July 4, 2003: St. Paul, Minn.; 24-year-old Naomi Gaines; Threw her 14-month-old twins, Sincere Understanding Allah and Supreme Knowledge Allah, into the Mississippi River, killing one of them, then tried to kill herself. Told police she and the twins would be "better off dead." On "neuroleptic medication."

Sincere Understanding Allah, 14 months, St. Paul, July 4, 2003

Sincere Understanding Allah, 14 months, drowned after his mother, Naomi Gaines, 24, allegedly threw him off the Wabasha Street Bridge during Fourth of July festivities at the Taste of Minnesota. Sincere’s twin brother, Supreme Understanding Allah, survived also being thrown into the Mississippi River.

Gaines also jumped into the water and was rescued along with Supreme Understanding by onlookers at the festival. Sincere could not be found until boaters spotted his body downriver two days later.

Gaines was charged with second-degree murder and attempted murder. Gaines told police in an interview that she wanted to kill herself and didn’t wanted to leave her twin boys behind in a hostile world.

Naomi Gaines received psychiatric treatment last August after she was found wandering the streets with her four children “talking and singing nonsensically,” according to court records.

At a Ramsey County court hearing August 7, 2002, Gaines agreed to voluntarily receive psychiatric treatment and take medication. She was released from those requirements on February 11, 2003.

Gaines also has two children ages 7 and 3, who were out of town with relatives at the time of the incident. Supreme Knowledge is now being cared for by his father. Naomi Gaines was committed to the Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peter for a psychiatric evaluation after a doctor found that she was suffering from psychosis and was unable to care for herself.

She was later sentenced to 19 years for Sincere Understanding’s murder and 14 years for the attempted murder of Supreme Knowledge.

Mom who threw twins in river raises awareness of mental illness

By Curt Brown - StarTribune.com

July 8, 2009

Six years ago on July 4th, Naomi Gaines took her 14-month-old twins from a stroller and tossed them from a St. Paul bridge 60 feet into the Mississippi River. Then she jumped in. This is her story.

Florida Doss was watching fireworks from her 12th-floor apartment, having decided that just for one night it was safe to leave her troubled daughter, Naomi, alone with her twin boys. 

The boys' father, Khalid Allah, also was enjoying the July 4th show along St. Paul's riverfront, unaware that Naomi had hit her breaking point, up on the Wabasha Street Bridge.

Shortly after 9 p.m., she took her 14-month-old boys out of their stroller on the bridge's observation deck, leaned over the railing and dropped them 60 feet into the churning water. Gaines then jumped herself, screaming as she fell.

Bystanders rescued her and one of her sons. The other boy's body was found two days later, 11 miles downstream.

Six years since that night, Gaines' family has rallied around her and her three surviving kids. Their heartache has galvanized her ex-boyfriend, sister and mother to become closer than they ever would have imagined. 

Convinced that postpartum psychosis brought her to the tipping point in a years-long battle with depression and made her do the unthinkable, Gaines and her family hope to spread the word about the dangers of ignoring or misunderstanding mental illness.

'If people were to ask me what happened that day and expect it to make sense, it won't," Gaines said. "What went wrong that day? It wasn't that day. It was months, and possibly even years, prior."

Doss, still wracked with guilt about not being there that night, regularly visits her daughter at the state women's prison in Shakopee.

"Until mental illness is addressed like it's supposed to be, these stories are going to keep happening and keep happening because they just sweep it under the rug," Doss said.

Since Gaines pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for the death of her son, lawmakers have enacted a law that mandates the screening of new mothers for postpartum depression. Hospitals also now give new parents information about the severe mental reactions childbirth can bring. An annual conference on the topic was held last month in Minnesota.

"Naomi Gaines is one of the women who raised awareness about postpartum depression," said Sue Abderholden, director the state's National Alliance on Mental Illness.

'I just sit ... and shake'

Gaines remembers sobbing in her bed at Regions Hospital a few days after she was pulled from the river.

"I was crying, thinking that maybe I didn't deserve to live or that I didn't want to," she said.

A nurse leaned into the doorway of her room.

"I don't remember her name, but she was that one person who was unbiased and didn't know me from a can of paint," Gaines said. "She said: 'Naomi, if you were driving your car with the twins in the back seat and you crashed because you had a heart attack and your twins died, would people be blaming you or your heart attack?'''

Gaines credits that observation as the beginning of her recovery.

Now 30, and no longer on medications after being stable for five years, Gaines said during a recent visit that "right now, my life is actually pretty good."

Wearing hair braids, gray sweat pants, sneakers, a blue shirt and a necklace of the goddess Isis, Gaines said she loves working in the prison library. She's teaching herself to play guitar and plans to perform Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven," at an upcoming prison recital.

Her older kids, 13-year-old Jalani and 8-year-old Kaylah, are able to spend occasional long days with their mom beyond the visitors' area, thanks to the prison's teen and Girl Scouts programs. The twin who survived the fall into the river, now, 7, has yet to meet his mother.

Gaines spends most of her time writing -- from ballads to raps to the first chapters of a memoir, titled Victory.

"I absolutely use writing as a form of therapy," she said. "Sometimes I just sit at my typewriter and shake. It's really painful to think about, because you not only live it in your memory, but you actually bring it to life and, re-reading it on paper, I experience it all over again.

By all accounts, Gaines tried to be a good mom. She took parenting classes, read to her kids and clearly loved them, according to family members and friends.

She remembers everything about July 4, 2003, but said it hurts to talk about it.

"It's very painful to be judged and to be looked at like a horrible mom when that's far from the truth," she said. "That's the most frustrating thing. People look at that day and say: 'Oh, what a terrible mother' ... 'Oh, I could never do that.'

"Well, I'm glad you could never know what it's like to want to do something like that. I'm glad. Consider yourself blessed."

'I was so paranoid'

Gaines grew up in the Robert Taylor Homes projects in Chicago. She said she had never heard the term mental illness before moving to Minnesota 13 years ago.

"It's not looked at the same way in the African-American community," she said. "It has a stigma attached and you're supposed to just pick yourself up.''

Some of her early bouts with depression were severe -- she once cut her wrists in a suicide attempt -- but the aftermath of the twins' birth brought a new intensity to her struggles.

Those struggles were revealed to authorities in the predawn dark of a St. Paul street in early August 2002.

Gaines was wandering with her children -- the twins were nearly 3 months old -- singing and "talking nonsensically," according to court documents. Police noticed the mother with four small children and took Gaines to Regions, where she told a social worker that God could feel her. Then she "started singing again quite loudly to the point the social worker is unable to ask further questions."

She was sent to Abbott Northwestern Hospital's psych ward, her third time there since the twins were born. According to a medical file that her mother describes as "thicker than a phone book," Gaines had been diagnosed with "Major Depression with Psychotic Features," schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Gaines remembers the wandering episode less clinically.

"I was having these thoughts that I wasn't safe in my house," she said. "For whatever reason, I don't know, I was paranoid and needed to get out of the house."

Abbott Northwestern released her after 72 hours because medications were making her more stable. They asked her to stay longer, but she refused. Ramsey County social workers and nurses, under court order, visited her home for the next six months to make sure she took her medications.

When the nurses stopped visiting, Gaines quit taking the pills. That was five months before the twins were thrown from the bridge.

"I was so paranoid, I felt people were poisoning me," she said. "It was another symptom of delusional thinking."

'I like to help people'

When Gaines' world was unraveling, she was no longer with the twins' father, Allah, 29.

The two had met at a St. Paul recording studio. His hip-hop group needed a singer and she was waiting for her recording session. They hit it off for a while, but then went their own ways. Allah was there at the Caesarean section and he named the twins Supreme Knowledge and Sincere Understanding because he wanted names with meaning and strength.

Long after the fireworks ended six years ago, about 4 a.m., Allah got the word about what had happened to his sons. He has had custody of Supreme ever since -- along with a tombstone tattoo with Sincere's dates of birth and death on his neck.

Gaines' younger sister, Natalie Doss, is raising the older kids, who were in Chicago, visiting their father, on July 4, 2003. Often a patchwork of caregivers -- Natalie, Allah, grandmother Florida Doss --tend to the three children.

On Father's Day, they all gathered at Natalie's Frogtown house for baked chicken, greens and homemade desserts.

Allah and Natalie laugh about how they disliked each other when he and Naomi started going out.

"We were like two bulls, bumping heads all the time," he said. "But the kids have brought us together. I'll do anything for Nat and she'll do anything for me."

Supreme -- nicknamed "Preme" -- will be a second-grader next year. He loves SpongeBob, reading, football and rap. His favorite rapper?

"My dad.''

Ask him what he wants to be and he doesn't hesitate: "A policeman, because I like to help people.''

Supreme knows he's a twin and that his brother is dead. Allah anticipates the time is coming when he will want to meet his mother in jail.

"When he comes out and says 'I want to see her,' he can," Allah said.

The boy's curiosity is growing and Allah tries to manage the delicate situation.

"I explain to him the best I can or the best I think he can understand right now," he said, sitting on the front stoop with Supreme at his Frogtown home.

Doss gets out to Shakopee every couple of weeks when she can get a ride.

"If I thought for a minute my child wasn't sick and she just did that, I wouldn't support her and visit her," she said. "But I believe she was sick. ... I never thought my child would take my grandchild's life -- not ever in a million years."

'Not going to be there'

Gaines gives Allah, her sister and her mother credit for keeping her three surviving kids together.

She has six years to go before she can be free, but even if she could leave prison now, Gaines said it would make little difference "because my son is not going to be there when I walk out these doors.''

"I will never meet the man he was becoming or the teenager he would have been or the husband and father he could have potentially been. And I will have to live with that for the rest of my life."

Mother Throws Children in Mississippi River and Jumps

July 8, 2003

In the minutes before Naomi Marie Gaines kissed her babies and threw them into the Mississippi River, she pushed them in a stroller up and down the Wabasha Street Bridge in St. Paul, yearning to see a friendly face or other single moms.

Gaines told police that she felt like people on the bridge were staring at her and that someone whom she bumped into with the stroller reacted rudely. She said she "would rather be dead than live in a place where I'm not free to walk around, I'm not free to be who I am, I'm not free to see other moms out, single black moms with their kids, enjoying their kids."

Friday night wasn't the first time Gaines caught authorities' attention by acting strangely with her children in public.

Gaines received psychiatric treatment last August after she was found wandering the streets with her four children "talking and singing nonsensically," according to court records.

...Gaines is a vocalist in the rap group NSL, or North Star Legends, which has performed in St. Paul and recently in Princeton, Minn. Her stage name is Naomi, but she also goes by "Pleasant."

A doctor who petitioned for a court order to hold Gaines at Abbott Northwestern Hospital said she was unable to care for herself. He diagnosed major depression with psychotic features after examining her.

At a Ramsey County court hearing Aug. 7, 2002, Gaines agreed to voluntarily receive treatment at the hospital and the Anoka-Metro Regional Treatment Center, if needed.

She also agreed, under a court order, to take neuroleptic medications, follow doctors' treatment and after-care orders, and abstain from alcohol and mind-altering substances.

A court order releasing her from those requirements was signed Feb. 11. Rhonda Ingram, a family friend, described Gaines as "a wonderful mother" but said the system had failed her.

Startribune.com

Mom of twins yearned to see a friendly face

By Tony Kennedy and Paul Gustafson - Star Tribune

July 8, 2003

In the minutes before Naomi Marie Gaines kissed her babies and threw them into the Mississippi River, she pushed them in a stroller up and down the Wabasha Street Bridge in St. Paul, yearning to see a friendly face or other single moms.

She wanted to join the Taste of Minnesota celebration on nearby Harriet Island, but instead she succumbed to the alienation she felt on the bridge. Suddenly, she wanted to kill herself and she didn't want to leave her twin 14-month-old boys behind in a hostile world.

That's what Gaines told police in an interview made public Monday in a second-degree murder charge filed against her in Ramsey County District Court.

Before heading for downtown, Gaines and the boys -- Sincere Understanding Allah and Supreme Knowledge Allah -- had been at a family picnic at Battle Creek Regional Park in St. Paul.

Naomi Gaines

Gaines' close friend Sheree Wilson wept as she tossed a red carnation from the bridge.

"This is for the baby," she cried. Wilson had visited with Gaines the night before the incident. "I love her so much," she wailed, as the summer wind carried the flower to the rapidly flowing water below.

Rhonda Ingram, a family friend, described Gaines as "a wonderful mother" but said the system had failed her.

"Naomi has been begging for help," Ingram said. She said Gaines had repeatedly asked for help for her mental problems. "They'd treat her for a week or two at a time, then give her her children back."

Gaines' friends said Supreme Knowledge is being cared for by his father, Khalid Allah. They described Gaines as a talented rap singer who was nicknamed "Pleasant."

County Attorney Susan Gaertner said at a news conference that "this crime is so incomprehensible . . . it defies understanding."

Friday night wasn't the first time Gaines caught authorities' attention by acting strangely with her children in public.

Gaines received psychiatric treatment last August after she was found wandering the streets with her four children "talking and singing nonsensically," according to court records.

A doctor who petitioned for a court order to hold Gaines at Abbott Northwestern Hospital said she was unable to care for herself. He diagnosed major depression with psychotic features after examining her.

At a Ramsey County court hearing Aug. 7, 2002, Gaines agreed to voluntarily receive treatment at the hospital and the Anoka-Metro Regional Treatment Center, if needed.

She also agreed, under a court order, to take neuroleptic medications, follow doctors' treatment and after-care orders, and abstain from alcohol and mind-altering substances.

A court order releasing her from those requirements was signed Feb. 11.

High standard

Gaertner wouldn't comment on Gaines' medical history, but she said she doesn't anticipate a successful mental-illness defense.

"There's a human reaction, 'She had to be crazy,' " Gaertner said. "But the law in Minnesota sets a very high standard [for mental-illness defense]."

Psychiatrists said Monday that a woman who would kiss her babies, tell them she's sorry and then throw them into a churning river could be suffering from psychosis or detachment from reality. The complaint against Gaines said she followed her boys off the bridge after removing her shirt and pants.

Dr. Michael Farnsworth, a forensic psychiatrist who works at the Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peter, said factors that could make a mother more vulnerable to postpartum depression include being single, being young, being economically disadvantaged and having a history of mental illness.

Gaines told police that she felt like people on the bridge were staring at her and that someone whom she bumped into with the stroller reacted rudely. She said she "would rather be dead than live in a place where I'm not free to walk around, I'm not free to be who I am, I'm not free to see other moms out, single black moms with their kids, enjoying their kids."

She told police interviewers that she did not want to die quietly in her apartment without anyone paying any attention to her.

Gaines, a resident of St. Paul's McDonough Homes public housing project, was described by her next-door neighbor as a caring mother who spent a lot of time with her children. Besides Sincere Understanding and Supreme Knowledge, Gaines is the mother of an older boy and girl by a different father, said Tracy Buford, the neighbor.

"As far as I know, she is a sweet person," Buford said. "She lived alone with the kids, but she got a lot of help from her mother and sister."

Darrell Jones, a mutual friend of Gaines and Khalid Allah, the twins' father, said she had been acting a little strangely in the past two weeks, but not to the extent that he worried about her.

Jones said that he met with Gaines in the middle of last week about their music business, No Yo Role Entertainment, and that she seemed unfocused and "spaced out." He knew of her past mental-health problems and said he believes that rap music has been "a healthy way for her to express herself."

Jones said Gaines is a vocalist in the rap group NSL, or North Star Legends, which has performed in St. Paul and recently in Princeton, Minn. Her stage name is Naomi, but she also goes by "Pleasant."

Khalid Allah could not be reached for comment.

Jones said that he is a former roommate of Allah's and that the two men often cared for Supreme Knowledge and Sincere Understanding.

FALLING

August 27, 2003

By Beth Hawkins

The Official Version

Naomi Gaines told police that she spent the early hours of July 4 at her townhouse in St. Paul's McDonough Homes public housing complex, cleaning and doing laundry. Her two older children, ages 7 and 2, were visiting relatives in Chicago. After she was done cleaning, she took the babies, 14-month-old twin boys, to a family picnic at Battle Creek Park.

That evening, she drove downtown and parked. She put the toddlers in a stroller and walked across the Wabasha Street Bridge toward the Taste of Minnesota celebration under way on Harriet Island. Thousands of people were waiting for fireworks to start.

Gaines made one round trip over the bridge, looking for other single moms, or even just a friendly face, and then again walked away from downtown, toward Raspberry Island. On her way, Gaines told police, she bumped her stroller into someone who told her to watch where she was going. She told police later it felt like people were looking at her.

Shortly after 9:00 p.m., Gaines stopped near the southeast corner of the bridge. She took one of the twins, Supreme Knowledge Allah, out of the stroller, kissed him, told him she was sorry, and threw him into the Mississippi River. Then she kissed his brother,

Sincere Understanding Allah, and threw him in too. Gaines stripped off her pants and shirt, climbed up on the railing and fell backward into the water between Raspberry Island and the river's south bank. She yelled "Freedom" as she dropped.

A man visiting from LaCrosse was able to pull Gaines and Supreme Knowledge out of the river. Sincere Understanding had bobbed briefly to the surface after hitting the water, but was pulled under by the current. His body was found two days later, 11 miles downriver.

At Regions Hospital, Gaines explained to police that it hadn't been her plan to kill her children, just herself. But at the last minute, she realized she didn't want her kids to have to live in this world without her.

She told them she would "rather be dead than live in a place where I'm not free to walk around, free to be who I am, I'm not free to see other moms out, single black moms with their kids, enjoying their kids." She didn't want to die alone in her apartment, she explained, and that was why she chose a spot where everyone could see her.

Some days later I typed Gaines's name into Google and found headlines about her from as far away as Uruguay. Why is hers the kind of story no one seems to tire of hearing?

An Archetypal Dream

When one of my kids was a newborn, I was plagued by a dream in which I would calmly and without a shred of rancor drop him off a balcony. As he fell, impossibly slowly, I'd think to myself, "Oh shit, I'm not going to be able to undo this."

I'd jerk awake to find myself in the TV's blue glow in a rocking chair in my living room, terrified that I'd dropped the baby from my arms, although I never had. And then I'd sit there holding him close in the middle of the night, exhausted and deeply ashamed I could think such things.

The dream lasted mere seconds, but to this day I can't tolerate the sight of either of my children near any kind of precipice.

Imagine my surprise to discover my dream, essentially, in sociologist Susan Maushart's book, The Mask of Motherhood. "I found myself in a second-story bedroom hurling a pile of indistinct little bundles one by one out the window," she wrote. "Eventually, it dawned on me that the bundles were in fact neatly swaddled babies. I was surprised, naturally, but determined to keep on with my work. 'It's a sad business,' I remember thinking to myself in the dream, 'but it simply had to be done.'"

After Naomi Gaines jumped, I called every mother I knew who had ever expressed ambivalent feelings about her children. Like Maushart, I found that virtually all had had what we came to call The Dropping Dream. One threw hers off a ledge, another a window. Two said they'd had the uninvited thoughts while awake.

One friend--who, like Gaines, was a teen when her first child was born--had been scared so badly by the dream that she took her daughter to her pediatrician and, despite her fears that her age already marked her as potentially unfit and the baby would be taken away, confessed. Her entire worldview was changed when the doctor burst out laughing and told her she'd be crazy if she didn't have such thoughts.

Another friend had been so disturbed by her repetitive thoughts of pitching her son over a banister that she did some research. "Part of it could be archetypal, don't you think?" she suggested when I asked. "An image integrated into the collective unconscious of motherhood. When mothers are teetering on the cusp of insanity, as we often are, our subconscious dredges up the image to soothe and scare the shit out of us simultaneously. The absurdity of the thought is what shocks us back into reality. Those of us who have enough support, just enough sleep, and most importantly, impulse control, merely entertain the thought as a psychological release."

There we paused, terrified at the idea that the line between Gaines and us could be so thin and so purely circumstantial. The following week I ran the results of my informal canvass past a local Jungian analyst, Mary Ann Miller. "It's a compensatory fantasy," she explained. "This is universal. It's part of the child archetype, the dreams, the fairy tales, the fantasies of needing and wanting to kill the baby. And anyone who has a balanced psyche can usually handle this."

Carl Jung posited that we all have a set of common psychic organs, just as we have physical organs. Jung deemed these "psychic organs," which he called archetypes, to be universal. Which is to say, regardless of class or culture, people all over the world find themselves contemplating the same images and themes, which arise in response to universal dilemmas. In this model, Miller explained, dreams are guided by the feelings of the dreamer. And so, among other things, we moms who envisioned our babies falling were really seeing ourselves tumbling into space.

Whatever choices we go on to make about raising our kids, assuming we're privileged enough to have choices, all new mothers lose their freedom and wholesale chunks of their identities. And there's no going back.

Gaines had four children, three of them under the age of three. She's a poor, young, single woman with a history of mental illness whose troubles are on file in official buildings all over town. One can't help wondering, by the time she kissed her twins goodbye, how much of her identity was left.

Hysteria

Consider all of this, and then consider the notion that her womb might have driven Naomi Gaines mad.

The word hysterectomy derived from the notion that female hysteria could be resolved by the removal of the womb. Certainly the idea is archaic and insulting. But given what we now know about postpartum depression, it's also not entirely crazy.

The so-called baby blues--the sudden drop in hormones that follows childbirth--affect 80 percent of new mothers. Fifteen to 40 percent of women will suffer a new episode of mental illness within a year of childbirth. Perhaps one in 500 will become psychotic. Women who suffer from postpartum depression once are at high risk of experiencing it again following subsequent births; often the recurrences are worse.

"Women in the first year of motherhood are five times more likely to suffer mental illness than at any other stage in their life cycle and a horrifying 16 times more likely to develop a serious, psychotic illness," Maushart writes. "Research also shows that mothers of preschool children who lack supportive partners are at greater risk of clinical depression than any other adult group. Estimates of the incidence of mild depression among mothers with preschool children range from 30 to 80 percent."

Gaines had her first baby on January 1, 1996, at the age of 16. She had grown up in Milwaukee, but moved here after the birth of Jalani, now 7, to be with his father. According to court documents, she and Nathaniel Ellis were married on March 19, 1999, and separated either two weeks or nine months later. At the time, Gaines had worked as a receptionist at Highland Family Physicians, and was making $19,200. The only property listed in their divorce file was Gaines's 1990 Pontiac Grand Am, on which she owed $5,600.

Months after their divorce was final, Ellis petitioned the court for custody of his son, complaining that Gaines was too unstable and too busy to care for the boy properly. Gaines, he wrote, "works eight-hour shifts and goes to school for five more hours. Her school and job is of great importance to her and she has only a few hours a day with our son. And also she has once attempted to take her own life and on a few occasions she that and [sic] well as written that she next time would take hers and my son because no one in Minnesota can support him. Also, she has many personality [sic] and believed to be a manic depresser [sic]."

Gaines complained about Ellis, too. According to court records and newspaper accounts, after the divorce, Gaines accused Ellis of storming into her house and breaking her car windows. Over the next three years, police would be called to her home 21 times. Two of the calls were listed as responding to an attempted suicide, two others to allegations of domestic violence.

Nonetheless, Gaines and Ellis went on to have a daughter, Kaylah, who is now two. After the girl was born, family members told the Pioneer Press, Gaines was diagnosed with postpartum depression "and other mental illnesses."

Last August, shortly after her twins, Supreme Knowledge and Sincere Understanding, were born, Gaines was "found wandering the streets talking and singing nonsensically with her four small children" according to court records. She was taken to Abbott Northwestern Hospital where doctors noted that she displayed "manic behavior" and required restraints.

The hospital petitioned the court to commit Gaines as mentally ill, with a diagnosis of "major depression variant, with psychotic features," and to allow "intrusive treatment with neuroleptic medication." The judge postponed making a decision for six months because Gaines agreed to stay in treatment and to allow herself to be medicated. She complied, and in February the commitment proceedings were dropped. Friends and relatives told both daily papers that Gaines continued to ask for help.

Who's Crazy?

At the time my second child was born, Andrea Yates was making headlines, and locally there were still fresh memories of the two Southeast Asian women who had lived, like Gaines, in St. Paul's McDonough Homes public housing complex, and who had each killed several of their children.

The nurses at the well-regarded local hospital where I'd delivered made no fewer than four stops in my room to warn me about postpartum depression. On one of the visits, the nurse told my husband to be on the lookout for a long list of symptoms. "One sure giveaway is if you just can't do anything right or make her happy," the nurse told my husband. "If that happens, immediately take the kids away. She'll be angry, but you just take them and go."

She said all of this in front of me. The husband of a friend who delivered three weeks later at the same hospital got the same lecture, except in that case they waited to talk to him until she was in the shower.

It was all I could do to ask what help I'd be offered in that instance. They do wonderful things these days with antidepressants, the nurse replied.

The Squeaky Wheel

There's a body of research out there positing that infants are programmed to annoy us on purpose. The theory holds that a baby that makes its needs known by crying and fussing until it's fed, changed, or picked up is a baby with a good chance of surviving infancy. Once satisfied, babies coo and smile and otherwise prime Mom to go ahead and invest in them--to bond, as today's "attachment-centered" parents say.

"If mothers were automatically nurturing, if they evolved to care for any infant born (as essentialists argue), why should infants be selected to expend so much metabolic energy making certain that a mother does so?" asks anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in Mother Nature. "Any dull, calorie-conserving lump of rapidly developing tissue would suffice."

Think of the fine evolutionary line the human infant must walk: Prime Mom too successfully, and she might just hurl you through that window for real.

Filicidal Fun Facts

American infants are now murdered as often as teens, and twice as often as they were 30 years ago, according to federal statistics. If this factoid is surprising, consider that people who kill teens are dangerous to society as a whole. People who kill their babies are only dangerous to their babies.

The United States ranks first in the number of homicides of children under four. Some experts believe that this rate is underreported by up to 50 percent, because it's often tough to prove that an infant did not die of sudden infant death syndrome or "overlying," the accidental smothering by a parent who rolls over on the baby in their sleep.

Nearly half of these cases, or slightly more than one percent of overall homicides, are neonaticides, killings that occur during the first 24 hours of the baby's life. The day a baby is born, its chances of being murdered are 10 times higher than on any other day.

Almost 90 percent of mothers who commit neonaticide are 25 or younger, and the majority are poor, unwed, and probably hid their pregnancies, according to legal and psychiatric research. They are rarely psychotic, although they may experience some kind of dissociation. By comparison, women who commit infanticide, the killing of a baby during its first year, are often psychotic, depressed, or suicidal.

In either case, weapons are almost never used; instead, death usually occurs literally by the parent's hand. Exposure, drowning, strangulation, suffocation, or trauma to the head are common methods.

Women commit two-thirds of neonaticides and infanticides.

Forensic psychiatrist Phillip Resnick parses filicide--the killing of a child by its parent--into five types. Altruistic filicide is the most common. Mothers are most likely to commit this type of homicide, usually as an extension of a suicide attempt. "These mothers see their children as an extension of themselves," Resnick told Psychiatric News. "They do not want to leave a child motherless in a 'cruel' world as seen through their depressed eyes." Less often, a parent kills a child to end its suffering--albeit sometimes an imagined suffering the mother has projected onto the child.

Resnick's other four categories are less common: Acutely psychotic filicide is driven by hallucinations or delirium; unwanted child filicide includes the killing of newborns; in fatal maltreatment filicide, children die as the result of a beating. The last category, revenge on a spouse, is more commonly practiced by fathers than mothers.

In Britain, Canada, Italy, and Australia, infanticide is a separate crime from other types of murder. A woman who kills a child under the age of one who can prove that the "balance of her mind is disturbed" is guilty only of manslaughter. England has a long history of viewing the crime as distinct, passing infanticide laws in 1623, 1922, 1938, and 1978.

Some 25 other countries recognize postpartum depression as a legal defense. The United States isn't one of them. Here, postpartum depression is sometimes raised as part of an insanity defense, but due to a Byzantine twist of reasoning, the gambit rarely succeeds. To be legally insane in most states, one has to be incapable of appreciating that her actions were wrong. Mothers who kill, as we have just seen, tend to have altruistic--if perverted--motives. They know their actions are legally wrong, they just aren't able to see a humane alternative.

Juries' responses are unpredictable. A Texas jury spared Andrea Yates the death penalty, but sent her to prison for life. California mother Susan Eubanks shot her four sons before attempting suicide, and a jury sentenced her to death.

In 1998, Khoua Her, who lived in the same public housing complex as Gaines, pled guilty to six counts of second-degree murder after killing her six children. Two years ago, Mee Xiong, another McDonough Homes resident, stabbed two of her children to death. She is not competent to stand trial and is being treated at a state hospital. If she recovers, she will be tried.

Latrice Jones, the Robbinsdale mother who eviscerated her eight-year-old because she believed he was possessed, last year became one of very few people to be found not guilty by reason of insanity in Minnesota. She was subsequently committed to a state hospital. She did not have to face a jury, though, because prosecutors had agreed that she was insane.

Grandiosity

Newspaper accounts say Gaines named her babies Sincere Understanding and Supreme Knowledge in the tradition of an Afrocentric sect split off from the Nation of Islam. The Five Percenters were founded in 1964 by Clarence13X, a onetime follower of Malcolm X. Adherents, many of them prison converts, believe that the "collective black man" is God, and that five percent of the population is righteous. Gaines is said to have been interested in the group's teachings about oppression, but not to have been a practitioner.

How apropos, then, that all three of the mental health professionals I called about Gaines raised the topic of her babies' divine names. "As one feels smaller and smaller," one explained, "one's fantasies become more and more grandiose."

The Obvious Question

On July 7, the Ramsey County Attorney's Office charged Gaines with second-degree murder and with attempted murder in the second degree. Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner says she does not believe Gaines would succeed with an insanity defense. Gaines's attorney has said nothing, but has asked for more time to formulate a plan. In the meantime, Gaines has been committed to a state hospital for 60 days of observation and evaluation.

Set aside the rhetoric about dignity and culpability and rehabilitation and vengeance and simply imagine yourself in her shoes. In many respects, her life really did end when she took that 75-foot dive. Can you imagine she really cares much one way or the other right now?

One week in America

July 4—Before thousands at the Taste of Minnesota festival on the Fourth of July in the Twin Cities, Naomi Gaines kissed her 14-month-old twin sons, threw them off the Wabasha Street Bridge in St. Paul, and then jumped herself into the Mississippi River, a 75-foot drop, yelling “Freedom!” all the way down. Onlookers pulled her and one of her sons to safety, but her other son’s dead body was found two days later 11-12 miles downstream.

Gaines’s twins were named in the tradition of the Five Percenters, a sect that split from the Nation of Islam. According to her family, she didn’t practice as part of the sect. But Naomi’s aunt LaShon McMillan commented, “My niece has a big problem with how society was. She basically felt we were slaves without the chains.” This may have prompted her calls for “Freedom” at the July Fourth festivities—choosing to attempt the murder-suicide on the day politicians and the media promote patriotism.

By all accounts, Naomi Gaines, 24, was a disturbed individual with a history of mental illness, including postpartum depression and manic behavior. She told police that she had come to the festival searching the crowd for one friendly face, reportedly telling the officers she would “rather be dead than live in a place where I’m not free to be who I am; I’m not free to see other moms out, single black moms with their kids, enjoying their kids.”

Gaines was a single mother, with a seven-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter in addition to her twin boys. She attempted to attend to her mental problems while taking care of her children. According to Ramsey County court records, she was “unable to care for self; found wandering street talking and singing nonsensically, with her four small children; psychotic.”

She was admitted to the Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis for psychiatric treatment in August 2002, but released six months later and taken off her medication, on the advice of doctors. Family members said she still suffered from depression.

The young mother found joy in music—she recorded a CD of songs at a friend’s studio—and several times recited poetry at spoken-words performances at local clubs. However, she appears to have been unable to shake the dark cloud of depression hanging over her, no doubt worsened by lack of treatment and the burden of raising four young children on her own.

Despite these circumstances, she was charged July 7 with second-degree murder in the death of her son. Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner said she didn’t anticipate a successful mental illness defense.