Parents Behaving Badly

Arkansas has passed a law increasing the amount of time you’ll spend in jail if you drive drunk with someone 16 or younger in the car. First-time offenders will now spend 7 days in jail, instead of the usual 24 hours. I’ll bet Jamie Marie Rosen is thanking her lucky stars she lives in Arizona.

I offer, without comment, this Q&A column from South Carolina’s State newspaper, in which a 70-year-old couple ask how to handle their son defaulting on a $40,000 loan. Apparently, he needed the moolah “to pay his past due child support, his lawyer, his former wife’s alimony, and to keep him out of jail.” Yep, he still hasn’t repaid it. Shocking, but true.

This case is all the more apropos in that I just finished reading Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer’s book about the murder of Brenda and Erica Lafferty by Dan and Ron Lafferty, two members of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). Several times throughout the book, interviewees who had once lived in the FLDS haven of Colorado City, Arizona revealed that the town had a rampant, unspoken problem with child sexual abuse.

Fast forward to present day Palmer, Alaska, where a fundamentalist of a slightly different stripe pleaded no contest this week to sexually abusing one of his 15 children. Robert Hale, a.k.a. “Papa Pilgrim”, made waves in Alaska by bucking some sort of federal land act. (Snore.) More important for this blog is Hale’s deep past and his awful present. Hale had eloped with the daughter of John B. Connally, future governor of Texas; his wife eventually shot herself in the face. The forlorn Hale became hippie, and lived on a commune on land owned by Jack Nicholson. He and his wife eventually became born-again Christians of a very fundamentalist strain.

Apparently, though, the Lord and a passel of a dozen-plus wasn’t enough for Papa Pilgrim. He was accused in 2005 of molesting one of his daughters, and fled. Immediately after this, some idiots declared that these charges were concocted as payback for standing up to the feds. Sadly, no. His wife and all of his kids were poised to testify against him. He didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in h – e – double hockey-sticks. Papa now faces up to 14 years in jail for his crime.

Kudos to the hale family for standing by the truth and by their child, rather than standing by their patriarch. I’m curious, though: how will their lives and beliefs change in the wake of this sickening act? From other reports, it appears that Hale had a long history of this shit, and that the family remained unaware of it until the April 12005 incident. Some of Hale’s elder sons have gone around to their neighbors and apologized for the trouble their family inadvertently caused. How tragic that 16 other people have to deal with the trauma this man unleashed upon them.

Well…where to begin with this Ohio couple? We can start with Doron Silverman, who recently had to defend himself against a charge of ‘gross sexual imposition” for allegedly molesting his 4-year-old son, Mikel. Silverman vehemently denies the claim, saying that police “tricked” him into giving a confession; he only confessed to the crimes so that he could go home. Smells like bullshit to me. As a father, I would never admit to a molestation I’d never committed, just so I could get out of jail. If you feel the police are pressuring you – well, that’s what the magic words “I wanna speak to my attorney” are for. A jury appeared to agree at least in part; after two days of deliberation, they found Doron not guilty of rape, but liable for the imposition charge.

But the accusations against Silverman, whether you believe them or not, have already left devastation in their wake. Shortly after the accusations came to light, his wife Heather Silverman pleaded on her MySpace page for someone to pray for her family, as it was about to be ripped apart. Apparently, Silverman was annoyed that God was working so slowly, and decided to take matters into her own hands by setting her house on fire. The blaze killed both of her kids, four-month-old Kaylee as well as Mikel.

Heather Silverman also denied the charge against her and entered a not guilty plea – despite allegedly confessing to police. (Damn, the cops are just out to GET this couple, aren’t they?) But she won’t be convicted any time soon: a judge has ruled her currently incompetent to stand trial. Prosecutors are biding their time until Mother Silverman can be restored to legal competency, and face the murder and arson charges against her.

On the blog The Space Behind, a commenter named Mike rips on that blogger for being bigoted and intolerant:

Actually, her profile was edited by MySpace itself after our repeated pleas that the immature and unintelligent people, like you, would be prevented from being able to continue spraying their verbal diarrhea to those that happen to have a different opinion from them on her comment’s page.

Impressive. If only such people could get that worked up about molestation and murder…

(Hat tip: Tai)

It’s that time of the year: time to look back at the stream of bad parents who have graced the pages of PBB and do the impossible by picking out the worst parent of 2006. Since I can’t possibly do that on my own, I’m asking YOU, my readers, for help.

Below is my selection of the worst parents of the year from the PBB archives. I based most of these selections on reader reactions and the length of the accompanying comment threads, which gives us a nice balance between the criminally stupid and the truly gruesome.

Because of the gap in my coverage, there’s an obvious imbalance toward the latter end of the year. Hey, you go to war with the blog you have! It balances out, though, as not all of these stories happened in late 2006; one or two actually happened in 2005, but I’m throwing them into the pot because they still managed to echo into the headlines of 2006. To correct any additional imbalance, I’m allowing you guys to add write-in candidates. Just go to the poll in this blog’s left sidebar and select or type in your choice. (NOTE: If the write-in future is abused, I’ll remove it. Please use sparingly.)

Voting will close on Friday, January 5th.

The Finalists

Khalid Adem. Friends and supporters insists he was railroaded, but a jury of his peers found him guilty of forcibly circumcising his daughter.

China Arnold. She maintains she’s innocent; the state says she microwaved her baby to death.

David and Liz Carroll. The foster parents left their son, Marcus Fiesel, bound in a closet while they skipped town for a family reunion. They came back to find him dead.

Savarin DeJesus (not pictured). The 18-year-old New York City mom got drunk, got sick, and then slept…while her child drowned in mommy’s vomit bucket.

Melinda Duckett. Holy shit…where to begin? The Florida mom offed herself after appearing on Nancy Grace and being grilled over her son Trenton’s disappearance. Evidence strongly indicates that she handed off her son to someone else to keep him away from his dad. Then the stories of her extra-sexular activity surfaced, including a photo purportedly of Melinda that showed her feeding Trenton a bottle while giving head. I know you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but in this case, the temptation’s almost overwhelming.

Jonathon Edington. The loving father thought his neighbor had molested his daughter, so he killed the guy. Edington was wrong. The dad now faces a very long prison sentence for losing his shit and killing an innocent man.

Michael and Sharen Gravelle. The “caged kids” parents from Ohio were convicted this year after offering pitiable explanations for locking their 11 foster kids up like rabbits.

Heather Heck. This supposedly Christian mom sparked a firestorm of controversy by first hiding her pregnancy, then leaving the kid in a car all weekend while she went out and had fun.

Festus Oguhebe. The professor from Nigeria who saw fit to motivate his lazy kids by torturing them with ants.

The Parents of Castro Valley High School. To their credit, they didn’t murder or mutilate anyone. But the parents of Castro Valley High continue to inflict an undue sense of entitlement on their kids by waging war against a local basketball coach (Nancy Nibarger, pictured) who doesn’t deserve their constant bullshit.

Being a bad parent is hard, yo! When you choose to neglect your kids, it forces you to make all kinds of difficult choices. Let’s say – strictly as a hypothetical, mind you – that you and your daughter decided to leave her kids home overnight and part of the next morning, so that you can go out and, I don’t know, snort coke off of the ballsacks of male strippers. (I’m not hip to what all the cool bad parents do for fun these days.) Your grandkids’ ages range from 7 to 11, so you know that none of them should be left to look after the others. Then the 11-year-old calls you in a panic. There’s a fire! In the house! What do we DO?!

Now, you already know that you’re a bad ma and grandma. You should’ve already coached the kids on what to do in case of a fire: get out of the house and call 911 from a neighbor’s. You ponder telling the little welp to do just that…but then you stop. If you or they call 911, then everybody will find out that you’re shitty caregivers! The HORROR! So instead, you tell the kids just to chill in the burning house until their mos gets back – so that, you know, she can make sure it’s a raging inferno, and not just a little pan-fire that she can smother with her ginormous ass. But you probably end up feeling guilty about that so, 18 minutes after the boy calls, you reluctantly dial up 911.

Oh….wait. You mean this ISN’T a hypothetical? Edwina Naholnik of Waterford, Connecticut actually told her daughter’s kids to do just that?! Huh. And here I thought I was concocting one of those “lifeboat dilemmas”.

Don’t worry – the kids are just fine. The house burned to the ground, though, and the fire killed all their pets. And the Naholnik elders have been brought up on charges, just as grandma feared they would. I wonder if 29-year-old mom Brandi tried to convince the kids to lie to the authorities once they arrived, and the kids ratted her out in the hopes of getting new parents from the state. One can only hope. Obviously, the parents that God gave these kids weren’t quite up to snuff.

(Hat tip: Marcia)

The Tony Camacho case gets more and more sick. The autopsy of his daughter Crystal shows that Camacho stabbed her before he set the fire; the wound was so vicious, it severed the girl’s spine. That’s sick – not to mention bizarre. Why would he stab his daughter, but leave himself and his son to die from the fire (both died of smoke inhalation)? Was he trying to send a message to his ex-wife? Did the girl try and run away from her maniac dad? We’ll probably never know, thanks to Tony.

Now where have we heard this one before? Oh right – it slightly mirrors the case of Sarah Smith, whose boyfriend Ryan Delaroche was hitting booze from a water bottle while driving. In that case, Smith unintentionally poisoned her baby when she used Ryan’s “water” to mix her daughter’s bottle.

In that case, the fault clearly lied with the father, who shouldn’t have been tippling (a) while he was driving, and (b) under Sarah’s nose. But in Jamie Marie Rosen’s case, the fault falls entirely on mom’s shoulders. The Gilbert, Arizona mom was pulled over by police, who smelled alcohol and her breath and noticed that she had “divided attention”. Her BAC? 0.15% – nearly twice the legal limit. The cops searched the car, and found the water bottle full of vodka in the 42-year-old mom’s purse. Busted! Rosen’s 4- and 6-year-old children were taken into protective custody, and mom was given a nice, quiet jail cell so she could think about what she’d done.

Rosen’s best option at this point would be to plead. Admit to alcoholism, enter treatment, and work out a deal to get her kids back from the state. That’s what we in the bad parenting biz call “Doing the Paula Poundstone”. From what Poundstone’s lawyer said about his client’s case, it seems likely that Rosen can get custody of her kids returned if she gts dry and stays that way for close to a year.

Good luck, Miss Rosen. Make sure to drop to your knees and thank the Deity of your choice that you didn’t kill anybody – yourself and your kids included. You could have easily ended up sharing some of the ignominy that belongs to Thomas Graham Towle, the Australian dad whose drunk driving cost six teens their lives. There but for the grace of God go you.

(Hat tip: Da Trench)

What kind of a sick fuck not only shakes, but bites his baby, injuring him to the point of inflicting brain damage? Police in San Antonio, Texas say that Charles Green is just that kind of sick fuck. Green is currently in jail on a $150,000 bond after the bizarre Christmas Eve assault that landed his 8-month old in the hospital.

So much for my fantasy about Christmas peace and cheer. You’d think that, if there were one time of year people could lay off the stupid, it’d be Christmas. But nooooo.

There’s precious little info about this story at the moment. I’m betting the 26-year-old Green has priors on his record. Either that, or he has what we in the true crime biz call “anger management issues”. It’s such a sad, repetitive story, we almost don’t need the facts; these tragic tales write themselves. Mom tells dad to watch kid while she “visits with her neighbor” (read: takes a massive bong hit) downstairs. Dad doesn’t wanna, but know that if he doesn’t, mom won’t put out later. Dad tosses baby in crib. Baby cries. Dad tells baby to shut the fuck up. Baby, being a baby, ignores him. Dad loses his shit, picks baby up, shakes baby. Baby, being a baby, screams his head off. Dad, now foaming at the mouth, bites baby in a frenzied, irrational rage.

Sigh. Sometimes I wish people weren’t so predictable.

No PBB today, in honor of that Christ fellow. Let’s at least pretend that the parents of the world behaved themselves today. Deal?

Tony Camacho always told his estranged wife that one day, she’d come home and he and their kids would be gone. Well, the son of a bitch was true to his word. Weeks before his ex, Jennie Carter, was slated to take possession of their former marital home in Fort Worth Lake, Florida, Camacho told his kids to come into the house to open early Christmas presents. But there were no presents – just Camacho, a series of dead bolts, and a crapload of kerosene. Camacho died during the fire; his 10-year-old son Nelson and 8-year-old daughter Crystal succumbed to their injuries in the ensuing days. Inside of the house, investigators found empty gas canisters, as well as full containers of gasoline configured like Molotov cocktails.

What’s galling is that there were numerous signs the train wreck that was Tony Camacho was about to derail. Outside of the threats reported by Carter in her divorce proceedings, a witness came forward after the fire and reported that, days earlier, Camacho threatened to kill Carter. Too little, too late.

Camacho should obviously have never had access to his kids given his history. Mom is no doubt raking herself over the coals for letting Camacho see his children that one last time. Amazingly, though, not everybody agrees. One anonymous father’s rights commentor on a Sun-Sentinel article about the case declares:

Another tragedy caused by faulty “custody” laws. Default custody should be 50-50. Take away the aggravation, game playing and stress and these incidents will diminish in quick fashion.

Um. Yeah. Something tells me that the last thing society needed was for the likes of bastards like Tony Camacho to spend MORE time around kids. If anything, this is evidence that “50/50 by default” is a horrible notion that will take away the discretion of the courts and keep kids trapped in abusive homes. Good parents don’t torch their children, regardless of how “stressed out” they are.

Mary and Christopher Hansche, the parents whose baby’s toes were bitten off by one of their animals, have copped a plea deal to participate in parenting classes. They also have to give up custody of both their ferret and pit bull. Good call: anyone whose baby gets used as pet food ought to lose that privilege, no? They still might serve six months in jail apiece for improper child supervision, and may lose custody of their kid. One can only hope. Hansches, if you people get a second chance from the judge, don’t you EVER let us see your names on PBB. Ever. Again.

Thanks to Steve for the heads up on the case of Dennis Potts of Bonita, California, now the prime suspect in the murders of his girlfriend Tori Vienneau and their son, Dean. Vienneau was beaten to death; poor Dean was found in his crib, hanged with a cord. The story is that Vienneau had planned to meet with Potts the night of the murder to tell him that she was suing him for child support. That’s one hell of a motive – and an all too common one.

Potts has NOT been arrested yet, so this is all speculation. For more background, see Steve Huff’s original post about this horrifying murder, as well as his follow-up, which contains a rundown on the accused’s MySpace page. Also, check out the video below from San Diego station KFMB. (No relation to KMFDM. At least, so far as I know.)

Question: How “inexperienced” of a traveler do you have to be to believe that your grandchild needs to go through the X-Ray conveyor? I’m just saying, yo. (Thanks, Gregg!)

Man, you gotta give Sherri Lohnstein an ounce of credit. When her 2 lb. baby died shortly after birth in September, she knew the reason: she had gotten drunk the night she went into labor. Lab tests confirmed that the child was born with a blood alcohol level of 0.17%, more than two times the legal driving limit. That’s only two-hundredths more sober than Gus van Sant, for crying out loud.

Dr. Mary Case, medical examiner for St. Charles County, said she had never seen a case in which a mom had drunk her baby to death. Indeed, the only case that leaps to my mind immediately is that of Melissa Irene Tanner, whose baby was born with a BAC of 0.21%. But Tanner’s child survived (though I can’t find an update on whether the kid sustained any logn-term damage). Also, Tanner’s child was over six pounds at birth, which tells me that Lohnstein was abusing drink in her pregnancy much earlier and much more heavily than Tanner did. (UPDATE: As Lohnstein’s sister notes in a comment below, Lohnstein gave birth prematurely, so the weight comparison is invalid. I haven’t read the full coroner’s report yet to determine whether the premature birth was a direct result of alcoholism.)

But, hey, let’s not be too hard on the 33-year-old mom. (Well, former mom.) Look at her last name: “Lohnstein”. Doesn’t that sound like a low-quality lager? You might’ve well as named her “Michelob”.

I kid, of course. The bitch should totally fry for this. And that’s no joke.

(Hat tip: Chelle)