Story of starving 4-year-old defies any explanation

When my now 20-year-old son was 2, he sneaked into the kitchen. He got up on a chair, and with chubby fingers he stripped all the frosting from a birthday cake I’d made for his father.

I caught him as he was licking the last of the icing from his hands. I remember trying not to laugh. I asked, “What are you doing?”

His answer is such a funny memory that we invariably repeat it whenever there’s a birthday in the family.

“Mmmm, cake,” my sticky toddler said.

Tuesday was no one’s birthday at my house. Thoughts of my little frosting thief came vividly back as I read about a 4-year-old so malnourished that his mother told a Herald reporter “he literally is a skeleton.”

Snohomish County sheriff’s detectives found the boy last week in a south Everett apartment. His father, Danny Jay Abegg, was arrested Friday for investigation of first-degree criminal mistreatment.

When I first read about it Monday, I scoured the news of this child, a 22-pound 4-year-old now being treated at Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle. I looked for a reason. Why on earth? I found none.

Tuesday’s Herald offered a mind-boggling explanation. The grandmother of the child, who lives in California, said the boy’s father told her the child had been “sneaking into food.”

Reading that, my mind flooded back to the ruined birthday cake. I remembered that last day of January so long ago. That afternoon, I cleaned my toddler’s hands and face. I took him outside with his big sister, and we built a snowman.

That’s not to say I have never lost my temper with a child. With three kids, of course I have. Every parent makes mistakes.

In the news, we see the worst. We see stories of neglect and abuse so awful as to be absolutely mystifying.

I’ll never forget about Eli Creekmore, the Everett 3-year-old who died in 1986 from beatings at the hands of his father, Darren Creekmore. Out of that case came the state’s homicide by abuse law.

In King County, there is the Kent woman accused of drinking herself into unconsciousness as her two babies starved. Prosecutors recently refiled second-degree murder charges against Marie Robinson. Police say she was surrounded by beer cans when the her sons’ bodies were found in 2004.

Earlier, a judge dismissed charges and said Robinson was mentally unfit for trial.

Mental illness, anger, alcohol, I’ve read terrible explanations. I’ve shook my head in disbelief.

Reading of the emaciated boy rescued last week, my fury was visceral. It’s not overnight, in some flash of rage, that a 4-year-old comes to weigh what an 11-month-old baby should weigh. It takes time to starve.

Food is one of the most basic human needs. To nourish a child is the most primitive impulse. It’s an animal instinct – no parenting class required.

Withholding food from a hungry child may fall under a legal umbrella of first-degree criminal mistreatment. I don’t know, ask a lawyer. Anyone with a shred of humanity would say that starving a child when food is available falls under a moral umbrella of unrelenting cruelty.

Monday was busy. I managed to hear a speaker at the Everett Public Library. At a meeting of the Everett Woman’s Book Club, Seattle author Debra Dean read aloud from her novel “The Madonnas of Leningrad.”

In Dean’s book, an old woman remembers her younger life in Leningrad during World War II. The character, Marina, works at the Hermitage Museum. She becomes one of about 2,000 people who take refuge in the museum and safeguard the art as Germans lay siege to their city.

As Leningrad’s people are starving, Marina remembers a chocolate bar left hidden in her apartment. She makes a treacherous walk across the city to fetch it, planning to give it to her dying uncle. Weak, hungry and alone, she finds the chocolate on a high shelf.

At the library Monday, Dean read these haunting words from her beautiful novel:

“She might have eaten it right there, sitting on the metal footlocker, staring down at this miracle in her hand. No one would know. No one. … She knows that if she unwraps the foil and exposes the chocolate, the last bit of her that is human will die.”

You feed a child. Period.

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.