and prompts users to seek increasingly high levels of sexual stimulation.
On March 30, 1993, around 7 P.M., Kristin said she had to go to the library to study for a class. Her parents, who’d been making calls to try to figure out what happened to their credit cards and checks, decided they needed to settle a few things with Kristin before she went anywhere.
Kristin decided otherwise and tried to leave. Ralph told her he wanted to look in her backpack, but she refused. Ralph tugged the pack away from her and unzipped it. He pulled out a white box and demanded to know what was in it. Kristin said it was a present for her mother. But when Ralph opened the box, he found a glass pipe, a plastic pen casing, and some razor blades inside. He demanded to know how she could have lied to him like this. She had betrayed his trust.
Ralph became enraged and started yelling as he hit her repeatedly on the upper arm, hard enough to leave a bruise. Then he grabbed one of her sandals off her bedroom floor and hit her on the butt with it. Constance yelled at him to stop, but she did nothing to pull him away. At some point, Constance slapped Kristin in the face.
Kristin ran into the kitchen, picked up a knife, and tried to cut her wrists with it until Ralph wrestled it out of her hands. She turned and ran back upstairs, where she locked herself in the bathroom and made superficial cuts in her wrists with a razor blade.
“I’m worthless,” she cried through the door. “You’d be better off without me.”
Because the cuts weren’t deep, Constance and Ralph determined she didn’t need medical treatment.
Sometime in the next few days, Kristin showed the bruise on her arm to a couple of girls at school and told them her parents had “beaten on her” during an argument. She started banging on the lockers and talking about committing suicide.
The two girls, concerned about Kristin’s recent odd behavior, went to the office to talk to a counselor, Leopoldina Abreu, a Cuban mother and grandmother to whom the high school yearbook staff dedicated their 1993 edition. School officials immediately reported a potential case of child abuse to the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and to the Claremont Police Department.
Larry Horowitz, a police officer who was working on a master’s degree in social work at the time, got the call around lunchtime on April 2, while he was out on patrol. When he arrived at the high school, Kristin and her two girlfriends were sitting outside the office of Barbara Salyer, the dean of discipline, waiting for him. Horowitz went into Salyer’s office and closed the door. Given the bruise and Kristin’s lack of disciplinary problems, Salyer was concerned her story might be true. Horowitz called the girls in one at a time and interviewed them.
The first girl told him that she and her friend had grown very worried about Kristin because her behavior had changed so much over the past week. So they talked to their counselor about it, and she decided to bring Kristin in for some help.
Kristin’s parents didn’t like the two girls, one of them told Horowitz. Describing Constance as “very curt” with them, she said that Constance wouldn’t “allow Kristin to talk with us or do anything with us. They don’t seem like very friendly people.”
Horowitz sent the two girlfriends on their way and spent the next forty-five minutes talking to Kristin. She seemed flat, numb, and depressed. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, and he had a hard time establishing a rapport with her. To him, all of these indicators pointed to a problem at home. He spent a few minutes asking for basic information, such as which grade she was in and where she lived, before proceeding to the hard questions.
Kristin told him that she had confided in her girlfriends, but she said, “I guess they wanted me to get into trouble, so they went to Mrs. Abreu and told her what was going on. I was brought into the office, but I didn’t want to bring up family matters with the school.”
This was the first time her father had hit her, she said. Most of the problems with her parents stemmed from their complaining about her friends. But this time, she said, it went further than usual, and her mother called her “worthless” and “a slut.” She said she didn’t want to see her parents get into trouble over their fight; she thought they could work the whole thing out over spring break.
Horowitz examined her arm and wrote in his notes that she had “pronounced bruising to the upper arm.” He took photos of the area but decided the injury wasn’t serious. He did notice, however, that she had fresh wounds on her knuckles—apparently from punching the lockers—and appeared to have picked at sores on the back of her hands. He figured drugs were involved.
She told him she felt safe going home because things had already improved.
“My dad even welcomed me back into the family on Thursday night,” Kristin told him.
Horowitz told Kristin to inform her parents about their conversation and to warn them he’d be calling that night to set up an interview. Back at the station, he followed police procedures by notifying the child abuse hotline of the incident and preparing a written report of suspected child abuse.
Around six o’clock, Kristin called to clarify her story. She said the bruise on her arm was really caused by her dad grabbing her as she tried to leave the house, not from hitting her as she’d said before. Horowitz thought she was backtracking to minimize what had happened, posturing to protect her parents.
When he called the Rossum house at 7:15 P.M., he told Constance that he was investigating a reported case of child abuse and made an appointment to meet with her and Ralph at home around 8 the next morning.
The Rossums lived in a white, two-story house at the end of a cul-de-sac on Weatherford Court, a short, quiet street with well-kept lawns and flowerbeds. In 2004 the house had red rose bushes growing in the front yard.
Horowitz talked with Constance and Ralph for about an hour in the family room off the kitchen, while Kristin stayed in her bedroom. He found the Rossums to be quite cooperative. After their anniversary cruise, Constance told him, she and Ralph learned that Kristin was using drugs, smoking cigarettes, and having parties for friends who stole checks and credit cards. The incident happened when they tried to confront her about all of this.
“Ralph got mad and did hit her in the arm,” Constance said. “I admit that I slapped her in the face, but she tried to hit me first.”
Constance explained how Kristin tried to cut her wrists, first with a knife and then with razor blades, but that she had made only superficial cuts, so they didn’t take her to see a doctor.
“I was afraid of what would happen if we took her to the hospital,” she told Horowitz. “We don’t know who to go to or what to do.”
Then it was Ralph’s turn. He said he found it unusual that Kristin had asked to use the car to go to the library because her driving privileges had been suspended due to “her actions while we were gone.” It was also unusual, he said, for her to carry a backpack. When he found the drug paraphernalia inside, he said, he began tugging on her arm, demanding to know the truth.
“I admit that I took my open hand and struck her three or four times on the upper arm,” he told Horowitz. “She told me what had been going on and apologized. Kristin was visibly upset and started talking about killing herself.”
After things had settled down later that evening, Ralph told him, they all agreed to work on the situation.
“I realize that there’s a lot going on and that we need some help,” Ralph said.
Horowitz
