The Dark Journey Of 4-Year-Old Steven -- Documents Tell The Story Of Boy's Nightmarish Life

The world rarely intruded on 4-year-old Steven Brown's never-ending night.

He lived in a 3- by 6-foot upstairs closet. Only his mother had the key. He saw his six brothers and sisters once every few weeks when his mother bathed him.

The rest of the time he lay on a piece of damp linoleum, with a threadbare pink blanket to keep him warm. He wore no clothes, only a diaper. He had no toys to keep him company; just a single glass jar for water and a piece of broken mirror.

When he cried out in the middle of the night, his mother would yell at him from her downstairs bedroom to be quiet.

Yet when Steven disappeared last month, he was missed. When the Leavenworth, Kan., police discovered his squalid, empty closet, they found a child's scrawl on the inside of the door:

"We love you Steve. Come back."

BODY FOUND

Steven won't be coming back. On March 30, police found his small, thin body entombed in a block of concrete that had been sitting on the back porch of his home, possibly for several weeks.

The story of his last few months of life is found in police reports, affidavits and witness statements dealing with the case. The record is not complete, and the account is based on statements of children, the oldest of whom is 10, and their parents. Both parents are undergoing psychiatric evaluations.

Terence Lober, the attorney for Steven's father, provided the documents, which he said were part of the Leavenworth County

attorney's case file. The story also is based on an interview with the father, Willie Brown.

Both he and Steven's mother, Alice Brown, have been charged with felony first-degree murder and child abuse.

Willie Brown, 37, has denied any involvement in his son's death. He is at Larned State Security Hospital to determine whether he is sane and competent to stand trial.

Alice Brown, 28, is at Osawatomie State Hospital. She could not be reached for comment.

Their six other children are in foster care.

The documents tell the tale of a boy who suffered at the hands of a mother who apparently shunned him because she thought he was mentally slow.

Alice Brown said in a letter she allegedly wrote to her husband from Osawatomie that she was responsible for her son's death.

`ALL BY MYSELF'

In another statement among the documents, Alice Brown wrote:

"I put Steven's body in a plastic sack and put him in a cardboard box on the back porch," she said. "Then I put cement in on (the) sack and poured the rest on top. No one helped me. I did it all by myself."

Steven was buried last week in the soil of Leavenworth National Cemetery. But he actually disappeared from the rest of the world last fall. That's when his mother banished him to the closet, according to statements family members made to police.

Steven's brothers told police that their mother apparently grew increasingly angry with him.

"She kept on saying she's going to kill Steven," his 10-year-old brother Duayne told police. "When she got mad at my dad, or when Steven did something, like when he smeared the do-do on the wall. She went downstairs, all mad, and my dad, he had to have me and my brothers hold her down so she wouldn't go up there."

The closet is in the upstairs hallway between two bedrooms used by the other children. Besides a foul odor and evidence of human waste, police said the closet wall was splattered with what appeared to be blood. They also found a white baby shoe.

The child for whom that cramped, dark space became home was born in Kennett, Mo., on Jan. 11, 1988. Although relatives have told police he was mentally slow, no hospital or social-service-agency reports verify this, authorities said.

"Is there something wrong with Steven?" a detective asked his brother Nathan, 8. "I don't know," the child said. "Nobody has seen him for a long time."

Willie Brown, nicknamed "Rap," didn't work; nor did his wife. The Army diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic, and he received a medical discharge in 1983, military records show. The Browns' sole income was a military pension of a few hundred dollars a week, Willie Brown's attorney said.

The family moved to Leavenworth, Alice Brown's hometown, in 1988. They bought a house in early 1989.

BRUTAL FIGHTING

The couple fought, sometimes brutally. Alice Brown stabbed her husband twice in the past three years, police reports say.

Brown told police that his wife was "mentally ill," but he declined to prosecute.

Neighbors said Alice Brown rarely left her house. Several told police they thought the family had only six children.

"The neighbors advised that they saw the other kids out playing and every once in a while saw the mother holding the infant," according to a police report, "but no one had ever seen the 4-year-old."

When police asked Steven's brothers and sisters why he was locked in the closet, they said their mother put him there because he was bad.

"I thought it wasn't right because he never gets to come downstairs and play with us," Duayne told police. "Every time we ask if he could come downstairs, she said he doesn't come downstairs until she says so."

Nathan told police he was angry at his mother.

"I was mad at her," Nathan said. "I thought she took him away forever."

The children said their mother never locked them in the closet. If she was upset with them, they were spanked, they said.

Duayne told police they got to see Steven about once every two or three weeks when his mother cleaned out the closet and gave his brother a bath.

"He was real puny, but when we fed him a lot of food he got fat," Duayne said. "The next thing, he was all puny again."

The children told police they never divulged to anyone how Steven was treated.

"Like my mom said, because the police would come up there and the welfare people would come and take us away," Duayne said.

A police report from the autopsy said that Steven was 30 inches tall, 10 inches below average for his age. It said his body was "very, very thin."

He had swelling above the left eye and a possible injury to the right temple. The autopsy also showed that two of his ribs had been broken but were healing when he died.

An official told police he wasn't sure what killed Steven, but he might have been suffocated.