The Year was 1994. Unfortunately the “good” people of Mason City, Iowa had just found a local man NOT-GUILTY of shaking my 10 month old son to death…a crime that was concluded by DCI, Mason City Police Department, The State of Iowa Attorney General’s office and Department of Criminal Investigations (DCI) to have ONLY been committed by him. The man was the new boyfriend of my then ex-girlfriend…you may know of her…she still lives right here in good old River City. Through this trial, leading medical experts from the University of Iowa and Minneapolis Children’s Hospital helped Mason City learn about a new form of violence titled “Shaken Baby Syndrome”.
The entire thing rolled me over to a boil. I had been slowly simmering for years prior to that…my family wasn’t entirely sane, and I had a dickens of a time sorting out my upbringing and my new found “friends” with their penchant for alcohol and substances. I admit I was troubled…but I was also talented, good looking, and had a good heart. I made some bad decisions along the way, and racked up a few “Driving Under Suspension” charges, along with a Possession of Schedule 1 Controlled Substance, for having a few “hits” of LSD in my pants pocket, after returning from a Grateful Dead show, stopped by an officer, who knew I shouldn’t be driving. They were all victimless crimes and since they hurt no one but (potentially) me, I still don’t consider them a valid assessment of my character.
When the murder occurred, (January 14, 1993) I was in Northern Virginia, about to start community college. I had been seeing a counselor on an outpatient basis and taking some Zoloft, which gave me a good zing and helped me feel better about myself. I was a very spirited young man with a lively intellect. I liked to debate and philosophize over a good cup of coffee and the morning sun. At times, with my conga-drum in hand, I would occasionally smoke some marijuana and go deep within myself and play. I even started recording my dreams in a daily journal…getting up each morning and jotting them down on the personal computer in the basement, where I lived in my parent’s townhome. It was during those recordings of dreams when things began to turn for the worse, while remaining sublime.
Around October of 1992, (3 months prior to the murder) I began jotting down some dreams involving my baby son. Strange ones collaged together…he was in the hospital on a respirator, his tiny lungs kept deflating with air, and I had to bend down and give him mouth to mouth resuscitation to keep filling them…then another one, a dream of being in Minneapolis gathered around a mortuary table with my family, an unknown family member on the table, with their insides cut out…another one involved a dream of my then ex-girlfriend having another baby with some other man and naming him “Tony”. These were all spaced out in between other dreams over several weeks within the months. I recorded them chronologically and saved them on 3.5” disk. I used a system to demarcate when one scene “flashed” onto the next. I would simply write FLASH ñ in between each dream sequence that I could remember.
What did these dreams have to do with the murder of a child? I’ll tell you.
The baby turned blue in the face, quit breathing, and had to be resuscitated by Snell’s Ambulance Service on January 14th, 1993 in an apartment complex off to the side of Hy-Vee East and Drug Town where the child lived with my ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend. His heart had stopped beating, but someone – either Snell’s Ambulance, or Mercy hospital managed to start it again and keep it going. No one knows precisely how long he went without oxygen…but he was dead and dying and it didn’t look good. He was airlifted to the Minneapolis Children’s Hospital and placed in immediate intensive care. He had breathing tubes inserted and machines were breathing for him, but his heart managed to continue beating on its own. Problem was he was brain dead. They couldn’t find any electrical activity. The expert doctor told me that unfortunately the trauma was too great to his brain stem, and it caused brain death. Although his heart was beating and he looked calm and peaceful, if they were to stop the respirator, he would not breathe on his own and soon die.
The doctor asked the baby’s mother and me if we would be willing to donate his organs. I was unwilling to quit and give up. I refused to let them pull the plug. I thought that perhaps over time and with much prayer and help from above, that perhaps he would become healed enough to get off the respirator and one day open his eyes. You have to understand this was in a time frame of only a few days…not several weeks, or months. The hospital doctors made the prognosis that he would never regain functioning and would be in a permanent vegetative state. I disagreed, and still do to this day. Budget concerns…baby on welfare with no insurance…it could have been a combination of many factors as to why the hospital staff wanted to keep things moving along.
I capitulated, and signed the release form to harvest his organs so that others may live.
Now back to my dreams. You may be able to say -”Okay that’s pretty eerie. You had a dream of the baby needing assistance to keep breathing – that was the respirator at the hospital and the resuscitation by the ambulance…and you had a dream of everyone gathered around the mortuary table in Minneapolis with the insides of a family member being cut out – that was your son’s organs being harvested in Minneapolis…but what about the dream where your ex girlfriend had a new baby and named it Tony?” – The priest in our church had driven up from Mason City and told me that the baby’s death coincided with St. Anthony’s Name Day, and that his spiritual name would be Antonio. January 17 – Antonios, Antonia, Antonis (Anthony) http://www.sfakia-crete.com/sfakia-crete/greeknamedays.html . A cold chill ran up my spine.
The ride back to Mason City was somber, and full of efficacious trivial self comforts by some members in the automobile. I preferred to remain silent and didn’t particularly like the games being played…naming the bright star in the western sky for him….that sort of thing. He was gone. Something traumatic happened to him.
After the funeral, I returned to Northern Virginia stunned and isolated. I had gone into my own private world and could not be reached. Everything was a blur. Nothing had changed on the home front. Only now it was worse. Someone killed my baby in a direct unavoidable F— YOU fashion. I had some enemies back in Mason City prior…mostly by their doing ñ not mine. Some bully types in a Canis Familiaris named posse…but I had no idea that anyone would hate me enough to want to kill an innocent child. It was too difficult to digest.
I did hear the mother and her new boyfriend were involved in methamphetamine – something far beyond acceptable to the typical alternative hippy crowd that I surrounded myself with. They were involved with something darker and more sinister. Violence, drugs, and hate were the surrounding ambience of this new bunch. There was no love, talent, acceptance, and creative genius that flowed within them that marked the times before. These people fought all the time, sniffed stuff up their noses, and prided themselves on who was the “baddest” and toughest…not who was the most creative or original. My poor baby was in the midst of this horror show and at the time, there was nothing I could do about it…nothing anyone could do about it, for none of us saw this coming save for a few premonition dreams that I shamefully could not piece together in time to rescue the child. People would have thought me crazy anyway had I invoked my dreams as a reason to strip the child from its mother. She had told me when the child was 2 months old that she hated me and wanted me gone, out of her life. Since I had no job and was homeless…and had nothing to offer…I left.
End of Part One
Peter Spektrum|
