Memories of a Lost Son

In the dark, hazy moments before sleep, at a time when memories emerge like headlights in the distance, Gail Helms thinks about her son.

She sees him at 4 running home from a birthday party, a cup of ice cream in his hand, hurrying to share it with his sisters before it melts.

She sees the sweetness in him, the willingness to help and the eagerness to share. She hears the excitement in his voice at play and sees the gifts he made for her on Mother’s Day. And then she cries.

Helms grieves for the David she knew as much as she grieves for the little boy, his own son, whom he murdered. Both losses weigh heavily on her mind.

Lance was 2 when David beat him to death in what was probably a drug-induced rage. Davis was convicted of the crime and awaits sentencing.

Helms knew in her heart from the beginning that her son had killed the boy. She pursued the case for three years even after the woman David was living with was convicted of the crime and sent to prison.

New evidence reopened the case. The woman was released and David was charged with the murder. A jury found him guilty last Friday.

Gail Helms, by her persistence, had at last achieved the justice she had sought for the hideous death of her grandson. But the victory wasn’t sweet.

“There’s nothing to celebrate,” she said as David was convicted. “He’s my son.”

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The kind of son he had been is what she thinks about now.

“He was a good little boy,” she said to me a few days after the verdict. We sat in a 12th-story conference room of the insurance company where she works, overlooking Century City.

“He did well in school and made friends easily. Family vacations to the beach were fun times. He’d save his allowance to buy me presents at Christmas. Then in junior high he began to change. . . .”

Helms suspected something was wrong but didn’t know what. It wasn’t until later that she realized David had been on drugs since the eighth grade.

In hindsight, the signs were obvious. He became troublesome in school and was expelled. At home, he was constantly hitting his two sisters, Ayn and Michelle, in violent rages. They became terrified of him. Only a younger brother, Eric, was spared his volcanic temper.

“I remember David punching Michelle in the face because he wanted to sit where she was sitting,” Helms said, uneasy with the memory. “During an argument, he knocked me to the floor and had his hands around my throat before he was finally pulled off.”

She thinks about that for a moment, trying to deal with the drug-fired metamorphosis from sweet little boy to violent son and then shakes her head. The connection isn’t made. It may never be.

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Helms indicates that a key to David’s dissolution may have been her divorce from his father when he was 5. Her husband beat her, Helms says, and David witnessed those beatings. What impact that may have had on his subsequent violent behavior is the stuff of psychiatric studies.

“He wanted a dad more than anything,” she said. “I tried to tell him he couldn’t have lived with that father, but he didn’t believe me.”

Photographs she brought to our meeting illustrate the transition of David from a handsome, relaxed young man to a dark, scowling thug with tattoos over most of his upper body.

Other pictures are of the son he murdered: Lance at 23 months, a smiling, beautiful toddler, and Lance shortly before he died, covered with bruises.

The little boy was taken from David and raised for a brief period by his sister Ayn, but David regained custody on the basis of parental rights, despite those photographs and testimony of abuse. The law has since been changed to place the rights of children first.

Helms is glad it’s over. The ordeal has been emotionally draining. It still is. She can’t put the good memories of David out of her mind. She sees him at 7 bursting in the door on the day his new baby brother was brought home from the hospital, shouting with happiness, “I’m home, baby, I’m home!”

And she sees him looking around the courtroom on the day of his conviction, wondering if there was anyone there for him and seeing no one.

“He was all alone,” Helms said. Then she added very, very softly, “but so was Lance when he was murdered. There was no one there who loved him.”

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com