Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Killer should be heard

Friday, Oct. 16, 1998 | 11:58 a.m.

JEREMY STROHMEYER does not deserve our sympathy.

Whatever good he had accomplished in his young life and whatever success he had achieved are for naught because he is a confessed murderer and our world can ill afford sympathy for those who would prey on and kill our children. There are too many Strohmeyers already and, I fear, a lot more growing up in his misguided, reckless image for us to feel the normal pangs of concern that make us human beings.

But, we would be derelict adults if we did not pay very close attention to the words he uttered in Judge Myron Leavitt's courtroom just before he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Strohmeyer will spend the rest of his life -- perhaps 60 or 70 years -- behind bars for the brutal rape and slaying of 7-year old Sherrice Iverson. Her life was abruptly ended in the restroom of a Primm Valley hotel-casino over the Memorial Day weekend in 1977.

Strohmeyer's 22-page statement was not typical. He took full responsibility for his crime, apologizing a number of times to the parents of young Sherrice, Yolanda Manuel and Leroy Iverson, and the rest of her family who sat teary-eyed and still bewildered at the sheer enormity of the crime and the criminal who took their daughter from them. He also said he wished that he could trade his life for the one he took. It makes you wonder why he didn't think of that last year.

Besides what sounded like a deep-felt apology and appropriate remorse -- as if that could ever be enough for the family of young Sherrice -- Jeremy's words spoke volumes about the kind of world in which we live and the challenges facing those who try to grow up in it.

For he talked at length about his own mental and physical problems, most of which were unknown to him or his adoptive parents, and the role they may have played that fateful night when he destroyed an innocent life. He claimed the events of that evening were mostly a fog to him because he was in a never-never land of drugs and alcohol. And, if he had known his birth mother suffered from addictions and mental illness, he claimed what happened to Sherrice could have been prevented.

And, you know, he may be right. So many young people today are born of parents who are alcohol- or drug-addicted that their brains and bodies are damaged to the point where their actions are far from normal. Even to the point of being destructive and dangerous. And it isn't their fault. That's how they were born.

Strohmeyer laid a good deal of the blame for his and his adoptive family's ignorance at the feet of an adoption system and mental health program in California that kept information of his birth mother's schizophrenia and alcohol addiction a secret. Had he or his parents known of that history, he could have obtained treatment for the effects that most likely he inherited.

I have seen firsthand the results of parents who thought only of themselves and their addictions. And those are the children who are born with problems that cannot be cured, only controlled in the best of circumstances. But to get the treatment needed, someone has to know. If we have rules and regulations that are designed to keep secret what must be shared -- at least with those responsible for the care and feeding of these young people -- then it is likely there will be more victims like Sherrice and wasted lives like Strohmeyer's.

I understand and appreciate the need for privacy but at what cost? Surely, we can't support a system that withholds information that could result in criminal anti-social behavior. There must be some measure of common sense applied in those circumstances. If not, there will continue to be more Jeremy Strohmeyers who may not even have the sense of remorse that seemed apparent to those who listened to a young man whose life, in his own words, will be "barren" as he rots away his years in a prison cell.

And should we not also pay heed to his other words of condemnation for his one-time friend, David Cash. He was absolutely clear in that courtroom about Cash's opportunity to stop him from killing and his dereliction in not doing so. Even to the point of taking credit for the murder by acknowledging that the two had "gotten away" with the killing. That's if Strohmeyer is to be believed.

And why shouldn't he be? He admitted to the crime and took the blame, as he should have done. Was his implication of Cash just some gratuitous afterthought knowing that his friend will lead a life outside of the bars that will define his existence forever?

Who knows? What we do know, though, is that this case shouldn't be over. For one, the district attorney should pursue his investigation based on Strohmeyer's statement about his friend. Not that he had a legal duty to stop the killing -- regardless of any moral imperative -- but, perhaps, that there was some kind of abetting either before or after the crime.

And, secondly, this case should stand as an example of what can and often does happen to young people who are born of addicted or mentally ill parents and who grow untreated into adults ready and able to strike without fear or understanding of that which they do.

Whether Jeremy Strohmeyer was such a kid can be easily determined. But whether such children are born and raised into precarious adulthood everyday cannot be disputed.

When her parents look for a reason for Sherrice's early and ugly demise, they may take some solace in the fact that because of her death and the subsequent revelation at her killer's sentencing, other young people will be treated who might have otherwise grown up to be Jeremy Strohmeyers.

At least, I hope that will be the case. I can't imagine having to learn this lesson over again.