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SIERRA VISTA — Aside from the tough initial task of discovering a child to be the victim of an abuser or sexual predator, another lot of challenges and complexities exist for police and prosecutors when a case must be made.
They’re challenged to collect evidence, interview a young victim, put together a strong enough case to win a verdict and deal with their own emotions as they deal with the case.
It all starts when a case is reported, either from families or another source.
For example, health professionals are “mandated reporters” of suspected child molestation, endangerment, abuse and neglect. They are professionally and ethically obligated to notify the proper authorities, said Darlene Herlinger, emergency medical service coordinator at Sierra Vista Regional Health Center and the Cochise College emergency medical service trainer.
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But state Child Protective Services does not investigate all child maltreatment allegations, CPS spokeswoman Liz Barker-Alvarez said.
“CPS is not called on every sexual abuse case,” Barker-Alvarez clarified. “Allegations of sexual abuse would not necessarily lead to a CPS report, unless the allegation were that a parent guardian or caregiver committed the abuse or that a parent, guardian or caregiver failed to protect the child from the abuse.”
In sexual abuse cases, regardless of the relationship of a perpetrator, investigative guidelines exist with respect to what may be used as evidence in court.
Laws and case precedents make for more nuanced investigative efforts in cases of child mistreatment. And a threshold of disbelief is frequently encountered by prosecutors, said Renee Lee, perinatal outreach coordinator at the Cochise County Health Department.
“The other thing is, when you finally do get to trial, the prosecutor’s office has a double whammy, so to speak, because people just can’t believe people would do that to a child,” Lee said. “It’s just the way society as a whole has termed what is happening to these children. It kind of waters it down, and I don’t know if that’s because people just can’t wrap their minds around it.
“Even the CPS hotline, if they don’t use the right word, it can downgrade the number,” Lee said. “Red mark versus red, visible welt — that makes a difference in classification.”
There is a lack of uniform data between jurisdictions nationwide in regard to crimes against children. And, Lee said, there often is little or no such significant data sets to reference in relatively rural areas such as Cochise County.
Precedent set
Cochise County Attorney Ed Rheinheimer said a U.S. Supreme Court precedent set by Crawford v. Washington, 2003, has made for more difficult prosecution because it can restrict as evidence court testimony from very young children, for example.
Rheinheimer said he believes this difficulty affected a recent child abuse case in Cochise County, attributing to the Crawford precedent an acquittal in place of what he thinks was a would-be conviction.
On Feb. 15, an eight-person jury acquitted Curtis Dailey on charges of felony child abuse.
“It looked like, and we thought it was, a real solid case,” Rheinheimer said. “The doctors testified that it had to be caused by a very, very, very hard blow to a very small area of the stomach.”
The judge in the case disallowed a statement made to investigators to be admitted as evidence, Rheinheimer said. The statement was “daddy hurt me in my tummy with his leg,” he said.
“We tried to use that as evidence, and the judge excluded it,” Rheinheimer said.
There are children who are clearly too young to testify and children who are clearly of age to do so, with a “gray area” between.
“Prior to Crawford, a child of that age could be interviewed by a forensic interviewer, using professionally accepted forensic techniques,” Rheinheimer said. That interview could be used as evidence.
“When you’re in the gray area, what you have to do is you have to put the child in front of the judge, outside of the jury. This is usually done before the trial,” Rheinheimer said. “It could also be an elderly person who is suffering from Alzheimer’s.”
In the past, a rather non-scientific comparison was sometimes employed between the age when a child stops believing in Santa Claus and the gray-area age for testimony, Rheinheimer said, as the ages are approximately the same.
“With sexual-type abuse cases, it’s possible for perpetrators to victimize a child without the child even knowing it,” the county attorney said.
Investigating and interviewing
In an ongoing case that involves older children as alleged victims, a former student aide at Apache Middle School, Kenneth Eric Boughton, was indicted in April on charges that he had sex with two female Apache students. In May, five more alleged victims came forward to police. In big cases like this one, a detective is immediately assigned because of the seriousness and number of potential victims, said Sierra Vista police Detective Nick Lamay.
Not to minimize the heavy implications of “active shooter” situations such as the recent multiple homicide tragedy at Virginia Tech University, there remains a sensible comparison to be made to an at-large child abuser or molester, Lamay said.
“If it’s a child, anyone under 18, we like to do a forensic interview,” the detective said. “It’s important that they do more talking than you; let the child tell you what happened, not telling them what you know.”
This type of investigative work is emotionally tough for detectives.
“Having to hear about what most people consider to be taboo in society,” Lamay said. “I mean, having sex with a child is far outside the norm of socially acceptable.”
It is not emotionally easy to deal with the sort of investigative content involved with crimes against children, Lamay said.
Cochise County Sheriff’s Office Detective Bobby Gerencser is the computer forensics investigator for the county, and he said his caseload mainly consists of either fraud or child pornography.
Gerencser agreed with the Sierra Vista detective in that the work can be emotionally difficult. He said he has seen people literally vomit after viewing some of the child pornography encountered during his investigations. The window on his office door is opaqued.
If child mistreatment is suspected, Lamay said, it can severely hinder investigation and prosecution if the child is questioned many times or by someone not properly trained to do so.
“The more they talk about the case, it actually hurts their recollection,” Lamay said.
Ideally, a forensic professional can get the most from an interview if they are the first to question the child.
“Be careful what you ask your child,” Lamay said. “Let the law enforcement officers ask the questions that need to be asked, and of course this goes right against parental instinct. But if they get right into asking questions about certain things, it can actually hurt their case in the long run.”
Evidence is not as accessible or easy to corroborate in child abuse or molestation cases as compared to the typically more red-handed evidence common in robberies or fraud, for example, Rheinheimer said.
“What happens in a number of these cases, is you just can’t get probable cause for arrest,” Lamay said. “Many times it ends with us. It’s sad to say, sometimes we just can’t do it.”
Investigators, like prosecutors, say statutory restraints can be frustrating and must be reckoned with.
In Arizona, for example, it is illegal for two minors to have sexual intercourse, but, of course, kids do it anyway.
This is a problem for investigators when, Lamay said using an example, angry fathers allege statutory rape committed by a minor daughter’s minor boyfriend, all the while entirely convinced his daughter remains innocent and that may not be the case.
“When in doubt, just call and then we’ll size up the situation and do our investigation,” Lamay said.
A darker example Lamay mentioned is an investigation that followed the recent death of a 5-month-old boy.
The Cochise County medical examiner determined the official cause of the baby’s Jan. 10 death to have been Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
“There were broken dope pipes right underneath the child’s crib and bags with residue. That stuff is very toxic and just bleeds into the air,” Lamay said. “And the baby shared the bedroom with the parents. The crib was right beside the bed. Any doctor would tell you that it’s not healthy to do that around a child.”
The boy’s parents were charged in connection to the death of the child, but evidence was not strong enough for felony convictions, Lamay said.
Jeremy Leamer, 26, and Rene Leamer, 18, reached misdemeanor plea agreements in which they were found guilty of drug paraphernalia and drug use and contributing to the delinquency/dependency of a minor. The court dismissed the charges of endangerment.
“In my personal opinion, anyone who’s raising children in a household where meth is being used, that in and of itself should be a crime against children,” Rheinheimer said. “The problem is that we are locked into the way the statutes are written, and the statutes don’t recognize that general environment as being a criminal environment.”
Proving a charge
In cases like the Leamers’, the prosecution must have proved a child inhaled or was directly exposed to a narcotic such as methamphetamine, or that a child’s clothing is contaminated with it, but it could not.
“Otherwise, you’re left with circumstantial evidence,” Rheinheimer said.
Lamay said the outcome of the Leamer case frustrates him.
“SIDS is, basically, a diagnosis that you don’t know what caused the death of a child,” the detective said. “I believe that in some way their drug use in the home caused that child’s death, but I was unable to find any drug residue on the child’s clothing or in the child’s blood.”
As such, felony charges could not be pursued.
“They got guilty charges and stuff on the records. I just couldn’t prove the more serious charges,” Lamay said.
In certain cases, children must be driven to Tucson to the Southern Arizona Children’s Advocacy Center for psychological evaluation and forensic interviewing. This is due to lack of local resources.
At the center, children give a good interview that can be used in court and that’s “forensically done and accepted.” Lamay said. But the trip is expensive and time consuming.
“I think every agency should have access to something like that locally. Being a detective, one of the biggest obstacles is time,” Lamay said.
Many times, Herlinger said, sexual abuse perpetrated against children or adults is not technically life threatening. Several nurses at Sierra Vista Regional Health Center Emergency Department are trained to perform physical forensic sexual assault examinations, and Dr. Dean Ettinger works directly with Child Protective Services to do overall physical exams when children must be removed from a home by the state, Herlinger said.
There remains not, however, any local equivalent to that of Tucson’s Southern Arizona Children’s Advocacy Center. “There have been several cases where there wasn’t any justice done because we didn’t have something like that in Cochise County,” Herlinger said.
The maltreatment of children has been an unfortunate reality throughout civilization, and Lamay is optimistic about attitudes toward the subject improving in the modern era.
“I don’t think it’s changed over time, I think it’s always been there, but through media and people trying to get this out in the open, I think it’s exposed more,” he said. “As it’s exposed more, families don’t hide as much.”
HERALD/REVIEW reporter Gentry Braswell can be reached at 515-4680 or by e-mail at gentry.braswell@svherald.com.
ABOUT THE SERIES
LAST SUNDAY: A look at danger zones and victim and offender demographics for child molestation and abuse.
TODAY: How investigators, prosecutors and social services take on crimes against children.
NEXT SUNDAY: Right now, methamphetamine surfaces in tragic scenarios throughout the United States, and there is a connection to child maltreatment.
JUNE 17: As well as endless opportunities, the Internet also poses some extreme dangers to youngsters, and police try to keep up.
JUNE 24: The bureaucracy in Southeastern Arizona for handling cases of victimized children needs improvement, local professionals agree, and they’re working toward it despite financial and other obstacles.
Lane Aspinwall wrote on Jun 5, 2007 9:06 AM: