Fatal Means for Children to End Abuse : Parricide Cases Evoke Conflict in Sympathy, Need for Punishment

Sociz (Johnny) Junatanov says he could not run away from the father who he says chained, beat, threatened and humiliated him for 18 years. But there came a day when, finally, “it was too much. I felt I was going to explode,” and he decided that killing his tormentor was the only way out.

However, the father survived a stabbing and an injection of battery acid, and the son was arrested after trying to hire an undercover cop to finish the job with a rifle.

The teen-ager, whose trial on charges of attempted murder began last week in Los Angeles Superior Court, has admitted to police and others that he tried to have his father killed. But Junatanov, now 19, pleaded not guilty, saying that he acted in self-defense. He is gambling that a sympathetic jury will believe him when he says that he acted in a desperate attempt to survive.

His father has denied ever hurting or threatening him.

Legal experts say cases involving violence toward parents are becoming more common. While most abused children either endure the mistreatment or run away, many finally reach a breaking point, lashing out in murderous rage.

Nearly 400 homicides a year--about 2% of the nation’s total--are parricides, murders of parents by their children, legal experts say. Many of them come after years of such relentless child abuse that some psychiatrists consider them “a sane reaction to an insane environment.”

For example, in recent months in the Los Angeles area alone:

- A 17-year-old Glendale youth, Arnel Salvatierra, has been charged with the shooting death of his father, a Filipino newspaper executive, in February. He tried to disguise the crime as a political assassination, police said. The youth has pleaded not guilty, and the case goes to trial this fall.

The boy’s mother testified in pretrial hearings that the elder Salvatierra regularly beat his son with a belt and locked him in a closet for punishment and physically and verbally abused and threatened her and their other children as well.

- A 17-year-old Canoga Park youth, Torran Lee Meier, strangled his mother and shoved a burning car containing her body and his 8-year-old half-brother over a Malibu cliff last October. His brother survived. Meier pleaded not guilty, focusing his defense on psychiatric testimony that brain damage prevented him from fleeing his psychologically abusive mother or releasing his rage against her in normal ways. Witnesses testified that she harangued him for hours, forced him to do chores in the middle of the night and repeatedly berated him as being a “faggot.”

Relatives, friends and neighbors rallied to the boy’s support, and jurors, in finding him guilty of voluntary manslaughter and several lesser charges, described his life as “a psychological nightmare.” He will be sentenced in November.

- A 16-year-old Fullerton youth, Donald Coday, admitted shooting his father eight times in March of last year, but he said he acted to escape punishment and to end years of physical and emotional abuse by both parents. He was found guilty of first-degree murder in a non-jury trial and sentenced to the California Youth Authority for a maximum of eight years.

Dozens of similar cases have made headlines throughout the country in the past few years, as a growing number of teen-agers choose to defend their killing of an abusive parent as self-defense or temporary insanity. Most are convicted of their crime, although the severity of the charges and sentences vary widely--ranging from manslaughter to murder, from probation to 15 years in prison.

Suspended Sentence

Perhaps the most unusual sentence was that of Robert Lee Moody of La Puente, a self-described “born-again” Christian convicted in 1983 of the shotgun killing of his violent and sexually abusive father. After a non-jury trial, the 19-year-old was given a suspended four-year prison sentence with five years’ probation--and ordered to spend at least two years abroad working as a Christian missionary.

The discrepant outcomes of essentially similar cases appear to be the result of the specific circumstances surrounding each murder, the region in which the crime occurred, the sophistication of the defense, the makeup of the jury, the reaction of the judge, and, perhaps most importantly, the strength of the evidence of severe child abuse, say legal experts familiar with recent cases throughout the United States.

“The issue becomes, ‘How bad did it (the abuse) get?’ ” said Los Angeles attorney Paul Mones, author of the only legal review and analysis of parricide cases in this country.

The study, published last year in a clinical textbook, “Unhappy Families,” and reprinted in several professional journals, focused on seven recent cases and explored the role of child abuse in such crimes. (Mones, former legal director of the Santa Monica-based Public Justice Foundation, specializes in children’s rights and has worked on dozens of parricide cases during the past three years. He is a consultant on the Junatanov case).

Even when the facts are undisputed, parricide cases are difficult for everyone involved, since both murder and child abuse are crimes.

For example, in placing one young killer on 15 years’ probation, a Jacksonville, Fla., judge told him: “I do not want you to think in any way that what you have done has been condoned by society. (But) I believe that the chain of violence and abuse that led to this end were brought about by your father’s actions rather than by yours.”

‘Account to Society’

But a Wyoming judge who sentenced another youth to five to 15 years in prison for a similar crime explained: “I’m sure we all have compassion. . . . (But) regardless of the circumstances . . . no one should be permitted to act as prosecutor, jury, judge, court of appeal and executioner without being called to account to society.”

He said he feared that granting probation or suspended sentences to children who kill their mothers or fathers would be tantamount to declaring open season on parents.

However, Junatanov’s attorney, Joel Isaacson, a court-appointed lawyer who became involved in the case at the request of the Jewish Committee for Personal Service, said he will try to prove that the youth believed that he had to kill his father or be killed.

The Russian-Jewish Junatanov family had emigrated from southeastern Russia to Hollywood, living in Israel, Belgium and New York along the way, he said. They moved frequently, operating ethnic restaurants featuring dancing by the boys’ mother, Firuza. She fled her husband, Albert, in 1983, claiming he had abused her. She has returned from Israel to testify for her son.

Junatanov said his father forced him to leave school at age 14 to work in the restaurant and that his single attempt at running away ended with his father’s catching him and stripping and beating him in front of their Brooklyn neighbors. He said he was attached to a chain to prevent any future escapes.

The youth claims that the threats and beatings intensified after Albert Junatanov and his sons moved west and opened a Middle Eastern restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. After witnessing the elder Junatanov’s volatile behavior, the restaurant’s dishwasher suggested a solution, then lined up a drifter from Oklahoma to do the job for $3,000, according to testimony presented at Junatanov’s preliminary hearing last November.

sh Father Stabbed Twice

On a hot afternoon last July, the hired killer walked into the restaurant, bought a soft drink, complained that the video game machine was broken, and stabbed the elder Junatanov twice in the stomach and chest while his sons and customers watched, according to preliminary hearing testimony. But the wounds were not fatal, and the assailant went to the victim’s room at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center to finish the job. He fled when his victim recognized him and pushed the call button above his bed.

Undaunted, the assailant’s girlfriend, a 17-year-old runaway from Oklahoma, was enlisted to help, according to preliminary hearing testimony.

Wearing a nurse’s uniform, she calmly entered Junatanov’s room and injected him with a syringe filled with battery acid. A forensic toxicologist testified that the fluid would have been fatal in minutes--except the needle went into the muscle of his upper arm, not into a vein.

Several weeks later the dishwasher, in jail on an auto theft charge, told police about the murder attempt and introduced an undercover officer--wearing a hidden microphone--to Johnny Junatanov. In a 15-minute conversation in the restaurant’s storeroom, the officer testified at the hearing, Junatanov said he wanted “a job” done on someone, showed the officer a rifle and a photograph of his father, and said he would pay $5,000.

Junatanov was arrested the same night and freely admitted his role in the scheme in a taped confession.

Why didn’t the youth just leave instead?

‘Psychologically Traumatized’

“Because they (Johnny and his brother) were so psychologically traumatized that they didn’t have the self-esteem and confidence to run away,” Isaacson said. “They were under the domination and control of this man. . . . They had no life.”

Isaacson said evidence that his client was a victim of child abuse will come not only from the youth’s testimony and that of numerous other witnesses but also from New York state social service records.

“When I went to child abuse (authorities in New York), nobody helped me out,” the teen-ager told a police investigator on the day that he was arrested last August. “If nobody wants to help us out, we’ll do it ourselves,” he said he and his older brother, Asror, decided. His older brother pleaded guilty to similar charges and has been given probation.

Johnny Junatanov said that when he was 12 years old, his New York schoolteacher noticed his bruised body and marks from the dog leash that his father had tightened around his neck and contacted child abuse authorities. They came to the family’s restaurant, the teen-ager told a reporter last week, “but my father said, ‘This is my kid. I’m gonna bring him up the way I want,’ and he broke my hand that night.”

Shortly thereafter, his father took him out of school and forced him to work in the restaurant 18 hours a day, he said. He was not allowed to go out and had no friends.

Dr. Shervert Frazier, a nationally known expert on violence who directs the National Institute of Mental Health, said the vast majority of children who kill a parent have abusive backgrounds, usually involving an alcoholic parent.

“But there is no such thing as sane killing,” he said, taking issue with some of his colleagues who have defended murder as a sometimes appropriate response to an intolerable situation. “That’s not a solution. If our society reverts to that, then we don’t have laws anymore.”

Frazier said a second category involves children who appear to be model youngsters--compliant, obedient, well-mannered, A-students--although their family relationships are disturbed. They deny and cover up the resentment and hostility that they feel until they reach a breaking point.

Only a fraction of those who commit parricide are psychotic or sociopathic, he said.

The psychiatrist said that while most children who have killed a parent are not likely to ever murder again, they do need treatment--often drug treatment, long-term intensive psychotherapy, social skills training and family therapy.

Mones, whose study focused on the relationship between child abuse and parricide, said victims of child abuse act in one of three ways.

“The majority take the abuse, and become withdrawn, lack self-confidence,” he explained. “And as they get older, they resort to using violence as a problem-solving mechanism--after all, hitting is what works when Mother and Daddy lose their tempers.”

He noted that the Florida judge who gave one youth 15 years’ probation said he decided on such a long period out of fear that the youth might perpetuate the cycle of abuse with his own children.

Many run away from home, Mones said. “The majority of several hundred thousand ‘missing children’ are in fact runaways fleeing from abuse. The majority of those found in runaway shelters have left home to escape abuse. Few have wanderlust; they’re not Huck Finn on the Mississippi.”

And a small but growing number kill their abuser, then argue that their act should be viewed as self-defense.

These youths tend to come from white, middle- and upper-middle-class backgrounds. (Those from lower economic strata, Mones theorizes, usually have public agencies involved in their life and are more likely to know where to go for help).

More than two-thirds of the killers are physically abused boys; more than three-fourths of the victims are fathers. Girls who commit parricide have usually been both sexually and physically abused. The average age at the time of murder is about 15 1/2 or 16, although Mones said he is aware of one 10-year-old.

‘Not Runaways’

“They have none of the classic characteristics of juvenile delinquents,” Mones said. “They’re not runaways, and their worst offense is probably shoplifting or truancy. Most of them are compliant, well-mannered teen-agers of whom people say, ‘It would never be so-and-so.’ ”