, self-destructive behavior, and trouble with school and relationships.
Preschoolers who witness a parent’s murder are likely to become withdrawn, re-enact the violence through play, and be anxious and clingy. They may regress in toilet training and experience sleep problems. Many expect the slain parent to return.
School-age children, who have a better understanding of the permanence of death, have problems concentrating, and their schoolwork can suffer. They can become irritable and aggressive. Some have super-hero fantasies in which they imagine themselves “saving” the slain parent.
Adolescents feel rage or shame, and often engage in dangerous or self-destructive behavior such as sexual promiscuity, truancy, risk-taking and drug and alcohol abuse.
Both 2-year-old Michael Carasi and 6-year-old Lisa Zelig, who saw their parents killed in Universal City and Downtown, respectively, are now being cared for by relatives, and are receiving therapy to help them through the aftermath.
While it is not known now whether either child will be called upon to testify against the fathers in court, the criminal justice system has provided the structure through which they will receive help from professional therapists.
Yet the courts have competing interests, as can a child’s family.
“American law focuses on the taking of a human life, not on the losing of one,” Pynoos and Eth said in their study. “Thus, criminal proceedings are directed at adjudicating blame for the homicide and are generally unmindful of the grievous loss suffered by the child.”
They said the courts, social services and schools should be more alert and sensitive to the needs of traumatized children, who often are torn over whether to unburden themselves or to remain silent out of loyalty to the surviving parent.
Sometimes, therapists say, the adults at home are preoccupied with their own grief, or may compel the child to take sides in the upcoming criminal case against the other parent. Often, they do not follow up with victim assistance agencies that can help them find affordable therapy.
“I think a lot of people don’t know about the program,” said Tammy Fagan, who supervises several offices for the city attorney’s victim-witness assistance program. “We do a lot of community outreach, trying to tell the different organizations about victim assistance. . . . But even some police officers don’t know we exist. When people make a crime report they get a copy with our number on it. A lot of them don’t read it.”
“It’s very sad how little is being done,” said Bob Bennett, executive director of Loved Ones of Homicide Victims. “I think this is a normal reaction on the part of society to deny trauma until it happens to you.”
