Family violence: The ties that bind

Thursday, April 19, 2007 | 6:54 a.m.

Geng Ozaki's brother set him on fire .

Standing outside the house where it happened a week later, bandages basted to his back and weeping burns on his neck, Ozaki explained what occurred in the minutes before he smelled the singe of his hair. He shared the sequence of events, the afternoon argument, the escalating exchange, the flammable fluid doused down his nape.

The entire story in torturous detail.

Not half an hour later, Ozaki decided he'd rather that story remain unpublished.

When blood spills blood, when victim and perpetrator share the same parents, the everyday mechanics of icy justice often take a back seat to the unspoken governance of family law. Clamming up, Ozaki, 36, became a prime example of why violence between siblings is some of the most difficult for police and prosecutors to deal with.

For starters, nobody wants to talk.

"There is a feeling that whatever happens within a family stays within a family. That it's nobody's business but the family's. That even though I'm attacking you, I still love you," said Metro Capt. Terry Lesney, head of the department's Crimes Against Youth and Family Bureau.

"Even if they do report it, they usually recant."

Delicate family dynamics are ill-equipped to bear the strain of domestic violence. Yet observers say the violence that occurs in families is often more gruesome than a stranger's attack.

"People will do stuff to each other (in families) that they would never do to someone else," said Deputy District Attorney Susan Krisko, chief of its domestic violence unit. "It's just so much more brutal."

Less than a week after Ozaki ran into a Metro substation with burn wounds down his back, police were on the scene of another sibling crime.

In the early hours of April 8, police discovered a man lying on the sidewalk in east Las Vegas with fatal stab wounds to the chest. Witnesses told homicide detectives that the suspect - 20-year-old Francisco Franco-Ordonez - had killed his brother.

The only news release issued by police said the victim's identity would be withheld pending notification of next of kin. With Franco-Ordonez behind bars, however, one assumes the next of kin already knew.

In academic circles, the term for killing a sister or brother is siblicide. The concept is complicated, and old as Cain.

"These situations are very difficult to investigate and very frustrating," Lesney said. "You have to go through all the psychological dynamics to get to the root of the problem. If there is violence in a home, there is somebody pulling at heartstrings. And fear."

Metro doesn't keep statistics on victim-perpetrator relationships, although Lesney and Krisko said violence between siblings accounts for only a small part of their work.

Most sibling aggression goes unreported, Lesney said, until it gets extremely violent. Once that happens, families contact the police, but only to end the immediate threat, said Elynne Greene, a Metro victims advocate.

"We find that people don't call police to arrest the abuser, but just to make the abuse stop," Greene said.

Police investigating domestic violence are obligated to identify the aggressor, and, if possible, make an arrest. This process is often complicated by victims who suddenly turn tail, refusing to cooperate with investigators or giving bad information to spare their sibling jail time, Lesney said.

In court, Krisko often seeks warrants for material witnesses when family members are unwilling to testify against a relative.

"In stranger-on-stranger crime, you are not going to have the bad guy's mom calling you and saying you're tearing the family apart," Krisko said. "Parents want to handle it in the house. They want the family to take care of it."

For parents, the prognosis is particularly complicated, Greene said. The healing process is, in some ways, impossible.

"They feel guilty when they support the perpetrator, because then they are doing an injustice to their victim. On the other hand, it's their child," she said. "Families get splintered and torn apart. There is disloyalty in every direction."