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Saturday, May 1, 1999
By Kim Murphy and Melissa Healy
Los Angeles Times
SEATTLE -- Should Steven Pfiel's parents have seen their son's murderous outburst coming?
At 7, he allegedly set fire to a motor home. As a grammar-school student in suburban Chicago, he was accused of singing death chants to a classmate. After the fellow student complained, Pfiel admitted to police that he had vandalized the student's home with a knife and had spray-painted satanic symbols on its side. According to friends, Pfiel dropped rocks on cars from overpasses, and when driving, would swerve his car in hopes of picking off small animals.
Still, when he turned 17, his birthday gift from his parents was a hunting knife with a serrated, 5-inch blade. And three weeks later, on July 12, 1993, Pfiel used the knife to murder 13-year-old Hillary
Norskog, and 17 months later, while awaiting trial, Pfiel beat his brother with a bat, slit his throat and then fled with three of his father's guns.
He is now serving a life prison sentence in Illinois, having pleaded guilty to both murders. And Pfiel's parents, a business executive and a stay-at-home mother are facing a suit from Norskog's mother.
"There are a whole lot of parents out there who act as if being a parent is just their right, and it doesn't come with responsibilities," says Donald
Pasulka, the Chicago attorney who brought the suit on behalf of Norskog's family.
"We sometimes view the parents as victims," Pasulka said. "When they see the school shootings in Arkansas and Littleton [Colo.] and Kentucky, people are starting to wake up and say, `Wait a minute: If you're not going to control your children, we're going to start controlling them -- and you.' "
Across the country, 23 states have extended some form of legal sanctions against parents whose children commit crimes, although rarely have they been invoked for major crimes.
Increasingly, parents also are being held accountable in the civil courts for the wrongdoing of their offspring. The National Center for Victims of Crime has tracked as many as 100 cases in the past decade in which parents like the Pfiels have been sued for negligent care. And the volume is rising sharply, said staff attorney Lisa Ferguson.
Parents of school gunmen in Jonesboro, Ark.; West Paducah, Ky.; and Moses Lake, Wash., all face substantial lawsuits from families of the victims -- alleging they should have done more to control their children.
And President Clinton, as part of a package of proposals unveiled last week, called for making it a felony for parents to knowingly or recklessly allow children to use guns to commit crimes. Illinois last week became the 17th state to pass similar legislation.
Yet drawing a firm connection between what children do and what their parents could have done to stop it remains difficult and constitutionally problematic, say lawyers.
In the case of the recent high school shootings in Littleton that left 13 innocent victims dead, authorities have said they are looking at a diary, bomb-making equipment and part of a shotgun found in the home of one of the two teen-age gunmen to help determine whether the parents should face criminal charges.
Most states have had contributing-to-the-delinquency-of-a-minor statutes on their books since the 1950s and 1960s. Occasionally, they are dusted off to prosecute a pimp, or an adult who serves alcohol to a minor.
But, experts say, specific parental-liability laws have proliferated amid a surge in youth crime that has scared Americans and prompted a search for what -- or who -- is to blame. In pressing their cases, lawmakers and attorneys frequently draw on the argument that along with their rights to raise children free of government meddling, parents bear the responsibility to provide adequate oversight.
The town of Silverton, Ore. -- whose 1995 parental-supervision ordinance became a model for a state law -- has seen its citations under the law go down from 14 the first year to two last year. There has been a 35 percent reduction in overall juvenile crime during the same period, said Police Chief Rick Lewis.
But Michael Borders, the Chicago lawyer defending the Pfeils in a case set to go to trial in October, said it is too easy to "flyspeck" a family's history and come out with a pronouncement that "you should have known."
Parents who have never experienced this with their own children "can't appreciate that children have their own minds, make their own decisions, not only on the basis of what they learn at home, but from society, that teen-agers are notorious for not sharing with their parents what they want to hide," Borders added. "It's a tragedy, but it's not going to be cured by dragging a bunch of parents into court."
© Copyright 1999, The Salt Lake Tribune
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