Parents routinely obsess over the cost of when a child does right, such as qualifying for expensive universities. But during the last decade, the costs incurred when a child does wrong has gotten a lot of attention from law enforcement officials and politicians.
Lawmakers from the Chicago suburbs all the way to Springfield have upped the ante, even as the federal Justice Department was reporting a continuing drop in juvenile crime to its lowest rate since 1986.
In 1998, state lawmakers raised to $2,500 from $1,000 the amount a parent can be sued for as compensation for a child’s wrong doing, plus court and attorneys’ fees, under the Parental Responsibility Law.
Starting in the early 1990s, municipalities across the state began passing their own parental-responsibility ordinances, all basically designed to put parents on notice after a first offense by children that if parents don’t take steps to correct the situation — whether curfew violations or underage drinking — they can be penalized financially. The local laws impose penalities similar to the state’s, and police chiefs swear by those ordinances as effective deterrents.
But parents should not think this is the extent of the damage to which their children can expose them. Bigger money in youthful malfeasance often lies outside parental responsibility laws, and it falls under three categories: plea bargains involving restitution, civil findings of parental liability for aiding or permitting a child’s wrongdoing, and simply spending whatever it takes to get a child back on the right track, or at least trying to control the damage they do.
The last one is perhaps the most common, the hush-hush category hidden in the family closet.
One Villa Park mother figures she spent at least $20,000 to get her son out of trouble. An executive with a Fortune 200 company, she said her battle was to keep her son away from gang life.
Among her expenses was paying someone to watch her house to make sure he stayed put after his arrest for gang activities, shipping him off to a relative to get him away from gang influence and sending him to parochial school upon his return. Plus there were the psychiatrist, the lawyer and the fines.
“I took ownership over my son’s actions,” said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous. “I have paid a fortune to correct the problems my son caused. I’m not a parent who doesn’t care.”
Now her six-year struggle is over, and her 19-year-old son has graduated from high school and has a job.
She reported that he recently told her: ” `Mom, I’m so impressed with you. I gave you a lot of trouble. But I have a lot of respect for you, because you hung in there and didn’t give up on me.”
Margaret and James Millea never gave up hope for son John, now 37, but they did tell him to leave.
John became an example of how a kid can turn a tragedy into a fairy tale. Now a successful Pittsburgh advertising and public relations executive, Millea grew up in South Bend, Ind., and in Pittsburgh, where he spent his high school years — what there were of them.
From age 13 through 20, he went on a bender with alcohol and drugs. The beginning of his slide from honor roll student to addict came just after his first semester as a freshman in a public high school after attending Catholic elementary schools.
Margaret and James Millea, now of Playa del Rey, Calif., said John’s move from the protected parochial environment to the relative anonymity of a large public high school proved too much for the teen.
“But I don’t blame anybody else,” Margaret Millea said. “He was responsible. In the ’70s, schools weren’t as cognizant about drug abuse.”
Today the Milleas cannot begin to recall the thousands of dollars they spent on family counseling, including their five younger children and themselves, plus the tuition to keep the other children in private schools for safe keeping. There also were fines and other penalties for John’s various scrapes with the law.
John dropped out of school in his junior year, working as a cook to pay for his drug and alcohol habits. Finally, when he was 20, his parents booted him out of the house, fearing his influence on his younger siblings.
“I began to realize I was being a fool,” Margaret said. “Everything was falling apart. I had suffered a loss of control. I just absolutely did not know how to deal with it. I took John aside one day and said, `I love you, but this is my house, and if you don’t want to obey the rules, you’re out.’ “
John rented a room from a friend but within about a year was back home and recovering, a point he reached on his own when he found that alcohol would not make him drunk anymore.
“I came home with my tail between my legs,” John remembered, “and said, `I’ve had enough of this.’ “
After getting his General Equivalency Diploma and recovering with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, he went on to the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, where he graduated with a 3.7 grade-point average and a bachelor’s degree in communications.
The Milleas said they had tried everything they could think of and got to a point where they had to cut their losses for the sake of the rest of the family.
In some cases, however, there comes a point when love goes blind, and the financial consequences can be astronomical.
Two high-profile cases involved allegations that the parents had gone too far and, in effect, helped in their children’s crimes.
One case was the $1 million settlement by Laurie Dann’s parents, who had been accused of failing to intervene before their adult child’s deadly shooting rampage at a Winnetka school in 1988.
The parents of the 2nd-grade boy who was killed by Dann sued Dann’s parents, who eventually settled, with most of the $1 million being paid through a personal liability provision in their homeowner’s insurance, according to a lawyer in the case.
But simply being her parents didn’t make them liable.
“Ordinarily, your responsibility for what your child does is fairly limited,” said Howard Schaffner, a partner in Hofeld and Schaffner, the Chicago firm that filed the suit. “Simply having a child who does something bad would not expose you to the kind of liability that Dann’s parents were exposed to. It’s when you behave in a negligent way that allows your child to go out and cause harm.”
Dann, at age 30, was living with her parents at the time and was known to be mentally unstable.
Before the day she entered the school and started shooting, the police had wanted to take away her guns, Schaffner said, but her parents said they would take care of them. The suit also charged that the parents failed to act on a psychiatrist’s recommendation to commit Dann and also withheld information that would have permitted authorities to commit her.
The rest is history so jarring that it became the watershed moment for the locking of school doors during daylight hours.
“The most important thing that you have to keep in mind,” Schaffner said, “is you don’t have liability because you’re a bad parent. You have liability because you’ve done something dangerous. The fact that your child might be unusual or strange doesn’t subject you to liability.
“You have to be immediately involved in the conduct. It’s unique that the conduct of a parent would reach the level where they would be subject to liability. Parenting is an art at best. The fact that you may be good or bad at it doesn’t subject you to liability.”
The other case was a wrongful-death suit involving David Biro, whose parents settled a lawsuit against them for $300,000 after their 16-year-old son killed a young Winnetka couple in 1990 with a gun stolen from his lawyer’s office. He is serving a life term. Survivors of the couple sued, charging that the parents had allowed Biro to leave a psychiatric hospital against the hospital’s wishes and despite a history of violence.
John Corbett, the Chicago attorney who represented the father and sister of one of the victims, said, “You have to have a good set of factual circumstances to go after the parents. The parents in this case did a lot to take control away from authorities. Normally a parent does not have a duty to control a child unless they know about the child’s dangerous propensities and they take away the control of others to do something about it. Lots of authorities warned those parents about trouble.
“You certainly don’t want to penalize responsible parents who have difficult children.”
A case close to Dann’s in shock value was the July rampage by racist Benjamin N. Smith, 21, a Wilmette native who over a two-day spree killed two people and wounded nine others in Illinois and Indiana before killing himself, as did Dann.
Named in a suit by the family of a shooting victim who survived were Smith’s parents, who have stated their revulsion and regret for their son’s crimes.
But personal-injury attorneys say that any link between Smith’s behavior and parental responsibility may be difficult to prove. Dann lived with her parents; Smith did not.
That put Dann’s parents in a special position to see her dangerous behavior, whether she was a relative or not. The same principle that applied in Dann’s case could have been applied even if she had simply been someone renting a room from the parents, according to prominent Chicago personal injury attorney Philip Corboy. There was no particular significance in the familial relationship.
Speaking of the Smith case, Corboy said, “If the mother and father of that shooter did nothing wrong, they’re not responsible for a child who goes out and does something like that. I do not know of any legal doctrine under which I as a parent can be held responsible for an adult child, unless for all those years I taught him murder, rape, taught him how to use guns. Then the child would become my `agent,’ ” he said, referring to the legal principle of agency, in which one person carries out the wishes of another.
In the Smith lawsuit, a judge has said that, to move forward, the suit must more closely tie Smith’s rampage to his parents.
DeKalb attorney Richard D. Larson, a former juvenile judge in Kane and DeKalb Counties, said that although the scenario may be rare, a parent in the position of harboring and abetting a dangerous child “runs the risk of losing all your earthly goods. If your child kills or seriously injures someone, you’re talking about a verdict that could be far in excess of what any homeowner’s policy would cover. (Homeowner’s insurance typically contains a personal-liability provision.)
“There is a problem of denial on the part of the parents, not wanting to accept that their child is a sociopath and therefore trying to minimize his acting-out behavior, and it bursts out of control.”
Of course, seeing what other parents are doing wrong can be a lot easier than seeing one’s own faults.
“It’s real easy to be stupid when it comes to your own kids,” said Dan Kummer, auto-insurance manager for the National Association of Independent Insurers, a trade organization in Des Plaines.
Perhaps the most dangerous scenario financially is one that would fall outside insurability. John Eager, director of claims services for the insurers association, explained such a situation: “Let’s say your kid has three traffic tickets to begin with. You mean to sit down with him and discuss this, but instead he says there is a party and he’s begging to go. You give in and give him the keys.”
Already, the traffic tickets should have shown the parent that a child may not be trustworthy with the car. In other words, the wakeup call has already come, and this isn’t going to look good in court, should it end up there.
The senario continues: “When he’s at the party, there’s a fight that spills into the street. Your kid is involved in the dispute and decides to get into the car and go after the other kid. He didn’t intend to kill the other kid but does in fact strike the kid and kill him with the vehicle. Your insurance company might say there is an exclusion for intentionally causing bodily injury.”
Thus, there would be no insurance coverage for the civil liability stemming from the case, according to Eager.
Beyond civil cases, criminal cases involving substantial damage can get costly for parents in out-of-pocket expenses.
Lake County Juvenile Judge Joseph Waldeck explained that one case he saw in his two years on the bench involved parents having to pay $20,000 for damage their child did to a building. In a plea deal, the prosecutor agreed to waive certain charges provided the parents made restitution.
“That’s a dilemma a lot of parents face,” Waldeck said. “They will do anything they can to keep the child out of the Department of Corrections. They agree to be responsible.” Failure to live up to an agreement, he added, would mean a contempt of court finding against the parents.
At the opposite end of the spectrum are parents who want to wash their hands of their child and any financial responsibility for mounting a defense, let alone paying restitution. But if a parent refuses to hire a defense attorney though able to afford one, the judge would force the issue. “All minors have to be represented by an attorney. I would order you to hire an attorney,” Waldeck explained.
Cook County Juvenile Judge Martin Agran said, however, that in the majority of the cases he has handled, the parents were so poor that ordering restitution would have been impossible.
“The thought of holding them liable is a waste of time in some areas,” he said. “You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip.”
But one factor he has found to be universal across all demographics, Agran added, is this: “Teenage boys and probably teenage girls are the dumbest people on Earth. They feel totally invincible. They think nothing can hurt them.”
And the cost of ignorance can be pricey.
TWO ROUTES TO LIABILITY?
Dan Kummer, auto-insurance manager for the National Association of Independent Insurers, a trade organization in Des Plaines, and John Eager, director of claims services for the association, explained the principles that can involve parental liability.
1. Negligent entrustment. “If a kid has a history of drinking or similar trouble and you decide to give him the keys to the car, if he goes off and kills somebody, the court can find negligent entrustment on your part,” Kummer said. “You should have known that this is a bad situation. But that goes beyond a son or daughter. It could be anybody. If you know they shouldn’t drive, there can be a certain amount of negligence that can come back to you.”
2. Agency. Something as simple as sending a child to the store for a loaf of bread makes the child an agent for you, and a car accident on the way to the store can bring liability to your doorstep.
“That, unfortunately, is the environment we live in,” Kummer said. “Everybody’s getting sued.”
— Ross Werland
