page 8 - The Behrend College Collegian. Thursday, November 6, 1997
Infant victim of 6-year-old
assault won't recover
By Mary Curtius=(c) 1997, Los
Angeles Times
RICHMOND, Calif.- At an age
when toddlers normally walk, talk
and play with toys, 19-month-old
Ignacio Bermudez rocks in an infant
swing.
Sturdy and round faced, Ignacio
is a handsome, healthy looking boy.
But his only sounds are a baby's coos,
and his tightly clenched fists reach out
for nothing.
Eighteen months ago, Ignacio,
called Nachito by his family, became
front-page news as the tiny victim of
a vicious beating by a most unlikely
attacker - a 6-year-old neighbor boy.
The assault sparked passionate
debate about how society should
respond to very young children who
commit heinous crimes. Some were
horrified when a Contra Costa
County deputy district attorney,
insisting the young attacker knew the
difference between right and wrong,
filed an attempted murder charge
against him. Others applauded the
move.
The CaSO faded from public view
only after a juvenile court referee
ruled the child could not understand
his offense and sent him to a group
home for deeply disturbed children.
But the violent two-minute
"His brain is at rest. It
just doesn't grow like
we would like for it
to."
-Dr Robert Haining
Neurologist
encounter between the two boys
forever has altered their lives and the
lives of their families.
"It's very sad for me to see him in
the state he's in," Maria Carmen
Bermudez says, sitting in the cramped
living room of their two-bedroom
house. Ignacio's two brothers and
sister play near his swing.
Doctors say nothing less than a
miracle will restore Ignacio to health.
Indeed, it may take a miracle for the
boy to ever see, walk or talk. He may
never eat food more solid than the
Gerber baby fare he now gobbles at
a rate of 12 jars a day.
"His is a brain at rest. It just doesn't
grow like we would like for it to,"
says Dr. Robert Haining, the
neurologist who supervises Ignacio's
care and measures his development
every six months.
Damage to the boy's brain,
Haining says, "was global," meaning
large parts on all sides have died and
will not rejuvenate.
Such a verdict, Haining said, is hard
for any parent to accept.
"Everything in our lives has
changed," says the baby's father, also
named Ignacio. "I worry all the time:
What is going to be with my boy?"
On that April evening in 1996, the
Bermudezes had left Ignacio with his
18-year-old stepsister, Maria, while
they went to the grocery store with
their older children.
When the family returned 30
minutes later, their home was
surrounded by police cars. Their son,
they were told, had been hurt badly
and was on his way to Children's
Hospital in nearby Oakland.
As the infant fought for his life,
attached to a respirator, the stunned
parents were told his assailant was a
6-year-old, who apparently had
entered the family's home, with two
8-year-old buddies, to steal a plastic
tricycle.
Before the trio made off with the toy,
the 6-year-old spied the baby in his
bassinet. As he later demonstrated
using a doll in a videotaped interview
with police, he pulled Ignacio from
the bassinet, dropped him on the
floor, then repeatedly punched him in
the face, kicked his head and whacked
him with a stick.
Asked by the police officer why he
beat the baby, the boy's reply was
chilling: "Cause I decided to."
Prosecutor Harold Jewett, head
of Contra Costa County's juvenile
crimes division, concluded the 8-
year-olds had not participated in the
assault. He focused on the youngest
boy, whose mother brought him to the
police station after he told her what
he had done.
The prosecutor was convinced the
boy knew what he was doing when
he beat Nachito. And so, at six years
old, the child became the youngest
American ever charged with
attempted murder. He also became
the youngest ever housed in Contra
Costa's Juvenile Hall, where he wore
uniforms several sizes too large and
slept with a stuffed animal.
After court-appointed psychiatrists
said the boy suffered from multiple
personality and learning disorders
and did not understand the
consequences of his act, Jewett
reduced the charge to assault with
intent to commit bodily harm. The
juvenile court referee then declared
the boy a victim of parental neglect
and sent him to the group home. His
transition into the home was rough.
He sometimes shoved or hit other
children.
But his attorney, John Burris, says
his client, now 7, is doing well. He is
undergoing intensive psychotherapy
and is being tutored. His mother, Lisa
Toliver, visits regularly and hopes to
one day be reunited with her son.
"I still consider him to be a threat
to the community," say Jewett, who
receives periodic reports on the boy's
progress but is barred by law from
discussing details.
What he sees troubles him enough,
Jewett said, that "if he were to be
released from the facility, if someone
were to attempt to return him to his
mother as though nothing had
happened, I would definitely bring ,
charges again."
Ignacio Bermudez says he wishes
nothing but the best for the boy who
beat his son.
"He is in the right place now, with
doctors who will take care of him,"
the Spanish-speaking Bermudez says,
with the help of an interpreter. "I hope
that someday, he will forget what he's
done and lead a normal life."
Bermudez, who works at a
fiberglass plant, moved to a night
shift to be able to help his wife with
Ignacio and the other children. He
sleeps only a few hours when he
comes home before rising to begin the
ritual of care. The family has moved
to a housing project about two miles
from the apartment where Ignacio
was beaten. They have a burglar
alarm and a small fenced yard where
they watch their children play.
Nachito suffers from frequent brain
seizures and takes daily medication
to control them. He catches cold
easily and often has ear infections. He
is restless and seems calm only when
rocking in his swing or strapped into
a car seat in a moving car.
Four days a week, a driver from the
county's mental health regional center
picks him up for four hours of therapy
and care. Once a week, the county
school district sends a therapist to the
home. She places musical toys close
to Ignacio's face in an effort to train
him to see. She encourages the family
to stimulate him by calling to him,
placing objects in front of him,
stroking him.
When out of his swing, Ignacio
usually lies where he is placed,
although he recently learned to roll
over. Pulled to a sitting position, he
can hold himself upright for brief
moments.
His eyes gaze blankly at the world,
oblivious to the children playing
around him, but then he starts and
appears to respond when his father
or mother call loudly to him. These
tiny triumphs encourage his parents.
Maria Carmen says she has little
time to think of the future. Her days
are filled with the mundane tasks of
caring for Ignacio, 4-year-old Elias,
3-year-old Javier and 2-year-old
Carmelita.
As Ignacio grows - he is normal
sized for his age - it gets harder for
her to cope, Maria Carmen says.
"He's getting very heavy," she
says. "The day is going to arrive when
I won't be able to carry him. Some
days, when he just cries and cries and
we don't know what is hurting him, I
just sit down beside him, and I cry
t 00.,,
World and Nation
U.N. to send delegation
Saddam Hussein
again refuses
Americans entry
By John M. Goshko and Thomas W.
Lippman=(c) 1997, The Washington
Post
WASHINGTON -
The United Nations decided
Sunday to send a three
man delegation to Iraq
after President Saddam
Hussein again defied the world body
by refusing entry to three American
arms inspectors and warning that
continued U.S. U-2 reconnaissance
flights could be fired on by Iraqi anti
aircraft guns.
Secretary General Kofi Annan said
Sunday night that the team will leave
for Baghdad Monday. U.N. sources
said the decision to send a high-level
diplomatic mission to Iraq came after
the United States dropped its
objections to the move. The sources
said the United States went along on
the understanding that the team's
mandate will be to remind Saddam
of his obligation to comply with
council resolutions and not make any
concessions or negotiate in any way.
"We support the secretary general's
mission," said Bill Richardson, U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations.
"We strongly believe their mandate
should be exclusively to underscore
the Security Council's resolutions to
Pope condemns anti
By Richard Boudreaux=(c) 1997, Los
Angeles Times
VATICAN CITY -
In the Vatican's strongest
condemnation of moral
passivity during the
Holocaust, Pope John Paul H
said Friday that anti-Semitic
prejudices based on "wrong and
unjust interpretations" of the New
Testament had deadened the
"spiritual resistance" of many
Christians to the Nazi persecution of
Jews.
But the pope, in a speech to
theologians, sidestepped the question
of whether such criticism applies to
the Roman Catholic Church as an
institution.
No pope has done as much as John
Paul to improve relations between
Catholics and Jews. His own quest
for an end-of-the-millennium
atonement for past errors and sins has
put the church under pressure to
address its record in World War 11,
when millions of Jews and others
labeled undesirable by Nazi Germany
were sent to death camps in regions
where the church had influence.
Keeping a decade-old promise to
American Jewish leaders, John Paul
gathered 60 Catholic, Protestant and
Orthodox Christian theologians for a
three-day symposium on the "Roots
of Anti-Judaism" in 2,000 years of
Christian teachings.
Many Jews had expected an
institutional "mea culpa." Instead, the
pope said:
"In the Christian world I am not
saying on the part of the church as
such - the wrong and unjust
interpretations of the New Testament
relating to the Jewish people and their
presumed guilt circulated for too
long, engendering sentiments of
hostility toward these people."
"This helped to deaden
consciences," he added, "so that
when Europe fell under a wave of
persecutions inspired by a pagan anti-
Semitism ... the spiritual resistance of
many was not that which humanity
had a right to expect from the
disciples of Christ."
John Paul, who survived the Nazi
occupation of his native Poland,
noted that some Christians risked
their lives to save Jews from death
camps. But he spoke of actions by
individuals, not of the church as a
whole.
The question of the church's role
during the war arose a month ago
when Catholic bishops in France
issued a detailed apology to the
Jewish people for not having done
more to oppose the Holocaust.
"Today we confess that silence was a
enforce Iraqi compliance, and we
don't think that these envoys should
negotiate anything except Iraqi
compliance."
The sentiment among U.N.
members is to seek a diplomatic
resolution of Saddam's latest attempt
to challenge the Security Council and
break free of the stringent economic
sanctions it has imposed on Iraq.
But senior Clinton administration
officials have refused to rule out a
resort to military force if necessary,
and Sunday top congressional leaders
- among them Senate Majority Leader
Trent Lott, R-Miss., and House
Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. - said
that the United States must respond
to Iraq in whatever manner is
required.
Members of the U.N. delegation will
be Lakhdar Brahami, a Pakistani
diplomat who has served as a special
U.N. envoy in Haiti and Afghanistan;
Emilio Cardenas, a former Argentine
ambassador to the United Nations;
and Jan Eliasson, a Swedish deputy
foreign minister and a former U.N.
undersecretary general.
The impending dispatch of the
mission comes as the United Nations
seeks ways to deter Saddam from
making good on his threat to expel
by Wednesday the American
members of the U.N. Special
Commission (UNSCOM) that was
established by the Security Council
following the 1991 Persian Gulf War
to search out Iraq's hidden weapons
of mass destruction.
mistake," said Olivier de Barranger,
who is the archbishop in the Paris
suburb where tens of thousands of
French Jews were deported to Nazi
camps.
German and Polish bishops
previously had apologized for their
silence during the war, and
speculation rose that the Vatican
would follow suit.
But this week's Vatican symposium
focused on theology, not politics.
Some Vatican watchers said the
pope, having apologized for centuries
of Catholic mistreatment of
Protestants and Christian
involvement in the slave trade, was
under pressure from church
conservatives to tone down the self-
criticism
"No other pontiff has apologized for
moral failure among Catholics the
way this one has," said the Rev. John
Navone, an American Jesuit priest
and professor of biblical theology at
the Pontifical Gregorian University in
Rome. "If he's not apologizing today,
"No other pontiff
has apologized for
moral failure among
Catholics the way
this one has."
-Rev. John Navone
he is telling the Jews that he wants to
start the new millennium with
reconciliation and friendship."
John Paul, who once called Jews
"our older brothers," is the first pope
to visit the sites of Nazi concentration
camps, the first to enter and preach
in a synagogue. Two years ago he
established relations between the
Vatican and Israel.
His decision not to invite Jewish
theologians to the symposium
perplexed Jewish leaders. But he used
the gathering to repeat his stand
against anti-Semitism, calling it
"totally unjustified and absolutely
condemnable" as well as
fundamentally anti-Christian.
The New York-based American
Jewish Congress called the pope's
position on anti-Semitism "wise and
forthright" and urged other religious
leaders to follow suit. It lamented his
failure to address the church's own
role "in the long and painful history
of anti-Jewish hatred" but added:
"What the pope was saying loud and
clear is that what was acceptable in
the past will not be acceptable in the
' future. By the nature of his audience,
by the theme of the presentation, John
A big test of Saddam's determination
will come Monday when the
UNSCOM team follows orders given
Friday by its head, Richard Butler, an
Australian diplomat, to resume
working with all its members,
including the eight to 10 American
team members currently inside Iraq.
U.S. officials said they expect
Saddam to block UNSCOM from
conducting operations Monday
because the U.S. members are part of
the team.
Sunday, for the second time in four
days, the Iraqis turned away three
American members of the team, who
tried to fly into Iraq after an absence
in Bahrain. And, in another escalation
of Baghdad's defiance, Iraq's U.N.
ambassador, Nizar Hamdoon, Sunday
sent letters to Butler and to
Richardson, warning them to cancel
U-2 flights that had been scheduled
over Iraq from this coming
Wednesday to Friday.
U.S. officials refused to comment on
the letter. But Western sources, who
saw it, quoted Hamdoon as saying
that because "Iraq expects a military
aggression against it by the United
States ... entry of the U.S. spy plane
into Iraq's air space cannot be
accepted." The sources said
Hamdoon added, "I hope it would be
clear that you assume the
responsibility for results of your
decision to send the spy plane to Iraq,
especially in these circumstances in
which our anti-aircraft artillery is
open everywhere in anticipation of a
-semitism
Paul made it clear the Roman
Catholic Church will never again
tolerate ... the rank hatred of Jews."
Shimon Samuels, director for
international liaison of the Los
Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal
Center, said the pope's speech was "a
deep disappointment." Samuels has
been lobbying the Vatican to open its
World War II archives.
Samuels said archives from Pius
Xll's wartime papacy could shed light
Ireland elects first
N. Ireland Pres
By William D. Montalbano=(c) 1997,
Los Angeles Times
DUBLIN, Ireland - Mary McAleese,
a law professor raised in the warring
heart of bloody Belfast, won easy
election Friday as Ireland's first
president to hail from British-ruled
Northern Ireland.
The 46-year-old McAleese, a
staunch Roman Catholic supported by
Ireland's largest political party, comes
to the mostly ceremonial post
promising to build bridges between
north and south in a divided island.
Raised as a minority Catholic in a
Protestant section of Belfast, the
capital of Northern Ireland, McAleese
said Friday that she hopes to help
revive the "sense of mutual affection
and generosity" she knew as a child
before violence sundered the two
communities in the province.
"It would be nice to find our way
back to a sense of one community,"
she said after an election that drew
four women candidates and sent
powerful signals of accelerating
modernization in this nation of 3.5
million.
McAleese, who is vice chancellor of
Queen's University in Belfast,
received 45 percent of the vote in the
first-round count to 29 percent for
runner-up Mary Banotti, a liberal
member of the European Parliament
and the only political veteran in the
five-candidate field.
The margin of difference reduced to
a formality a second count required
to ensure McAleese of an outright
majority by redistributing the votes
cast for the trailing candidates.
Among them, Rosemary Scallon,
better known as a singer whose stage
name is Dana and who also is a native
of Northern Ireland, ran a surprisingly
strong third with 14 percent. She had
returned to campaign from Alabama,
where she is the host of a conservative
to Iraq
possible aggression."
U.S. officials, while keeping the
military option open, have said their
first emphasis would be in
cooperating with other Security
Council members on diplomatic
approaches.
But the comments Sunday by key
congressional leaders - including top
Democrats - appeared to increase the
political pressure on the
administration to act decisively. That
is especially the case because the last
time Saddam challenged U.N. rules,
by sending troops last year into the
Kurdish-controlled city of Irbil in a
strike that rolled up a major CIA
operation, the administration's
response was widely criticized as
weak and ineffectual.
"They need to abide by the rules,
and we should be prepared to take
whatever steps are necessary to
enforce those rules," Gingrich said on
NBC's "Meet the Press." Asked if that
included military action, he replied,
"Absolutely."
However, the bellicose tone of
congressional leaders is, at least for
the moment, at odds with the thinking
of many key Security Council
members. France, Russia and China,
while all asserting that Iraq must bow
to the council's dictates, have said
they oppose military action. Russian
Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov,
a longtime advocate of a more
flexible line toward Iraq, said on
Friday that his government also is
against imposing new sanctions.
in speech
on how much the Vatican knew about
the Holocaust and whether it helped
Nazi war criminals escape justice. He
and others fault Pius for not speaking
out against roundups and
persecutions of Jews, including those
in Rome.
Defenders say Pius worked behind
the scenes to avoid wider Nazi
persecutions and thus saved millions
of Catholics.
Catholic television show
Anti-nuclear campaigner Adi
Roche, who received 7 percent, and
retired police Sgt. Derek Nally, who
won 4.7 percent, lagged badly.
In Thursday's vote, a brutish day of
rain combined with a cab drivers'
strike that snarled Dublin to reduce
overall turnout to about 48 percent of
2.7 million voters. In 1990, 64 percent
voted in the election that made Mary
Robinson Ireland's first woman chief
of state.
McAleese could not vote because
she is not a resident of the Irish
Republic that she will now serve in a
seven-year term as president.
She will nominally need
Parliament's permission to be with
her dentist husband and their three
children at their home in Northern
Ireland because it means visiting a
foreign country.
Under the republic's Constitution,
everyone born on the island is Irish,
but only those who live in the 26
southern counties are eligible to vote.
The six northern counties, where
Protestants are a majority, form the
British province of Northern Ireland,
and people born there vote in British
elections.
It takes about two hours to drive
from Dublin to Belfast.
McAleese, who has a reputation for
being flinty and who once accused
Britain of running a police state in
Northern Ireland, refrained from
raising contentious issues in her six
week campaign.
She preached reconciliation,
insisting that her personal views - she
opposes divorce and abortion but has
lobbied for gay rights and objects to
her church's ban on women priests -
were irrelevant to the figurehead post.
She vowed in victory Friday to throw
open the presidential palace and make
it "the hearth of Ireland."