`We don’t deserve this. All I want is for it to go away.”
That’s Amy Grossberg in a letter to her then-boyfriend, Brian Peterson. The “this” and “it” she refers to is their baby boy, the one she was pregnant with at the time. The one the New Jersey teenagers killed moments after his birth. The one that was found in a garbage bin, wrapped in a trash bag, with his skull broken.
Grossberg and Peterson were sentenced to prison July 9. With time off for good behavior, they could be out in as little as 18 months. Of course, the baby they killed will still be dead.
The leniency of the sentences aside, the thing that vexes me is the question I’ve struggled with ever since this all came to light two years ago: “How could they have done that?”
I find myself asking that a lot lately, especially where the misdeeds of children are concerned. I asked it in 1994 when 10- and 11-year-old Chicago boys dropped a 5-year-old 14 stories to his death because he refused to steal candy for them. Asked it again in 1995, when a group of kids in Silsbee, Texas, chased a horse into a barbed wire fence, clubbed it to death with tree branches and rammed a stick up its nostril. Asked it repeatedly these last months as adolescent maniacs shot up a series of schools.
“How could they do that?”
I mean, some crimes you can almost understand. Not condone, not excuse, but understand.
Sudden passion caused the murder. Greed and opportunity led to the robbery. Twisted as these motives are, they are not beyond comprehension.
But what causes someone–especially a child–to commit crimes as depraved as these we’ve recently seen? Crimes where the violence is extreme and the gain minimal or even non-existent? What is it inside the human conscience that breaks down at such moments?
I didn’t get it. Until, that is, I read what Grossberg said: “We don’t deserve this. All I want is for it to go away.”
And I wonder, could it really be that simple? Could this awful thing have happened just because Amy Grossberg was a spoiled brat?
That’s certainly the conclusion of the judge and the prosecutor, who described Grossberg as a vain, egocentric girl, mortified at the notion that her unwanted pregnancy might be exposed to her upper-crust family and neighbors. The baby was an embarrassment, and an intrusion upon her perfect life.
There’s something off-putting in the very mundaneness of it, something disconcerting in the notion that so monstrous an evil could spring from so unexceptional a place. But at the same time, there’s something about it that resonates, makes me wonder if at least part of what drives some children to acts of depravity isn’t as blandly simple as that: They’re spoiled.
Not in the sense of material wealth. Rather, spoiled in the sense that they live lives of entitlement, their every waking thought revolving around themselves–their problems, their needs, their wants, their gratification. We blame so many dysfunctions on low self-esteem, but I wonder if some don’t suffer the opposite affliction, if some aren’t so steeped in self-esteem that they can’t see or sympathize beyond the borders of their own lives. Can’t begin to respect the needs or feelings of others. Instead, others become objects to be moved–or removed–as necessary.
Of course that is, I’m forced to admit, a description that fits many who are neither young nor murderous. Indeed, one could argue that being spoiled is the all-American affliction. Our culture celebrates acquisition, treats self-interest as the only interest that matters. We live, many of us, in a state of have plenty and want more.
So if Amy Grossberg is a spoiled brat, she’s our spoiled brat, an American child right to the top of her selfish, empty little head. And the banality of her motivation fills me with as much recognition as revulsion.
As a precious gift grew in her womb, her best response was, “We don’t deserve this.”
And you know something? She was right.
