Why do people kill babies?

In Newark, California, a community near my last home in that state, a 23-year-old man has been charged with the beating death of his 2-month-old son. While tragic, in the annals of violent childhood death, this scenario isn't particularly unusual. But there is an added twist in the case that causes me to question whether or not the father is the actual culprit.

You see, the man is married and it seems the infant who died was left in the father’s care in his home…the same home he shares with his wife and other son, who is four. The wife was aware of the infant’s existence…and thereby her husband’s infidelity…and was actually home during some of the time the child of her husband’s paramour was in the house.

Now, police investigators have come to the conclusion that it was the father who assaulted and killed the infant and he has been arrested and so charged. But was it him or someone else, someone who had reason to be unhappy with the child’s very existence? It wouldn’t be the first time that a woman had hostile feelings for a child her man fathered on another woman.

Here in South Africa I remember stopping at a red light and reading the headlines a newsboy was holding up. An infant had been murdered during a robbery in local home. Immediately, I was suspicious.

The particulars, spelled out in the headlines and subhead, indicated the child was the only casualty of a daylight home-invasion robbery. Who robs a house and kills only the baby, leaving the adult eye-witnesses alive? Ok, I’m the first to admit that people who commit burglaries in lower-income neighbourhoods are probably not members of the intelligentsia, but c’mon…leave the people who can identify you alive, but kill the baby, who cannot? Something was definitely wrong here.

I mentioned this “clinker” to my husband and he turned to me incredulously. “Who would want to kill a baby?” he asked. “What kind of person would do that?”

I explained to him that there were women out there who would want the death of a child fathered by her boyfriend/husband. They would resent the lifelong connection to another woman, resent the financial drain of child support, resent the interruption of her own life that the child would represent. Instead of an idyllic romance with the man of her dreams, such a woman could easily feel bitter about the role of step-mother being thrust upon her, or the time her man might spend with the child…another woman’s child.

Some women of this nature would simply dump the man and try to find one without all the baggage. Other women might try to create and impose some structure on the relationship with the child and its mother. But there are a few who would seek to remove the obstacle, to remove forever the need for her man to have any connection to a previous love by removing the product of that love.

And so it turned out in the South African story. Dina Rodriguez, unhappy with the existence of her lover’s 6-month-old baby daughter by a previous relationship, conspired to have the baby killed. She hired several young men, provided them with a delivery package for them to use as a ruse to get the family to open the door to them, and the rest is history. Baby Jordan died and Dina’s path to a blissful romance with the child’s father was cleared. Until the police proved exactly what I had suspected on the day I learned of the crime and she was sentenced to spend the remainder of her days in prison.

Why do people kill babies? There are those who smother unwanted newborns and those who kill a child out of frustration with its incessant screaming. There are those whose personal demons lead them to abuse or neglect their children to the point of death, and even those whose religious delusions cause them to believe that killing their children is the will of their deity.

But there are also deeply selfish individuals who have no compunctions about ending the life of an innocent child for nothing more than to further their own agenda, to eliminate what they view as a hindrance to their happiness. Such a woman is Dina Rodriguez, and I would be utterly unsurprised to learn that a certain wife in Newark, California is cut from the very same cloth.