Family Crimes to Make You Cringe

Every time you think you’ve encountered the most disturbing, bloodcurdling family drama that you will ever come across, along comes more horror.

There was the woman in South Carolina who pretended that her children had been kidnap victims, after she had apparently been a party to their deaths in a lake inside a car with locked doors.

There was the “dungeons and dragons” case that author Joe McGinniss wrote about in “Cruel Doubt,” about a boy found guilty of conspiring with his friends--possibly with his sister’s knowledge--to slay his parents in their sleep.

There was the woman who had to testify in a California court that her adorable little grandson had, by all available evidence, been beaten to death by her son.

Crimes to make you cringe.

A particularly notorious case was the cold-blooded Colorado killing of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, made more infamous than the others by three details: (1) She was a winner of pint-sized beauty pageants, (2) She was killed at Christmas, and (3) Her parents became the prime suspects, in a murder never solved.

You wouldn’t think there would be many circumstances that could make your flesh crawl the way that one did.

*

A 15-year-old boy took the witness stand a few days ago inside a San Fernando courthouse, before a judge and jury.

His name, David Nieves, became common knowledge, because he was not a minor charged with a crime, but rather the survivor of one.

There were only two people who lived through a frightening fire on the first day of July 1998 in the kitchen of a Santa Clarita Valley home.

One of them was David, who at the tender age of 14 was the man of the house.

The other was his mother.

“Do you know what happened that night--what caused the fire?” David was asked Thursday on his second day on the stand, under cross-examination by a defense attorney.

His mother’s attorney.

“I assume,” the attorney continued, “you don’t remember starting it.”

David said that was right.

*

It had been just another nothing-special Wednesday in the neighborhood two years ago along Cherry Creek Drive, school out, summertime at hand, families dwelling in pleasant middle-class homes in a part of town known as Seco Canyon.

The house in which David lived was full of kids. His sisters and stepsisters were there that morning, all four of them, all younger. The 11-year-old, whose name was Rashel, with an S, had just taken part in a June 12 ceremony at Santa Clarita Elementary School, where, although her class was only in the sixth grade, the kids graduated in caps and gowns.

Three of the four girls attended that school.

At 5 a.m. July 1, a neighbor smelled smoke. But no fire was visible from outside, so no emergency number was called.

Hours later, a neighbor reportedly saw Sandi Nieves, a divorced mother of five, standing in front of her house, speaking on a cell phone.

Firefighters and investigators were on the scene shortly, responding to a 911 call from a woman who said that her house was full of smoke and that she couldn’t wake her kids.

They found Sandi Nieves and her son covered with soot, still gagging from the smoke.

And they found all four of David’s sisters--ages 12, 11, 7 and 5--dead on the kitchen floor.

“Something is wrong here,” a Sheriff’s Department lieutenant said on the scene that day, and he didn’t just mean finding four kids dead in sleeping bags. He meant that the entire fire seemed suspicious.

A day later, Sandi Nieves was under arrest.

*

Nearly two years have passed, with David Nieves not having seen his mother until he was called to testify. Four counts of first-degree murder, plus arson and the attempted murder of her son, now face Sandi Nieves, 36.

David told a jury that he woke up that day, coughing. He went to the kitchen and found his sisters Rashel, Jaqlene, Kristl and Nikolet, their faces smudged with something that looked like foam.

He said his mother gave no explanation. According to the boy, she ordered him to stay put and he obeyed out of fear that “she would whip me.”

David now lives with his father.

A prosecutor is out to prove that Sandi Nieves invited her daughters to have a kitchen slumber party, then set a fire and somehow kept them from leaving the room.

On the witness stand, a mother’s only remaining child said there was so much he needed to know.

“Like how she did it, why she did it,” David said. “That sort of thing.”

The murder of a little girl in Colorado remains a big mystery--who could do such a thing? The deaths of four little girls in California have us seeking answers again--who, how, but, most of all, for heaven’s sake, why?

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com