Should Parents Be Held Responsible?

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. Should Steven Pfiel's parents have seen the signs of their son's murderous outburst?

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. Friends said Pfiel dropped rocks on cars from overpasses and, when driving, would try to pick off small animals with his car.

Still, when he turned 17, his birthday gift from his parents was a hunting knife with a serrated, 5-inch blade. 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 sentence in Illinois, having pleaded guilty to both murders. Pfiel's parents, a business executive and a stay-at-home mother who volunteered at his school, are facing a suit from Norskog's mother.

Parenthood as a `right'

"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," said 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 - including Washington - have extended some form of legal sanctions against parents whose children commit crimes, although rarely have they been invoked for major crimes.

Thirteen states, including Colorado but not Washingon, have laws making parents criminally responsible for failing to supervise delinquent children. It is rare for such charges to be brought.

"I know of no case in our country's history in which a parent has been convicted of a crime for the conduct committed by their children," said Martin Guggenheim, an expert in juvenile justice at New York University School of Law.

Scenarios envisioning charges against the gunmen's parents in the Littleton case probably won't go far, said Phil Cherner, vice president of the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar Association.

"I'm sure there are plenty of people mining the lawbooks," said Cherner, "but accidental assistance is not going to cut it."

However, local and state laws seeking to hold parents accountable have been gaining acceptance and popularity throughout the 1990s, said Howard Davidson, director of the American Bar Association's Center for Children and the Law.

An Oregon woman got a hefty fine under a local ordinance when her son was repeatedly arrested for tobacco, marijuana and curfew violations. In Michigan, a pizza baker was ordered to pay a $300 fine for overlooking the fact that his son had in his bedroom property stolen in burglaries.

100 civil cases

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.

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 month, called for making it a felony for parents to knowingly or recklessly allow children to use guns to commit crimes. Illinois recently 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 and almost any parent who has tried to tell a teenager: "Don't."

In the case of the recent high-school shootings in Littleton, in which Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 12 students and a teacher before committing suicide, authorities have said they are looking at a diary, bomb-making equipment and part of a shotgun found in Harris' home to help determine whether the parents should face criminal charges.

The Jefferson County District Attorney's Office is still trying to question Wayne and Kathy Harris, the parents of Eric Harris, who, through their attorney, have requested immunity before agreeing to meet with investigators. Such an agreement has been rejected.

Thomas and Susan Klebold were interviewed for nearly two hours on April 30 and have been described as cooperative.

Oregon, Louisiana, Alabama, Wyoming and Hawaii all adopted laws in recent years threatening parents with fines or prison for negligent parenting, although some have been struck down in the courts. An Oklahoma law requires parents to complete community service or pay a fine of up to $2,000 if their child possesses a firearm at school. Florida requires parents to pay the cost of their child's criminal prosecution, and in Tennessee, parents must pay the cost of medical exams, treatment and pretrial placement of their children.

The town of Silverton, Ore. - whose 1995 parental-supervision ordinance became a model for the 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. "The parents understand what their role is in their kids' lives."

However, criminal charges against parents in a case such as Littleton have been rare or nonexistent, most legal experts said, because of the difficulty in proving criminal recklessness: that a parent knew there was a substantial risk his child was going to commit a crime and did nothing to prevent it.

A Chicago-area family won a $300,000 settlement from the well-to-do parents of 16-year-old David Biro, who broke into a townhome in an affluent suburb and murdered a man and his pregnant wife in 1990. Attorney John Corbett introduced evidence that Biro had previously shot his BB gun out of his bedroom window at passers-by, injuring at least two, and had tried to poison his family by pouring wood alcohol into their milk.

A search of the boy's room, according to evidence introduced at trial, turned up two guns, a set of handcuffs, a bag of burglary tools and satanic writings.

"I don't think they ever went into his room," Corbett said of the parents. "They were pretty much oblivious."

A judge in Kentucky recently refused to dismiss a case filed against the parents of Michael Carneal, who pleaded guilty in the shooting deaths of three fellow middle-school students in West Paducah in 1997.

"People are appreciating the fact that if they're going to stop the violence in the schools, it's going to have to start someplace, and the home is the best place to do that," said Michael Breen, the attorney representing parents of the victims.

`You should have known'

Michael Borders, the Chicago lawyer defending the Pfeils in a case set to go to trial in October, said it is too easy to come out with a pronouncement that "you should have known."

"Everybody is all too quick to judge parents after something like this," Borders said.

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 teenagers 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."

Charles McCoy, professor emeritus of theological ethics at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif., said society should do a better job of preparing parents for the task of child-rearing.

"Parents," he said, "are the last stronghold of amateurism. We need parental education."

Information from The Associated Press and Gannett News Service is included in this report.