Friday, May 16, 2008
The parents of a murderer sue adoption workers, claiming they should have been told about the boy's mentally ill birth mother.
Feb 24, 2000 | Earlier this month, the parents of murderer Jeremy Strohmeyer filed a $1 million lawsuit against Los Angeles County and four county adoption workers, complaining that the adoption workers failed to inform them about his biological mother's history of mental illness.
Strohmeyer, 21, was convicted in 1998 for the May 1997 murder of 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson, whom he had lured into a casino rest room while playing a game of hide-and-seek. The murder was quick and brutal. A security camera recorded Strohmeyer entering the rest room with Sherrice and exiting without her. He immediately confessed to his best friend, and later to a judge.
He was sentenced to four life terms with no possibility of parole. He has since recanted his confession, but he lost his bid to withdraw his guilty plea and take the case to trial.
At the time of his sentencing, the fact that Strohmeyer was adopted became a huge issue for public discourse, as talk shows debated whether adopted children are more or less likely than biological children to be emotionally unstable or to commit heinous crimes.
I can understand why his parents are upset that the adoption workers may have withheld information, but I can also understand how it happened. Strohmeyer was adopted at a time when matching the hair and eye color of adoptive parents to birth parents was the primary concern of many child welfare agencies. Their priority was aesthetic: They wanted to make sure the children wouldn't look like they were adopted.
Obtaining and recording insightful, relevant and useful information about biological families was an afterthought in those days, if it was considered at all. Frequently, biological parents filled out the family and medical history forms themselves, so they would look as good (or as bad) as they wanted to look.
If the adoption agency in Strohmeyer's case knew something particularly relevant, like, say, that his birth mother had an obvious history of severe mental illness, they should have mentioned it, especially if the adoptive family had asked specifically not to be given a child with that background. But my guess is that the caseworker was afraid that if she divulged what she knew, she would never find a home for Strohmeyer. And in a world where foster care is rarely as genteel and nurturing as that demonstrated in the orphanage of "The Cider House Rules," it is a legitimate fear.
But the lawsuit obscures an eternal dilemma that cannot be resolved in a court. Which one of us knows what we're going to get when we decide to become parents? Did Kip Kinkel, who murdered his parents and two classmates, arrive with a little note tied to his umbilical cord that said "Warning: This baby will one day try to kill you"? How about Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? Did they come into the world with tattoos that read "Future mass murderer"?
Of course this crosses over into the ongoing debate about what parents should or should not have done to prevent their children from turning into sociopaths, and it seems that's what the Strohmeyers are getting at. In a sense, they are telling us: "Look, we are not responsible here. If we'd known that this child had a genetic predisposition for mental illness, we wouldn't have adopted him, and you would never even know our names." The message is that they adopted this kid by mistake, so, everyone, don't look in their direction and find fault.
It's surprising that, having been parents for 20 some years, the Strohmeyers can look back and believe that if only they had known what they did not know, their lives would have been easier and less expensive. We certainly can't assume that Jeremy wouldn't have killed someone had the Strohmeyers not adopted him. Nor can we assume that he would have. I'm sure nobody told the Iverson family that their daughter would be murdered in a casino rest room at age 7, either. But somehow, the Strohmeyers plan to tell a court that, had they known that this child might suffer from mental illness, they would have been spared heartache and agony, and a million dollars to boot.
Did they somehow miss one of the most fundamental laws of parenting -- that there are no guarantees? Sure, maybe they wouldn't have adopted him, but they could have adopted another child with no history of mental illness and have had the same outcome. Is a history of mental illness in one's biological past a prerequisite to becoming a murderer? Or they could have adopted a child with a sparkling genetic past who ultimately needed a heart transplant, or who would become severely injured in an automobile accident, or who would become a drug addict. Isn't this uncertainty what everyone faces as a parent? Isn't parenthood frequently about heartache and agony?
Get Salon in your mailbox!