Single moms, boyfriends and dead kids

This newspaper is never lacking for stomach-turning, gut-churning, heartbreaking crime stories. But none flips my outrage switch faster than a report about some mother's boyfriend abusing and killing her kid.

Whom do you judge more harshly, the monster who tortures and batters a small child, or the mom who stupidly left her little one in the care of some cretin she just met? As a parent, I really don't know.

It's never more than a few months until the next horror story is reported -- in Southern Nevada or anywhere else.

However, I found last fall's slaying of 12-year-old Silvestri Junior High School student Lexis Kaye Roberts especially disturbing. The Review-Journal reported Lexis had told family members she didn't like her mother's boyfriend of a couple of months, Thomas Steven "Spider" Sanders, and didn't want to go on a Labor Day weekend trip to Arizona with them. Her mother, Suellen Roberts, made Lexis go.

Lexis' body was found in the woods of central Louisiana on Oct. 8. After a nationwide manhunt, Sanders was caught Nov. 14, and he told authorities where to find Roberts' body in Arizona. Sanders faces murder and kidnapping charges.

I wondered how often this was happening. But in trying to quantify the problem, I came to find that no one really knows how bad it is or whether it's getting worse. No one keeps track.

"The data availability is disappointing," said UNLV assistant sociology professor Andrew Spivak, an expert in examining FBI Uniform Crime Reports and Supplemental Homicide Reports. He pointed out the documents list 17 categories for a homicide victim's relationship to the killer, and "mother's boyfriend" isn't one of them. They would fall under the broad category of "acquaintance," which happens to account for 38 percent of solved homicides from 2009, the most of any subset.

Las Vegas police were kind enough to research the issue at my request. They found that over the past six years in Metro's jurisdiction, child abuse and neglect homicides were most often carried out by the mother's boyfriend. There have been 11 such cases since 2005, and five in the past two years, outnumbering the nine involving fathers. Interestingly, only one Las Vegas child abuse homicide out of 38 total in the past six years was carried out by a stepfather.

So why do so many single mothers either move in with or leave their kids with men who clearly aren't parenting or baby-sitting material?

Markie Blumer, an assistant professor at UNLV's Department of Marriage and Family Therapy, has some perspective on that through her work with the school's ongoing "Counseling the Unemployed" project. It provides about $1 million in free and reduced-cost therapy a year to families enduring the hardships of joblessness. (Call 895-3106 for information.)

"If you ask them whether they're doing what's best for their kids," Blumer said of women who quickly put their children and their boyfriends in the same household, "They will say, 'But I am thinking of my kids.' This might be the only way for them to provide for their kids, to keep a roof over their heads. It's done out of desperation."

As with the lack of crime data, Blumer said there's a dearth of research into incidents of men killing their girlfriends' children. She and two research assistants scoured the record and turned up studies with only indirect explanations:

-- While single fathers begin to date sooner than single mothers, women introduce their children to dates sooner and more frequently than men.

-- Single mothers think it is more appropriate for their dates to discipline their children than single fathers.

-- Children connect themselves to their parents' dating and want to know about their dates, but find it very difficult to talk to dates. There's no hiding them from any relationship.

Of course, the most vulnerable kids and the ones at greatest risk of violence are the ones too small to talk or understand what's going on in their homes.

In April 2010, 16-month-old Addison Weast was left in the care of her mother's boyfriend, Cody Geddings, a man with previous child abuse, larceny and burglary convictions. The little girl died as a result of shaken-baby syndrome and 12 skull fractures. Geddings' murder trial is scheduled to begin next month in a case from Henderson -- not included in the numbers provided by Las Vegas police.

And who in Las Vegas can forget little Crystal Figueroa, the 3-year-old found in the trash bin of a Las Vegas apartment complex in 2006 and initially called Jane "Cordova" Doe until her grandparents identified her. Her mother's boyfriend, Marc Anthony Colon, beat her ruthlessly because she was bringing "too much drama" into his life. Both Colon and the mother, Gladys Perez, are locked up for life.

So is there a solution? There might be, but I don't think it lies in expanded welfare programs or new police powers. The best hope for sparing children from the abuses of Mommy's new boyfriend is someone who shares their blood: grandparents. More than anyone else, they generally have financial and emotional stability, a mature outside perspective and the sense to know when their grandkids might be in trouble.

"We're definitely starting to see more grandparents swooping in and rescuing kids," UNLV's Blumer said.

But sometimes, even that's not enough. Lexis' grandmother, Mary Woodburn, wanted the girl to stay with her, rather than go to Arizona with her mother and Stevens. She warned her unemployed daughter against leaving the state with someone she barely knew.

At least Woodburn was there for her family. At least she was able to try.

Perhaps you read this month's touching story about a Southwest Airlines pilot who held a full flight for 12 minutes so a grieving grandfather could make a connecting flight to be at his dying, 2-year-old grandson's bedside. The man arrived at a Denver hospital in time to say goodbye, before doctors took the boy off life support. Most reports focused on how Southwest's corporate culture made the extraordinary act of kindness possible.

The reason the boy was in the hospital? The man's daughter left his grandson in the care of her live-in boyfriend while she was at work. Police say the stoned, drunken boyfriend threw the child across a room into a bed frame.

Glenn Cook (gcook@reviewjournal.com) is a Review-Journal editorial writer.