Columnist Susan Snyder: Torment in crime’s aftermath

Monday, Jan. 27, 2003 | 8:12 a.m.

It was a tragic day for mothers.

Certainly, residents across Nevada and the country were aghast at news that a 19-year-old man and his teenage sister went on a stabbing rampage before dawn Wednesday, killing a 3-year-old Mesquite girl and paralyzing her 10-year-old sister.

But mothers lost so much.

There's a mother whose daughters suffered the savage attack while police say she and her boyfriend gambled in the casino next door.

There's a mother whose 19-year-old son and 16-year-old daughter are charged in connection with the deadly assault. There's a grandmother who had been providing a home for a grandson now jailed for a heinous crime.

And there are all the mothers who think of their own children and wonder so many things.

How could a mother leave two young girls home alone? How could a mother cope with the loss of one and permanent injury to the other? How could a mother cope with knowing her children had wielded the knives?

"I was just emotionally sick over it all day yesterday," a waitress murmured to two men drinking coffee at Mesquite's Chalet Cafe lunch counter Thursday.

"I'm a mother," she added. "I just cannot imagine it."

She retreated to the kitchen.

At the Southwest Spirit gift shop up the street, a sales clerk arriving for work told store manager Diana Sirikul that two people had been arrested in Utah for the crime, and there wasn't a morning daily newspaper to be had anywhere in town. She read about it on the Internet.

Sirikul said she didn't know how the children's mother could live with her decision to leave the girls alone and go to a casino.

"It's just so sad," Sirikul said. "Was it worth it?"

"It's not her fault," said the clerk, who asked not to be identified. "She didn't stab them. Even if she had been there, how do you know she wouldn't have been stabbed, too?"

"You're not a mother, though," Sirikul said.

"No, but I was a child," the clerk answered.

Sirikul sighed and said it's true. There's no telling whether the atrocity could have been stopped, even if a parent or baby sitter had been present.

"It just breaks my heart," Sirikul said.

Police claims that a teenage girl also stabbed the children made it harder. We think of women as the ones who give and nurture life, not take it away, Sirikul said.

"There are a lot of women in prison," the clerk said. "Not all of humanity is good."

They were quiet for a moment. There's no making sense of such senselessness.

"Our children are under attack, with all the kidnappings and rapings and murders," Sirikul said. "Why are our children being victimized so much?"

Such questions will linger long after the funeral has ended, depositions are taken and the verdicts are delivered. The unanswered hows and whys make people in cities big and small wonder and mutter that such things don't happen "here."

"But it can happen here," the clerk said. "Sooner or later it happens everywhere."

It's not supposed to, though.

It's just not supposed to happen anywhere.