“I felt like I had lost control.”įour months later, Samantha tried to strangle her baby brother, who was just two months old. Samantha later showed Jen her sketches, and Jen watched in horror as her daughter demonstrated how to strangle or suffocate her stuffed animals. “You realize that would have killed her? She would not have been able to breathe. “I was trying to choke her,” Samantha said. Jen separated them, and once they were home, she pulled Samantha aside. Suddenly Jen heard screaming from the back seat, and when she looked in the mirror, she saw Samantha with her hands around the throat of her 2-year-old sister, who was trapped in her car seat. One bitter December day in 2011, Jen was driving the children along a winding road near their home. More darkly-and typically, in these sorts of cases-another psychologist blamed Jen and Danny, implying that Samantha was reacting to harsh and unloving parenting. Yet another suggested that she had reactive attachment disorder, which could be ameliorated with intensive therapy. Samantha was impulsive, another said, something that medication would fix. Samantha would grow out of it, one psychologist assured her parents the problem was merely delayed empathy. They had her admitted to a psychiatric hospital three times before sending her to a residential treatment program in Montana at age 6. They consulted doctors, psychiatrists, and therapists. Jen, a former elementary-school teacher, and Danny, a physician, realized they were out of their depth. “It was very thoughtful, premeditated.” “I want to kill all of you,” Samantha told her mother. “Her behavior wasn’t impulsive,” Jen says. Samantha walked upstairs to her parents’ bathroom and washed her mother’s contact lenses down the drain. Once, when Samantha was 5, Jen scolded her for being mean to one of her siblings. She would break into her sister’s piggy bank and rip up all the bills. When Samantha got a little older, she would pinch, trip, or push her siblings and smile if they cried. “There was an ability to wait until an opportune moment to exact her revenge on someone.” “She knew exactly what she was doing,” Jen says. Later that day Samantha, who was already potty trained, walked over to where the boy was playing, pulled down her pants, and peed on him. The caretaker soothed them both problem solved. When she was about 20 months old, living with foster parents in Texas, she clashed with a boy in day care. She had no learning disabilities, no emotional scars, no signs of ADHD or autism.īut even at a very young age, Samantha had a mean streak. According to documentation from the state of Texas, Samantha met all her cognitive, emotional, and physical milestones. But what toddler isn’t? Her biological mother had been forced to give her up because she’d lost her job and home and couldn’t provide for her four children, but there was no evidence of abuse. They later had two more kids.įrom the start, Samantha seemed a willful child, in tyrannical need of attention. They already had three biological children, but they felt called to add Samantha (not her real name) and her half sister, who is two years older, to their family. Samantha’s parents, Jen and Danny, adopted Samantha when she was 2. “Because I thought that someday I was going to end up doing it on somebody.”Ĭheck out more from this issue and find your next story to read. “How did you feel when you were doing that to your stuffed animals?” “You were practicing on your stuffed animals?,” I ask her. She tells me that she pretended to kill her stuffed animals. Starting at age 6, Samantha began drawing pictures of murder weapons: a knife, a bow and arrow, chemicals for poisoning, a plastic bag for suffocating. “So I made a whole entire book about how to hurt people.” “I wanted the whole world to myself,” she says. But when we steer into uncomfortable territory-the events that led her to this juvenile-treatment facility nearly 2,000 miles from her family-Samantha hesitates and looks down at her hands. She seems poised and cheerful, a normal preteen. She flashes a smile when I ask about her favorite subject (history), and grimaces when I ask about her least favorite (math). The girl needs supplies: new jeans, yoga pants, nail polish.Īt 11, Samantha is just over 5 feet tall and has wavy black hair and a steady gaze. Samantha’s mother is visiting from Idaho, as she does every six weeks, which means lunch off campus and an excursion to Target. We’re sitting in a conference room at the San Marcos Treatment Center, just south of Austin, Texas, a space that has witnessed countless difficult conversations between troubled children, their worried parents, and clinical therapists. This is a good day, Samantha tells me: 10 on a scale of 10. Listen to the audio version of this article:įeature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone.
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