Answers few in deaths

Increase of violence involving teenagers raises only more questions.

After Dion Ross Griffin was killed in his back yard, expected things happened. Detectives investigated and arrested, district attorneys charged, and parents and friends grieved.

But Griffin, who became the third teen-age homicide victim this year, also became a victim of other failures, police and other experts said. Failures they say society needs to correct if children are to stop dying.

"What makes that kid pull that trigger? I'm not sure anyone knows that, and I'm sure that the kids we see don't know," said Maj. Ed White, commander of the Topeka Police Department Criminal Investigations Division. "If we had the answer to that question, we'd bottle it and sell it."

Griffin was shot early Sunday, Sept. 12, at a party celebrating his 17th birthday. During the party, according to police and court records, four young men arrived uninvited and became embroiled in a fight with Griffin. A 16-year-old Topeka boy was charged Wednesday with premeditated first-degree murder in the slaying.

Topeka and Shawnee County has recorded nine homicides so far this year.

Griffin's death brought the percentage of teen-age homicide victims this year to 33 percent, the highest percentage of teen homicide victims since 1990, when 40 percent -- two of five -- were teens.

"Obviously, kids are getting more violent," White said. "Years ago, it was very rare to take a gun off a juvenile. But now kids are getting them, either stealing or borrowing them, and are getting into confrontational situations in which they think that there's no other way out than to retaliate. Some of these kids are crimes waiting to happen."

White listed accessibility to handguns as one of the major obstacles to overcoming youth violence, and national crime numbers agree. FBI statistics for 1997 show handguns were used in 7,838 reported murders -- 53 percent of the total.

"There were probably kids in my day who had the potential to kill someone," White said, "but they just didn't have a gun. But now it's easier, and once you have a gun, you're going to do one of two things: You're going to use it, or you're going to eat it."

White added that he didn't want to paint a picture of Topeka's youths as irretrievably violent, saying the vast majority of teenagers are doing well in school and are looking toward fruitful lives. But people -- parents, especially -- need to re-evaluate how they treat children and examine the types of moral values they are teaching them, he said.

That treatment is a main concern of Dr. John Sargent, an adolescent and family psychiatrist at Menninger, who is supervising research designed to learn how children are affected by violence and why they sometimes react violently.

The problem is that finding single factors and linking them directly with violence is difficult, he said. Instead, researchers look for associations of several risk factors.

"There's not one key that makes a kid violent," Sargent said. "It's a series of things that add up and increase the probability to act violently."

Those factors, he said, included insecure attachments to parents because of neglect or substance abuse; a fewer number of hours each day that parents spend with their children; an increase in reported cases of child abuse; significant exposure to violence in movies, television and video games; and an increased level of disruption of the family structure, such as divorce and remarriage.

Another characteristic that both White and Sargent listed as an important detail of an adolescent's mind set is the inability to see the finality of death. What adults can keep in their mind, many children lose in a fit of violence, they said.

"In the heat of the moment, they forget about it," Sargent said. "They deny it and say it isn't as important as what they're doing at that second. They don't see that once you fire that bullet, it's over."

The goal of the Child and Family Center at Menninger, Sargent said, is to help children learn how to avoid violence and cope with it once it happens.

"We want to help kids learn how to approach conflicts -- show them that aggressiveness leads to more problems," he said. "We look at behavioral problems in early childhood and hopefully improve the connection between child and parent. There are all kinds of questions we're trying to answer."

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