People in the tiny village of Savona still let their young romp outside as country children do everywhere, and they go to bed at night with their doors unlocked. But their children's play has been less free and their sleep less peaceful since a fifth-grader named Eric Smith beat 4-year-old Derrick Robie to death in a thicket in the center of town.
Nothing like it had ever happened in Savona, not that anyone could remember. But in the months after that killing last summer, a series of violent incidents deepened the sense of shock.In November, just outside Savona, a 15-year-old boy killed his older brother during a quarrel over a bottle of medicine. That same week, two high school boys in a nearby town fought over the honor of a girl, and during a wild car chase, one of their friends was wounded by gunfire. In January, just down the road from Savona, a 17-year-old youth blinded himself in a suicide attempt.
Such tragedies are familiar an hour's drive away in Rochester, or in New York City or Chicago or San Francisco. But in Savona, a middle-class hamlet of 300 homes set among the wooded hills of Steuben County, a killing by a teenager makes a stark imprint on the community's imagination.
The violence had not arrived from somewhere else. It had not been the result of outside predation. It had happened at home. And it had been done by local kids.
Today, the people of Savona find that they have become part of a national crisis - an upwelling of violence by children and adolescents that has brought grief to cities and small towns alike.
From New York to California, Americans are trying to comprehend how a generation of rage could have grown up in their midst. People fear for their children and, increasingly, they are afraid of them. They look for answers, but often the search leads only to bigger questions.
"I think kids are more violent today, period," said Sharon Strong, a Savona village trustee. "I think they see a lot of violence everywhere. I think it's scary, too, to be a kid. It's sad that we're growing up like this. We've lost a lot of innocence, for young people and adults, too."
By every measure, the problem is alarming: If the historical pattern linking crime rates to the youth population had remained consistent, experts say, the nation's level of violent crime would have waned by the late 1980s.
Instead, the homicide rate has increased by more than 25 percent since 1985, largely because killings by teenagers are far out of proportion to their shrinking numbers. Just last week, the FBI reported that the murder rate rose 3 percent nationwide in 1993, an increase analysts blame on teenagers.
According to researchers at Northeastern University in Boston, homicides committed by youths 14 to 17 climbed from 969 in 1984 to a record 2,362 in 1992. Another Northeastern study found that in the years 1985 through 1991, arrest rates for criminal homicide increased 140 percent among 13- and 14-year-old boys, 217 percent among 15-year-olds. The numbers were almost as high for older teenagers.
In Steuben County and across the country, people are horrified and angry. Many in Savona support the decision to try 13-year-old Eric Smith as an adult. They were struck by the brutality of the slaying and fear he could hurt others. Others are torn between the impulse to punish him and the instinct to protect a child in trouble.
Eric is a confessed killer, but people here know him as a red-haired kid with oversized glasses who pedaled his bike down shady streets, impressed his school principal with his willingness to listen to advice, played peewee sports and honked "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" on his trombone in the school band. His flaws had been apparent but, to most people, not especially dramatic.
"I had a really hard time accepting Eric had done it," said Sally Yanias, a Savona resident who counsels abused women and children. "I knew him when he wrestled my son when he was a little kid. Such a cute little kid. It absolutely blew my mind.
"I think it would have been better," she said, "if he had been a stranger."
Children are born with a remarkable ability to adapt. The overwhelming majority of society's most violence-prone members - teenage boys scarred by neglect and abuse - reach adulthood without catastrophe.
Child-development experts say two crucial factors can help a child endure brutal stress: consistent, caring supervision by an adult and a trusting rapport with one's peers.
For Eric Smith and for Elias Burlew, the boy who killed his brother in a fight over some sore-throat medicine, instability was a part of growing up. Both were children of divorce. The men in their homes were temperamental. Elias suffered a traumatic injury to his self-image, and psychiatric reports suggest that Eric did, too.
Some people argue that the forces that shaped these youths were in motion even before they were born. The killings, they say, both had an element of fate. Says one Smith family acquaintance: "The tragedy of a broken family is, it's passed down from generation to generation."