Deaths of Single Parents Highlight Macabre Trend

Travis Butler, 9, terrified of being sent to foster care, tells no one.

In Massachusetts, 7-year-old Lydia Hanson tells her teacher and gets scolded.

In Oklahoma, 4-year-old Karina Pistorio does as she’s been taught: Never go outside, never answer the phone.

In Michigan, Ahmad Washington, with the magical faith of a 6-year-old, thinks his mother will wake up.

Bobby Corbett Jr., only 3 and with the IQ of an infant, is trapped inside a trailer in the North Carolina backwoods.

Five children whose single parents died at home within three months, beginning last December. Cases in which a child lived days, sometimes weeks, with a corpse.

Such vigils as these, reviewed by the Associated Press, have not been studied, child psychology experts say. They worry the incidents may signal a macabre trend among the swelling number of single-parent households.

“What does it say about American life that a parent would die, and no one would miss them for about a month?” asks Cornell University psychologist James Garbarino, who works internationally with traumatized children.

“Americans have tried to make kids safer by telling them constantly how dangerous the world is,” Garbarino said. Some children are so isolated and so afraid, it seems, a dead parent is better than no parent.

“They don’t have a community of adults to rely on,” said Wheelock College professor Diane Levin, author of “Teaching Young Children in Violent Times.”

“Some kids have learned not to ask for help.”

*

In an east Memphis housing project where hope was nearly as dead as the grass, Crystal Wells, age 30, stood at the stove last Nov. 3, cooking dinner.

Her only child, Travis Butler, came through the front door, and Wells hollered her school-night command: “Do your homework and get ready for supper.”

Travis minded his momma. He was all she had. They kept to themselves in the Mallard Pond Apartments, a mammoth complex of tired, two-story buildings. Most people around here do.

Then from the kitchen came a noise so loud, Travis ran.

“Momma? Are you OK?”

Wells was sprawled over the threshold between kitchen and living room. There was “red stuff” in her hair. Her eyes were rolled back and “all white,” the boy said.

An autopsy would show that she died of complications from a benign tumor, the size of a fist, in her lung.

What Travis did next was based on a belief, uttered much later, that without his momma he would be sent to juvenile hall and then to a foster family of strangers. That fear has yet to be explained. His housing project playmates say they don’t know what foster care is.

Travis carried on for 33 days. He took the bus to school. He bought milk and macaroni and cheese at Kroger’s. He microwaved frozen pizza for Thanksgiving dinner. He paid the electric bill with a money order he found in the house, carefully addressing it the way he watched his momma do it. When gum stuck in his hair, he cut his hair himself.

“I knew my mommy was dead,” he said, “but I felt safe because she was still in the house.”

*

On Dec. 9, three days after Crystal Wells’ body was found, Lydia Hanson went to school in Peabody, Mass., and told her adored teacher: “I think my mummy is dead.”

The woman, according to Lydia’s maternal grandmother, chided her pupil for telling stories.

Lydia was a shy girl who didn’t question adults. At the end of the day, she trudged home. Inside the house, mummy was in the same spot.

Kimberly Hanson was only 33. That morning, as Lydia dressed for school, Hanson sat in the living room recliner reading mail. She made “a sucking sound,” her daughter said. It was a fatal seizure, brought on by diabetes and a bad heart.

The child climbed into the chair, kissed her mother and rubbed her cheeks. Outside, a car horn announced Lydia’s carpool. Afraid of being late, she scooted out the door.

When she came back, it was getting dark outside. In the kitchen, Lydia microwaved dinner. Later she made popcorn, as she and her mother did every night.

Then Lydia got a blanket, climbed into her mother’s lap and watched TV until she fell asleep.

The blanket, she later told her grandmother, wasn’t for her.

“Mummy was so cold,” Lydia said.

Sharon and Richard Tucker drove to their daughter’s house the next morning.

“Why didn’t you call?” Lydia’s grandmother asked.

Kimberly Hanson did consulting work at home and had just installed a new phone system. Lydia couldn’t work it.

“Why didn’t you go next door?”

“I didn’t want to leave Mummy,” she said.

Months later, Sharon Tucker is still angry. “They just sent her home. She should never have had to spend the night like that. Never.”

The Tuckers have sued the school for negligence. “I don’t want any other child to have to go through this,” she said. The teacher and school officials declined a request for comment.

The Tuckers are now living apart. Sharon Tucker and Lydia have moved to Pennsylvania. Richard Tucker remains in Peabody. “It’s been very hard on him,” Sharon Tucker said. Which is exactly what he said about her.

Their granddaughter goes to a new school. “Nobody knows what happened to her,” Sharon Tucker said. “They treat her just like she’s anybody else.”

*

Child experts say schools should provide a haven where children know they will be heard. When that doesn’t happen, “it just reinforces the child’s perception that ‘I am all alone,’ ” said Claire Kopp, professor of psychology at California’s Claremont Graduate University.

And being alone is terrifying.

“Children’s greatest fear is to be separated from their parent,” said Cornell’s Garbarino. “Kids’ paranoia is much greater than it’s ever been.”

But there are no statistics. Authorities say it’s impossible to know whether these recent cases are an anomaly.

“I’ve never heard of it,” said Dr. Phyllis Rolfe Silverman, co-director of the Harvard Bereavement Study, a long-term survey of 125 children who have experienced deaths of parents. Without hard numbers on children who stay with the dead, she said, “it’s hard to know what to make of it.”

What becomes of these children will depend on what they are told.

“If the people who come next encourage the child and tell them what a great responsibility they took on, and that it was not their fault, then there is hope,” Garbarino said.

All five have received psychological help.

The stories of Travis and Lydia, because their mothers’ bodies were discovered just days apart, got extensive, even gruesome, media play. “Corpse Kid,” the New York Post called Travis.

The three children who followed received far less attention.

*

In Mustang, Okla., Karina Pistorio spent Christmas weekend next to Pat Pistorio, 31, dead from a ruptured aorta. The 4-year-old put a cold cloth on Daddy’s head and brought him the cordless phone so he could call for help.

“She knew he was gone,” said Karina’s maternal grandmother, Ethel Citrano. “She just had some sense. He had taught her not to go out, not to answer the phone. She just did what she had been taught to do.”

Neighbors finally banged down the door after holiday packages piled up outside. The Citranos, who live on Long Island, N.Y., went to Oklahoma to get their grandchild. Their daughter, Karina’s mother, had died of cancer two years before.

They declined to be interviewed in person. “My husband and I don’t want to exploit this story,” she said. “Enough has been done already.”

*

On Jan. 19, inside a trailer in remote Kelly, N.C., Bobby Corbett Jr. was trapped. His father, Bobby Corbett Sr., 56, had dropped dead from heart failure. The 3-year-old was alone for two days before family members, who lived just next door, found him.

By then, the toddler was frostbitten and dehydrated.

Relatives said Corbett was a crusty recluse. One had reported him to child welfare authorities for neglecting Bobby, who is developmentally delayed.

“When people wanted to check in on him, he didn’t want anything to do with them,” his niece told the local paper.

Bobby is now with a foster family who wants to adopt him. His mother, who never married Corbett, “doesn’t have the means to care for him,” said June Koenig of the Bladen County Department of Social Services.

“We certainly have been mind-boggled by this,” Koenig said. “It’s just so sad, but we feel better about it because of the way things have worked out. He is a happy boy now. It’s a happy ending.”

Then she caught herself: “I don’t mean happy. Things have worked out for the good.”

*

On March 7, in Gaines Township, Mich., Ahmad Washington saw deputies pull up outside Woodfield Apartments and pretended to be just another kid playing.

They were looking for him because he had missed school for several days.

When no one answered his door, the deputies forced it open. They found the decomposed body of his mother, Juanita Reynolds, covered by a mattress pad.

One deputy came outside and asked Ahmad his name. Reluctantly, he answered.

The 29-year-old Reynolds, the coroner says, probably died around Feb. 14 of natural causes. Because of advanced decomposition, it was impossible to pinpoint the cause of death. There were no signs of violence. Her family believes her diabetes may be responsible.

Ahmad, now 7, has speech and learning problems. He is a ward of the state while officials await a determination from Texas whether his father, Paul Washington, meets standards for custody.

Reynolds’ sister, Tracy Erby, sought custody of Ahmad, but authorities say she once abused her own son.

“Ahmad would like to go home with his father,” said Dave Murkowski, Ahmad’s court-appointed attorney. “We would like that too.”

Ahmad likely stayed with his mother’s body because “he was just waiting for her to wake up,” Erby said.

Murkowski says his young client survived on cereal and crackers.

“I don’t know why he didn’t seek out someone,” he said. “It may have something to do with his disabilities.”

*

Travis Butler was the first of the five cases, and the most notorious. The shy boy from an East Memphis housing project became a media spectacle. His maternal grandmother, Shirley Wilder, who lives in Carthage, Miss., took him on syndicated talk shows. The Rev. Jesse Jackson called.

Professional basketball players, celebrities and ordinary people around the country donated food, clothes and more than $200,000, which has been placed in trust. Much was given by two wealthy New York women who read about Travis and now call themselves his “aunts.”

Wilder is fighting for custody with Travis’ biological father, who before Wells’ death had not seen his son in years. He denied paternity when Travis was born, but a blood test proved otherwise and child support was deducted from his Army pay. The parents met and split up while both were in the service.

The grandmother’s attorney resigned after Wilder tried to use Travis’ trust money to buy a four-bedroom house on the edge of a golf course in northern Mississippi’s upscale DeSoto County.

In August, a judge removed the boy from her care, placed the trust funds under control of a court clerk and awarded temporary custody to the couple who had discovered his mother’s corpse.

Dorothy and Nathaniel Jeffries live in Olive Branch, Miss., the same area where Wilder wanted to buy a house. The suburban enclave is about 15 minutes from Memphis. The couple met Wells about two years ago, they say, when her car broke down and they gave her a ride.

The judge has also issued a gag order barring all involved from discussing the case, and banned the public from court proceedings. The constant media attention, the judge says, is damaging Travis, now 10.

But in February, before the gag order, Wilder, Travis and Dorothy Jeffries came to New York for “The Montel Williams Show.”

On the show, Travis sat stiffly, his luminous brown eyes filling his face. He shot darting glances offstage while a fawning Williams asked questions.

What did he cook?

“Mostly I cook microwave.”

How did he know his mother was dead?

“Well, because her eyes were fully white.”

What did Travis do, as the weeks wore on, about the smell?

“I sprayed. We had stuff that would stink the room up. I sprayed that. I tried to put her in her room, but she was too heavy.”

Travis said he went to school, did his homework and tried to pretend nothing was wrong. He told two friends, even showed them his mother’s body, which he covered with notebook paper and a coat. He swore them to secrecy.

“I was kind of afraid they would take me to juvenile court,” he said softly.

Williams showered him with gifts: free groceries for a year from Piggly Wiggly, a new bike, computer games, money for his grandmother to fix up her dilapidated mobile home.

Travis grinned with excitement. He didn’t look like an orphaned child. He looked like a game-show contestant.

Six months later, Shirley Wilder refused to come to the door of her trailer at the end of a gravel road.

Mississippi’s red clay baked and shimmered in the late-August heat as an old air conditioner wheezed in the back window. Aluminum foil covered one window; stained curtains and bent blinds shaded the others.

Her brother-in-law, Buster Wilder, stood in the shade, shelling green beans.

“Oh, she’s in there,” he said, slowly smiling as he dropped the beans, hard as pebbles, into a plastic pail.

Shirley Wilder doesn’t talk to her husband’s family. Hasn’t since they got together about 20 years ago, said Buster, 59, who was visiting from Wisconsin.

He’s never met Travis. Never met Travis’ mother either.

Wilder has always been “different,” Buster said. “She don’t talk to nobody.”

Not a sound came from her trailer.

“He sat up there for a month?” Buster asked softly, meaning Travis. “And he didn’t tell nobody?”

Buster Wilder pondered this, then looked up at the hot sky.

“Children think different. Maybe he thought he could get away with it until he grew up.”