Flashback 1985: "Mom, do I have to go to school?"

 

Boy on the floor playing with a toy car, by Charles Ray (Art Institute of Chicago)

     Some stories stick with you. Almost 30 years later, I remember standing next to the first Cook County Medical examiner, Dr. Robert Stein, looking through large crime scene photographs of the bodies of children. Stark black and white shots that I won't describe, though I can see them clearly as if they were in front of me now.

     There were the days at the University of Illinois Craniofacial Center, talking to patients who were having facial prosthetics made. One man, who was having a silicon nose and upper lip to go over the big hole in the middle of his face. The nose was held on by four titanium posts.
     Or the first such jarring story, written back when I was the opinion page editor of the Wheaton Daily Journal. A single mother wrote a letter to the paper. Her 4-year-old son had been raped by the school janitor. She phoned the police, expecting them to show up with lights flashing. Instead it began a legal crawl that ended up heading ... nowhere.

     Not quite nowhere. I wrote a series on child sex abuse that ran for a week on the front page of the Journal. I spoke to her, met her son. Assistant DuPage County State's Attorney Brian Telander was convinced the crime had happened, but the evidence just wasn't there. I looked at other aspects of abuse, interviewing a man in prison who'd started raping his daughter when she was 11. I asked him how he could do it, and he answered me. I also talked to a an older teen who'd been molested as a child, about the devastating damage it did to her.
    Now that I look over the stories, it's the sort of thing that doesn't run in newspapers much anymore. I'm not sure why. Journalism has fashions like everything else, I suppose.
     The stories themselves ... start quite slowly. I think because I was 25 and had never had to process this sort of thing before. The one about the pre-schooler begins this way:

     No one wants to say that four-year-olds are open game for sex abusers. Talk to almost any professional, and he will try to find ways around it.

     Laws are changing. Confessions are frequent.

     But after a while, they'll say it outright. It's open season. Afterward, they'll ask you not to print it. So as not to tip off the perverts, they say. But if you talk to them a little further, they will admit: the perverts already know. The people who don't know are the parents.

     Charlie's mother didn't know. A single mother, living in DuPage County, she sent her son Charlie to a school while she attended a professional school.

     It was late August, early September 1984, when she first noticed something was wrong with Charlie.

     Usually an energetic, confident four-year-old, he started not wanting to go to school.

     If I were writing it today, I might begin with the sentence above, and save the jarring opening paragraph for the end of the story. 

     "He was very outgoing, a very sociable child," she said, later. "That made it all the more incongruous."

     He asked me 20 times a day, 'Do I have to go to school today?' Even on the weekend, he would ask, 'Mom, do I have to go to school today, do I have to go to school?'"

     His mother was concerned, but no amount of coaxing would get Charlie to tell her what was bothering him about school.

     This went on for months. Charlie's mother was concentrating on getting her diploma, and began to automatically answer her son's complaints by assuring him that, as soon as she graduated, he would be able to stop going to school.

     "Be a good boy for a little longer," she pleaded. She comforted herself with the thought that Charlie's difficulty was due to "separation anxiety."

     It made sense. I could justify it — I was away from him now," she said.

     Charlie started to adopt mannerisms that struck his mother as uncharacteristically mature, such as drumming his fingers like an adult. He also had the annoying tendency to punch her father or brother in the crotch when they were around.

      When Charlie came home one day and told his mother that a teaching assistant, "Mr. Smith"...

     I made the janitor into a teaching assistant, one of several changes — mentioned at the top — to protect the identities of the subject. The man had not been charged, never mind convicted, of any crime.

...kicked him, his mother didn't pay much notice to it. She couldn't find any marks, and decided Charlie was probably making it up. He did that sometimes. She didn't report anything to the school.

     "I should have reported it," the mother said. ""I respected an adult more than my own child."

      The week before Thanksgiving, Charlie was caught in a closet touching a playmate sexually. His babysitting announced she would no longer watch Charlie because of his aggressive sexual behavior.

      Distraught, the mother told the psychologist at her dental school about her son's problems. The psychologist said Charlie was exhibiting the classic signs of sexual abuse, and recommended she call the Child Abuse Hotline.

     "When I look back, all these things fit in like puzzle pieces, but at the time ..." Her voice trails off.

     Cathy called the hotline on Nov. 30. On Dec. 4 an Illinois Department of Children and Family Services caseworker was sent out to interview Charlie, along with a detective from a municipal police department and Lori Chassee, an investigator for the state's attorney's office. He didn't tell them anything significant.

     Two weeks into December, Charlies mother suspected but did not definitely know that something had happened to her son. Despite her fears, she continued to send Charlie to the school. She had the pressure of examinations, and really didn't know what else she could do.

     On the night of her graduation, Dec. 15, Charlie said, "I don't have to go to school, right? You don't have to go to school, and I did my job , and don't have to go to school either." Cathy said yes, he did not have to go back to the center.

     Then it all came out.

     "He talked for three solid hours," said Cathy. "In gross detail. Everything hat happened in that school. I was in shock. I was shaking, thinking, 'It can't be true.' Everything caved in. I had no idea it was like this. I thought my kid had been fondled. I had no idea it was like this." 

     Charlie described being forced to commit oral sex, of having his mouth stuffed with Kleenex and taped shut and then being sodomized and other acts committed by Mr. Smith.

     Cathy called the police immediately, at 4 a.m. She expected the police to arrive with flashing lights. She expected Mr. Smith to be yanked out of bed and arrested.

     Charlie's mother did not know it at the time, but she was about to be plunged into another world, a world of policemen and lawyers, therapists and administrators. her days would be filled with phone calls, with meetings, with notes and documents and procedures. For the next eight months, she would doggedly purpose a single, elusive goal: justice for her son.

     The policeman who took her call was sympathetic, but told her to call back Monday morning and talk to a detective.

     That's enough, right? It's about the first third of the story. Another student was found to have been abused, and in that case, there was physical evidence. But his parents did not want him to testify. Without his evidence, the case went nowhere. Charlie was a terrible witness, adding all sorts of flights of fantasy, contradicting himself. The case went before a grand jury, which did not find enough evidence to press charges. Mr. Smith went off scot free. Cathy said she felt as if her son's personality was murdered. I follow the frustrating odyssey like a dim bloodhound tracking a false scent to nowhere.

     Charlie would be in his 40s now. I wonder what happened to him. And how many more victims Mr. Smith had before he was finally brought to justice, assuming he ever was. This is a very long way of explaining why I didn't join the media party dancing around the Epstein maypole. I thought they were missing the point, blinded by celebrity and spin, and ignoring the underlying crimes, again. A situation I hope to address in Friday's column, where I refer to this story. So I figure, put it up here, ahead of time.