Jack and Jill, Kids Who Kill

Whenever I think of violent kids, I think of Scott. He was 16, blond, laser-thin and had the emptiest blue eyes I’ve ever seen.

The kid was so cold that the very air around him seemed chilled by his attitude, especially when I asked why he’d killed. He said, “Because I felt like it.”

He was in custody of the California Youth Authority at the time for having murdered an elderly homeless man who’d done nothing more to him than pass by. Scott beat him to death with a shovel.

This occurred a long time ago, but I’ll never forget him. I’ve talked to a few psychopaths over the years, some of them on death row, and they’ve never affected me like the kid with the empty blue eyes.

What brings him to mind today is a conversation I had with Jim Shaw, who’s getting his Ph.D. next month from Claremont Graduate School. His doctoral thesis is called, “Jack and Jill, Why They Kill.”

Shaw, 48, is a consultant in child welfare for the L.A. County Office of Education. He’s got three kids of his own and when he gets his degree he wants to spend the rest of his life saving young people.

No one knows exactly where epiphanies are born. They emerge through one’s instincts and experiences, I suppose, nurtured in those quiet places of the soul where human decency is fashioned.

I’d guess the epiphany that’s shaping Shaw’s future was created in that kind of place, but it bubbled to the surface in a caldron of guilt.

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A master’s degree in his pocket, Shaw was on a fast track with the Bank of America for five years, training others in selling and marketing, solidly ensconced in a department with a $45-million budget.

Then one day, as he tells it, he was looking out the window from his office on the 50th floor of the South Arco Tower and felt a wave of guilt because he wasn’t doing enough for the children of L.A.

Shaw’s M.A. was in education with a specialty in counseling troubled kids, and there he was about as far from troubled kids as a man could be. He could imagine them down there on the streets of the city, and they needed him.

Not many of us would give up promising careers to teach school in the inner city, but that’s what Shaw did. He put himself where his training took him and ended up at Inglewood’s Morningside High.

It was there he began sensing a drift to violence among his students and decided he still wasn’t doing enough. He’d go for his Ph.D. and get into educational administration as a way of reaching an even greater number of young people.

We need guys like Shaw. We live in an age of pervasive violence, and it’s affecting our children. The number of adolescent murderers in the United States tripled in the past decade alone, and experts believe it’s going to get worse. As we are abused, so we abuse, and the nature of that abuse, like thunder in a storm, is a deafening reality.

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For his Ph.D., Shaw spent four years interviewing adolescents who, as victims, ultimately became victimizers. Kids like Irma.

A mother at 15, she smothered her baby while trying to keep it from crying, the way her own mother, a crack addict, had put a pillow over Irma’s face to shut her up.

“She was battered all of her life,” Shaw said, “to the extent that the sight of blood ultimately relaxed her. She knew as an infant that when she saw blood, the beatings would stop.”

Now every day of her life Irma writes an imaginary letter to the baby she smothered and begs for a forgiveness that can never come.

Shaw listened to adolescents who had killed for gratification, revenge, status and hatred, children, as he puts it, “cradled in a culture of violence who are inheriting their own past.”

The interviews left him in emotional turmoil, and as he discussed them with me his voice choked. “Must we leave this century as an Age of Violence?” he asked, fighting for control. “We can do better than we have.”

Shaw continues to seek that better way. He’s written a poem he hopes will be the basis for a children’s book. It’s called “Hands Are For . . . “

Hands are for banding and linking together

Hands are for sharing to make life better

“I want to teach kids it’s not OK to hit each other or to use our hands in violent ways. Maybe I can help them learn that we don’t have to kill to solve our problems.”

Hands are for loving and sharing

The world gets better when hands are caring.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com