NEW YORK — Three recent high-profile cases in which young children in New York City were killed or brutally beaten has raised an alarming question:
What could prompt anyone to attack the young and innocent?
In all three, children were attacked or killed at the hands of those close to them. The circumstances were different, but experts point to reasons that may offer some insight into the cruelty and depravity that New Yorkers have seen over the last 10 days.
On Monday, an Upper West Side father fatally stabbed his wife and two young children, ages 1 and 3, before slitting his own throat.
On Sunday, a man beat his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son to death in the mother’s Brooklyn home. The tot called his eventual killer — who cooked meals and did chores around the apartment — “Daddy.” Latrell Lewis is now facing murder charges.
And last week, a roommate viciously attacked a family in the apartment they shared, killing the mother with a hammer and leaving her son, 5, and daughter, 3, fighting for their lives. Liyong Le, covered in blood, was taken into custody shortly after and has been charged with murder, attempted murder, assault and weapons possession.
Louis Schlesinger, psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the reasons for committing this kind of crime can be varied and depend on many different factors.
“This is not as simple as, ‘People who kill their children are psychopaths,”’ Schlesinger said. “You’ll hear that a lot when you talk to people, and it’s not true. This is way more involved, way more complicated than that.”
Schlesinger said that it’s fairly typical in cases where a parent murders both their partner and their kids that they’re almost perceived by the killer as mercy killings, where the parent believes the solution to a problem in their life, whatever it may be, is to kill the whole family.
“They developed a fixed idea that killing the whole family spares them the agony of homelessness or whatever this guy was going to confront, and it’s in the context of a deep depression,” Schlesinger said.
The circumstances surrounding the Upper West Side case remain mysterious.
Before Edison Lopez, 41, fatally stabbed his fiancee and two sons, he was about to move to Westchester for a new job. He had to move out of his apartment, where he grew up, by Friday — but the apartment at the new job site wasn’t ready yet. The NYPD said they’re looking into whether this had anything to do with the brutal slaughter of his family.
In other cases, the child can be a causality of a dispute between adults, said Kristina Coleman, vice president of child advocacy and mental health programs at Safe Horizon — and killers may see tots as an object.
Neighbors of the Sunset Park family said the mother hadn’t gotten along with the alleged killer, often getting into loud fights with the man who later attacked them. An uncle of the children said the killer had a problem with the family for a long time.
“If you take away the humaneness of it, you find ways to justify the behavior in the sense of, ‘I know this is wrong, but I can justify it to make it OK,’” Coleman said.
People may also kill children in an episode of psychosis, or because they don’t want the child. It could even be an act of revenge on the other parent. Or it may just be unintentional, spurred by a rageful moment or under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
“These are people that are not well integrated,” Schlesinger said. “They’re not psychotic in an overt sense, hearing voices and whatnot. But these are marginally adjusted people, and they become very angry, impulsive and explosive.”
Often, mental health problems, drugs and alcohol are common denominators in child killings, said Dr. Marlene F. Watson, a marriage and family therapist, and director of training for the Ackerman Institute for the Family. Much of the time, the perpetrators will kill when they hit a crisis point where they don’t feel they have another choice.
“That’s why it’s so important [to have] access to mental health, because parents who have mental health issues or who are substance abusers, and parents who have depression, from life issues, who … are severely affected by a lack of employment or housing,” Watson said.
Young children are defenseless and more fragile than any other age group, so they’re also more likely to die from a physical attack, even more so than older children.
Latrell Lewis, 23, started beating his girlfriend’s child in a fit of rage after the little boy woke him up, cops said. In an interrogation, Lewis admitted to throwing the boy up against a wall after he interrupted his sleep.
“Children are one of the most vulnerable, if not the most vulnerable population in this world, right? They can’t really defend themselves,” Coleman said. “They have to ask for permission for everything, they’re in situations where they oftentimes can’t get out of harm’s way.”