Late last week baby Ignacio was in critical condition, suffering skull fractures, and authorities faced another horror: what to do with a 6-year-old accused of attempted murder. Police say the boy, the youngest ever charged with a felony in California, had tipped over the bassinet where the baby was sleeping, then kicked and pummeled him with a stick. The baby’s 18-year-old stepsister, who had been in the bathroom at the time, found Ignacio bloodied and listless on the bed. The boy’s two friends, 8-year-old twins, were charged with burglary. Baffled neighbors said the boys, all African-American with single mothers, had no history of trouble or family child abuse. But prosecutor Harold Jewett alleged that the 6-year-old, who had broken into the same apartment just five days earlier, had become “an aggressive young fellow lately,” and had told others he had to kill the baby because members of the Bermudez family “looked at him wrong.” If authorities can prove intent, the boy could spend up to 11 years in juvenile detention; the twins face a maximum of six years.
Some psychologists said children that young are not capable of understanding, much less planning, such a horrendous act. Public defender Leslie Bialik argued that her 6-year-old client, who is partially deaf, “seems like a little kid, a little munchkin.” A judge ordered psychiatric testing. Residents of the largely Hispanic area, meanwhile, were eying their neighbors with new suspicion. “I’ll never leave my door unlocked,” said Martha Ponce, vigilantly watching her own 15-month-old. But the battered baby’s father, Mexican-born Ignacio Bermudez, who’d been grocery shopping at the time, refused to join in the recriminations–or even call for punishment. “I don’t want anything to happen to that child because he also has a mother, and she would suffer very deeply, just as we have suffered,” Bermudez said, through an interpreter. Then he added, choking back tears, “What was a child of this age doing alone at 6 at night?”
