Children, Murder and Civilization’s Fragility

There was no good way to think about killings involving children. People couldn’t stop dwelling on them and couldn’t stop wishing them away. The candles outside the home where half the Flores family had been murdered were lit in broad daylight. They stood three and four deep, the full length of the brown house. Their perfume was like a fog in the hot sun. A child leaned over a tall votive, small hand reaching, her mother unsure why they’d even come here. “Ayyy! La nina!” A stranger yelled out her minivan window to the little girl’s mother. “The fire!”

“It’s a tragedy,” a father of three at the other end of the shrine was saying. This was late morning, Pico Rivera. The curious child’s mother snatched her little hand. People were driving by, stopping and not stopping. Looking for something about them in it. There was nothing about them in it.

“I try to explain it to my children and I don’t know what to say,” the father confided. “It’s demonic. Demonic. Because not only was the father murdered, but the children. And now they’re saying that children did it. How can that be? Children don’t know what they’re doing. Even teenaged children. Their minds just aren’t that formed.”

A small crowd had gathered. None were actually close to the Flores family, or the 16-year-old daughter who, with her disapproved-of Goth boyfriend, was accused of fatally stabbing two adoptive brothers, her popular adoptive sister and her adoptive dad. It is a physical crime, stabbing. It requires a power that is hard to come by unless some unbearable, shameful weakness must be dispelled. Unless something must be proven to the world, to oneself. Because such a mind-set is unnerving to speak of, the crowd looked for villains: the media and working mothers, drugs and rap music. Evil came up. None of these seemed to pertain to the sporty, churchgoing Flores family, but the ritual was involving. Someone had left an emotional ode to “all the things I can always count on,” this deviance notwithstanding:

I can always count on PTA moms and booster parents/Carne asada Sundays with the familia/Almost every house in Pico Rivera has a rose bush/Green lawns . . .

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The candles outside Valley View Elementary School in Glendale also were three and four deep, also legion. They spilled down the sidewalk outside the cordoned-off playground. Because kids kept trying to break into the crime scene, a security guard had been posted beside this shrine to two boys who’d been found beaten to death there. As in Pico Rivera, the suspects were young.

As in Pico Rivera, the crime was purely about the perpetrators and the victims. This, police stressed, had been personal. Still, people came and went, as seemingly agitated as if something imperiled them, too. Children had written notes to the murdered adolescents, Blaine Talmo Jr. and Chris McCulloch, and the adults scoured them, partly for information, partly, it seemed, to show themselves that they didn’t just feel estrangement. And partly, perhaps, for reassurance that human frailty isn’t the epidemic it is.

There wasn’t enough solace. One note was from a parent with a child in prison, trying to be in the drama, begging those assembled to guard the “innocence of this community.” A few people had drawn big R.I.Ps, as if in a cartoon. One kid had awkwardly written: “Remember, Blaine, when you would come over to my house lighting all the candles you could find in my room and almost burning the house down? I forgive you for blowing up my speakers.”

“I’m moving out of here,” a father muttered, hurrying away.

The people announced it was “time to move on,” and then brought up that teenager who’d confessed to killing the cat lady in Rialto. There was no comprehending it, no letting it alone. Children are supposed to be innocent, controllable. Innocence and control are supposed to be things we “can always count on.” If they go, what does that mean for our control, for the innocence within us? If civilization is this fragile, if the fire is this irresistible, if our children just refract our own dangerous extremes of stain and weakness--

But, no. Surely this was about something easier--bad media, bad parenting, bad company. Or something more romantic--”bad seeds,” “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” evil disguised. The courtroom hushed as the Flores daughter and her boyfriend were called as adults on a transgression irreconcilable with youth as we dream it. The girl, shorn of makeup, looked as plump and out-of-touch as a baby. The boy’s thin fists clenched like a furious child’s.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.