Although the case got less attention than the killing of first grader Kayla Rolland by a classmate in Mt. Morris Township, Mich., last spring, it raised the same question for the criminal-justice system: was this a prosecutable crime? On the one hand, the Riverside County Sheriff’s office was carrying the case as a murder by suffocation. After talking to the girls, investigators concluded they “intended to kill Damion with the pillow,” according to a spokesman. “We don’t really have a motive,” he added. “To see these cute little girls tell that awful story was chilling,” Investigator Kent Krisell told NEWSWEEK. On the other hand, there was little question of actually charging, much less trying or punishing, the two girls. Under California law, children younger than 14 can be charged only if there is “clear proof that at the time of committing the act… they [knew] its wrongfulness.” The girls, says District Attorney Grover Trask, are just “too young. The criminal-justice system is not prepared to do anything with kids 5 or 6 years old.”
Grandmother Mary Stiffler says, “They got to playing too rough, [and] it got out of hand.” That’s in line with the thinking of child-development experts, who contend that children of that age cannot even understand the irreversibility of killing. “They would know they had done something wrong,” says Dr. Barbara Howard, a developmental behavioral specialist at Johns Hopkins, “but they wouldn’t get how bad it is, that if they killed the baby, it was gone forever.” But Howard also draws a distinction between what the girls did and the killing of Kayla, who was shot to death by a classmate (who is now in foster care). “It’s easy to shoot someone,” she points out. “To suffocate a 3-year-old would not be easy. These children had enough anger to suffocate a child who would have put up a fight.”
And such anger, Howard adds, is usually found only in children who have been harmed themselves–either purposefully, neglectfully or vicariously, by witnessing violence to others. Last month Damion’s mother, Sophia, filed for divorce from Gerald Stiffler, asserting in court papers that in five years of marriage “we have never been able to get along together… Respondent has physically abused me for the past nine years on and off.” Stiffler says that his wife’s abuse charges are exaggerated. But he also has two minor drug convictions and was ordered last year to attend a one-year domestic-violence program. His mother, Mary Stiffler, in whose home Damion and at least five other children were staying when Damion was killed, was arrested in June on drug allegations and was free on bail. The adults who were present can’t be charged with homicide, but officials are “exploring” child-endangerment charges.
The home itself is a ramshackle frame house which has been expanded with the addition of a dusty Airstream trailer in the yard. It sits on the edge of Blythe, a sunbaked farming town and gas stop. Five of the children who were living there, including the 5-year-old who allegedly helped kill Damion, were taken into custody by child-welfare officials. But the Stiffler children were still there last week, while “a variety of agencies are working with Mr. Stiffler and his children to devise a course of therapy and care that will benefit them,” according to Dennis Boyle, who heads the county social-services agency. That includes the 6-year-old sister, sweet-looking with a brown pageboy. She came out, along with several children and an aunt, to meet a NEWSWEEK reporter last week. Without saying hello, she kicked the reporter in the shins.
