Tuesday, Jun. 17, 2008

Mental illnesses, revenge among reasons parents kill

It's rare when parents kill their children, but when they do, their stories always make headlines.

In 2006, the most recent year available, just 3 percent of all U.S. homicide victims, nearly 15,000 people, were killed by their parents, with 283 sons and 179 daughters killed, according to the FBI. Sons are killed more often than daughters.

These FBI data do not break down victims' ages, but other statistics show that parents or stepparents are most often responsible when children younger than 5 are killed, according to the Department of Justice.

"We tend to think of it as strangers who murder kids, but really it's more often the parent," said Dr. Susan Hatters Friedman, a forensic psychiatrist and a senior instructor at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio.

Although authorities are waiting for DNA test results to confirm the relationship between a man and a 2-year-old boy who was killed Saturday night, investigators said they believe the man, Sergio Casian Aguiar, 27, was the boy's father.

It wouldn't be the first time a man has killed his children in this region. Two years ago, a Gustine father shot his children on the Fourth of July. In March 2002, a stepfather killed his four children in Merced.

In Stanislaus County, cases in which a biological parent kills his or her children are rare, Assistant District Attorney Carol Shipley said.

Department of Justice data going back to 1975 show that 31 percent of murdered children were killed by fathers and 29 percent by mothers. Just 3 percent were killed by strangers.

But even though mothers and fathers murder at the same rate, society tends to assign different reasons for their actions.

More often than not, women who kill are said to be mentally ill, while men are said to be trying to get back at a spouse. But this could be a societal misconception, Friedman said.

"A father could be just as mentally ill," she said.

"Often we think of men who do this as evil and bad, and there are certainly men who kill to get back at an ex-wife in a custody battle, for example. But a lot of them are mentally ill. More men commit suicide after killing a child than women, which indicates mental illness. So it's not as if all men who do it are evil and all women are mentally ill."

Friedman said two aspects of the Aguiar case surprised her: the degree of violence and the apparent circumstances of the killing. It is quite unusual to hear of a parent stomping a child to death, she said.

Although much more research has been done on mothers who kill children than on fathers, some trends have emerged.

"Fathers tend to have more hands-on violence than moms," Friedman said. "Whereas a mom might drown the child or do other things that may seem quick or more painless, sometimes fathers kill in a more aggressive way."

The fact that Aguiar was found attacking his child in the street also was out of the ordinary, she said. Violence occurs more often in the privacy of the home, she added.

Researchers have split the reasons parents kill their children into five main categories, Friedman said. Sometimes, parents are acutely psychotic. They may be schizophrenic or manic depressive or hearing voices. There is no rational, comprehensible motive for this type of killing.

In other circumstances, classified as "altruistic," parents say they killed their children out of love. They may kill a child who is sick as a form of euthanasia. Or a depressed parent, who could be suicidal and hates the world, might think killing a child gently protects the child from terrible events in the future.