Questions for Parents

The execution-style slaying of 15-year-old Nicholas Markowitz in the mountains outside Santa Barbara shows that there’s no ready explanation for the number of teenagers and young people who have made headlines this summer for the most irrational of acts, murder.

A drug debt owed by Markowitz’s older brother is said to be the reason for his slaying, and a high-powered gun did the job. But motive and method do not adequately get to the heart of how anyone, least of all one-time friends, could commit such a chillingly heartless crime. Neither does it answer an even harder question: Why didn’t any adult see this coming?

A Simi Valley resident and four other young men held or sought in Markowitz’s death range from 17 to 21. Some of them had played together on the same West Hills baseball league. They grew up in a neighborhood known for comfortable homes and involved parents.

Half a dozen other teenagers apparently knew Markowitz was being held hostage for two days before he died but didn’t tell anyone.

It’s all too easy for middle-class families to see juvenile crime as the problem of gang-ridden, impoverished neighborhoods, as though the kind of peer pressure that keeps kids from speaking up or gives them the nerve to do things they wouldn’t do alone is limited to gangs as we commonly define them. As though good kids can’t come out of bad neighborhoods, or bad ones out of good.

Consider the range of circumstances behind the juvenile crimes that have made headlines since May. Three teenage gang members were accused of stabbing to death a 17-year-old Glendale boy, who died a hero trying to stop a fight. Three Littlerock High School football players are being held for kicking to death an 18-year-old at a party. Most recently, a 15-year-old was arrested for the July 23 bludgeoning deaths of Blaine Talmo Jr., 14, and Christopher McCulloch, 13, under still mysterious circumstances at a La Crescenta playground.

Some of these alleged killers belonged to gangs, some did not. Some made good grades, others were school dropouts. Some came from impoverished backgrounds, others from comfortable middle-class neighborhoods. Some of the crimes appeared random, others coldly planned. Some of the violence can be blamed on easy access to guns, but knives, tire irons, rocks, even hands and feet were used.

If anything connects these cases it is the ages of the alleged killers--and the dashed hope that they were young enough to be helped. Unlike adults who kill, they were young enough to be under the care of adults who could have, at the very least, noticed signs of trouble.

Why do kids kill? Just because there is no easy answer doesn’t mean we should stop asking hard questions. Two Orange County educators who have spent the past year traveling the country doing just that came up with this answer from kids themselves: Rich or poor, teenagers need more time with their parents and more guidance from them.

It may not be the entire answer. But it’s a step that parents, teenagers and every resident of the larger village that plays a role in raising children--and teenagers--should take to heart.