It seems as if this idyllic twin island republic is no place to raise a child.
After two-year-old Angelo Tobias Plaza’s death in May, the nation of Trinidad and Tobago was rocked by the murder of 12-year-old Mercedes Layne on the ominous date of the 6th day of June.
Mercedez disappeared in the Erin district of south Trinidad.
A large-scale search effort involving the TTPS, the Hunters Search and Rescue Team, and Volunteers from the community were involved.
Mercedez, a student of Erin RC School, was reported missing on Saturday, 6th June. It was reported that she was last seen after being placed in the care of a driver who was expected to take her home.
On the 7th of June, it was reported that the search ended when Mercedez’s body was discovered. Publicly reported information is scant on forensic details and the name of the suspect; however, a suspect, a 26-year-old Palo Seco man, is in police custody.
This horrific murder reminds us all of the death of six-year-old Sean Luke back in 2006 and 11-year-old Akiel Chambers from 1998. Speculation in the absence of an autopsy may be rendered irrelevant when discussing the motive of the killer, but I suspect it falls in the same category as the aforementioned cases.
The murder of a child is the most disturbing crime to study as an academic.
Public discussion often assumes that child killers fit a single profile, but research demonstrates that there is no single mental profile of a child killer. Instead, child homicide offenders vary significantly in their motivations, psychological characteristics, and relationships to their victims.
In the paper Behavioral Perspectives on Child Homicide: The Role of Access, Vulnerability, and Routine Activities Theory, researchers Monique Boudreaux, Wayne Lord, and John Jarvis note that investigators must consider “relationships between the offenders and their victims” and whether offenders are known to the child or complete strangers. Their work emphasises that understanding access to the victim is often more important than attempting to create a generic offender profile.
The paper itself is quoted as follows “Although media often provide extensive coverage of crimes committed against children by stranger offenders, resulting in the perception that this type of crime is widespread, research on crimes such as child abuse, abduction, and homicide show that these offences are primarily perpetrated by offenders known to their juvenile victims (Boudreaux, Lord, & Dutra, 1999; FBI, 1995; Finkelhor, Hotaling, & Sedlak, 1992; McGuire, 1994).”
Routine Activities Theory is a useful tool for explaining crimes against children. According to this theory, crime occurs when a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of effective guardianship converge in time and space. In the case of Mercedez, the temporary custody of the child held by an adult in a vehicle may have been the “effective guardianship” that created an opportunity.
Psychological research has identified traits that appear frequently among child killers. These traits include callousness, manipulation, lack of remorse, and reduced empathy.
Studies of psychopathy describe psychopathic individuals as displaying “callous and unemotional behaviour” and often exhibiting an absence of empathy and remorse. However, psychologists caution that psychopathy alone does not explain homicide. Most people with psychopathic traits never commit murder, and many murderers do not meet the clinical criteria associated with psychopathy.
Research on homicidal offenders also highlights the importance of developmental and environmental factors. Studies have found elevated rates of childhood abuse, neglect, exposure to violence, family dysfunction, and conduct problems among violent offenders. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of abused or neglected children do not become violent criminals.
The cases of Sean Luke and Akiel Chambers fall under the category of sexual homicides which are a well studied subgroup of child homicides. Research suggests that some offenders are motivated by sexual gratification while others kill primarily to eliminate witnesses following a sexual assault. In such cases, investigators often focus on offender access to children and patterns of movement to the possible site of the assault and the site of the body’s disposal. Again, opportunity is key in this crime.
In the case of Sean Luke’s murder, the opportunity arguably lay in the seemingly innocent way six-year-old Sean Luke was left alone with older boys in the community.
Culturally, more protection would have been given to girl children in those situations, but Sean’s unfortunate death has shown that older boys would commit the act of sodomy, then mortally wound Sean to perhaps eliminate him as a witness against them.
Regardless of the motivation, or whether the killer knew Mercedez, T&T needs to get a grip on preventing these sorts of heinous crimes from taking place. At the level of prevention, parents should be given more community support for the transportation and care of children, and we should all come together as a community to ensure the protection of our nation’s children.
