How 6-Year-Old Suspect Left Innocence Behind

It’s a plain, modest bedroom like a lot of little boys might have.

There’s a Power Rangers poster on one wall and a “Star Student” school certificate on another. A plastic Batmobile rests, poised for action, on the night stand. And by the door, a penny collection has only started to fill a giant plastic Sparkletts bottle.

Many of the trappings of childhood are here, but the 6-year-old boy who lived in this room has left innocence behind. He was charged last week with attempting to kill a tiny, helpless baby--a crime that has shocked and disgusted the nation.

It is an event that may never make sense. But you might only begin to understand when you step outside the small cocoon that a kindergartner created for himself, into a troubled family life and, beyond, into the unforgiving streets of this economically depressed city on San Francisco Bay.

In Richmond, in a neighborhood called the Iron Triangle, boys no taller than fire hydrants gaze on the world with hard, weary stares. A strung-out woman wanders the street in pink house slippers, ranting at some unseen enemy. Sirens scream.

And a 6-year-old, now charged with attempted murder, often found his way alone. According to friends, relatives and official records, his father is dead, his mother is out for long hours--working at a job where she cares for other people’s children--and his grandmother, a convicted drug dealer, often is left to mind the boy.

If a prosecutor’s allegations are true, it is a life that turned a rambunctious boy with a winning smile into a malicious menace. That turned him into a ringleader, who brought twin 8-year-old boys along to break into the infant’s home. There, he allegedly beat month-old Ignacio Bermudez Jr. nearly to death. And largely, prosecutors allege, because he wanted a plastic tricycle that retails for as little as $19.99.

But there are some in this neighborhood, also friends and relatives of the small ringleader, who say that that scenario is inconceivable. They express sorrow for the infant who lies in critical condition in an Oakland hospital. But they also recall that his alleged attacker cradled other infants in his arms, talking softly to them.

“I can’t believe it, and I don’t believe it,” said Cordelia Jones, an adult cousin of the suspect. “I have seen this boy, and I know better.”

The boy remains in Contra Costa County Juvenile Hall, where he was visited Friday evening by his mother. He could remain there for months, while the courts decide how to deal with such a young offender.

But already commentators and sociologists are weighing in.

The beating on Chanslor Avenue may be destined to take its place in the grim litany of child-on-child crimes. Most recently that list includes the murder of a 2-year-old in Liverpool, England, by two 10-year-olds who lured the boy away from his mother before stoning him to death, and the killing of a Chicago boy, 5, who was dropped to his death from a 14th-floor tenement by 10- and 11-year-old acquaintances.

The especially tender age of both victim and suspect have made the Richmond case even more troubling. Lisa Greer, a Los Angeles County deputy public defender, says such crimes are being committed by ever younger children, a trend that she attributes to “a socially toxic society.”

“It is manifesting itself in the weakest first,” Greer said. “The young are going to feel a growing nastiness in society. Shouldn’t we acknowledge the conditions out there that are causing this?”

The conditions for the Richmond youth might be traced to an upbringing in a broken, troubled family.

Neighbors remember that if they asked the little boy about his father, he answered plainly: “My daddy’s dead.” But no one seems to recall who the man was or how he died.

His mother, Lisa Toliver, 27, has worked on and off in child care, including stints at three East Bay day-care centers since 1994, according to the Department of Social Services. She also is licensed to provide foster care at her home, although relatives said she had not taken advantage of the status.

Friends described Toliver as struggling to pull herself out of a difficult childhood and adolescence. They said she was sickened by the drug use that she saw in her own family and was determined to stay clean, said a relative, who asked to remain anonymous.

She made a game, if not always winning, effort to raise her son right, a relative said.

“She was really trying,” the woman said. “She didn’t want [the boy] to be in that bad element.”

But Richmond police have at least one record of when Toliver apparently strayed. A police report describes the incident from August 1995 this way: She was partying and drinking late into the night at a friend’s house when a dispute broke out and Toliver began to brawl with three women. Her shirt was torn off and her face bloodied by the time police arrived. When they tried to intercede, Toliver allegedly lunged at them. It took three officers and a dose of pepper spray to subdue her.

Toliver’s case was referred to the Contra Costa County district attorney’s office, but charges were not filed. It is unclear what became of the case, and prosecutors could not be reached for comment.

Toliver has declined to talk to the media and, through her mother, turned down an interview with The Times.

Just three months after the brawl, Toliver was thrust back into the legal system when she nearly was evicted from her Richmond apartment for allegedly failing twice to pay her $500 monthly rent. Toliver settled the case early this year and, soon afterward, found a new apartment almost next door. That is where she lived with her son when last Monday’s beating occurred.

It is a lackluster second-floor unit on 6th Street, just around the corner from the Bermudez family’s walk-up. At the Toliver home, a stained and sagging curtain blocks the sliding glass door that is the main entry. Outside, a rusting barbecue sits on a deck, near a sack filled with empty wine bottles.

The blocks around the home show the decay of a blue-collar town that long since lost its principal industry, shipbuilding.

When Toliver’s son wasn’t with her, or across the street at Lincoln Elementary School, he often was with his grandmother, Phyllis. But Phyllis Rideau, 56, also has had her encounters with the law.

In May 1994, she pleaded no contest in Alameda County Superior Court to possession of cocaine for sale. She and a 40-year-old man, who pleaded guilty, were arrested at a home in Berkeley.

In exchange for their pleas, a judge dismissed a second charge and spared Rideau from prison. But she remains on three years’ probation and is under orders not to associate with people using or selling drugs.

Rideau declined to discuss the matter Saturday morning.

Some neighbors questioned how attentive the mother and grandmother were to the 6-year-old.

One night last winter, at least a couple of hours after dark, the youth’s grandmother was out looking for him. She knocked on neighbor Jeanette Stringer’s door, asking if she had seen the boy.

“What kind of a parent doesn’t know where her 6-year-old is at night?” Stringer asked.

Jeanette Stringer noted that many youths remain on the straight and narrow, even in the rough-and-tumble of the Iron Triangle. The 8-year-old twins--who are charged with breaking into the Bermudez house that fateful day with their younger friend--are generally described by neighbors as decent boys.

And acquaintances and family members said the twins previously had stayed out of trouble, despite the fact that their father died two years ago and their mother is ill with cancer and often too weak to watch over them.

“The house is clean. The food is cooked. Things are right in the house,” said Larry West, the twins’ uncle .

“They are just kids. They are 8 years old,” said Shireare West, 24, the boys’ cousin. “They are good boys. They didn’t plan this. They don’t even know how to do their times tables. How could they plan it?”

But several neighbors insisted that the twins’ 6-year-old running mate was different--more intense, more volatile.

“There’s no discipline there,” said Jeanette Stringer. “No father. No role model. That child is a victim of his home, not of his neighborhood.”

The boy carried his problems into Lincoln Elementary, an austere cinder-block building, a block from where the beating occurred.

He was held back this year to repeat kindergarten. And a hearing impairment was discovered recently, forcing him to wear a hearing aid. The “star student” certificate was for his mere participation in one school academic event.

“It just seemed he had a hard time learning,” said a woman who did volunteer work in his class last year. He still was trying to learn to write his name. When he finally made progress, “that made him proud,” the woman said.

But she, like others, worried about him. “They should have worked with him then,” she said, “instead of waiting until this.”

There are others in Richmond who scoff at the idea that the boy was a sociopath or extraordinary in any way.

“He is an average grandson,” said Rideau, the grandmother. “He’s just like most other 6-year-old boys.

“He has his arguments and scrapes in school. He can be hyper,” she said, sitting on the wooden stoop outside the boy’s home. “But he is a very lovable child and well-mannered.”

Rideau concluded: “We are not violent people. In fact, that boy has gotten very few whippings.”

Other things don’t make sense to the supporters of all three boys. In the world of extended families in which they lived, all had proved they could be patient, even tender, with smaller children. They also had access to bicycles and toys and would have no need to steal a Big Wheel tricycle from younger children, supporters said.

On the day of the beating, a neighbor named Patricia Rucker remembers seeing a man from the Bermudez family shoo other children off two tricycles belonging to his kids. Late in the afternoon, she saw the trio, who soon would become felony suspects, waving broken slats from a picket fence. Rucker broke up what appeared to her to be a dangerous game.

Somehow little boys playing with sticks--a game that nearly every parent has had to contend with--may have escalated within just a few hours into what authorities say was a vicious assault.

Prosecutor Harold Jewett told a judge Friday that the 6-year-old “went to the home and previously expressed the belief that the family there had been harassing him--looked at him the wrong way--and he had to kill the baby.”

But Leslie Bialik, the public defender representing the 6-year-old, urged therapy and compassion for the youngster, saying he is “just a little tiny munchkin.” On Friday, four days after the alleged attack, it still seemed hard to reconcile her client with the monster that Jewett described.

This was the little boy who left a class picture back in that small bedroom--his smile just as wide and bright as all the other children’s--and his Power Rangers backpack filled with stuffed animals, blocks and a few books--a backpack ready for a Tuesday morning in kindergarten that would never come.

Times staff writer Richard C. Paddock in San Francisco and Peter Y. Hong in Los Angeles contributed to this story.