Quiet street, smiling family: Internal investigation launched after 3 children killed

Reporting from Phoenix —  A day after Phoenix police found the partially dismembered corpses of three children in their mother’s closet, the Arizona Department of Child Safety found itself defending its history with Octavia Rogers, 29, amid an internal investigation.

Rogers is suspected of killing her sons, ages 8, 5, and 2 months, then trying to kill herself. She remained hospitalized in critical condition with knife wounds to her neck and abdomen. She has not yet communicated with police.

The Department of Child Safety checked on some of the children during the last six years, but found little to draw their sustained attention.

“Our powers are limited,” said the department’s director, Gregory McKay, in a statement Friday morning. “We cannot predict the future, and people can at times do awful things.”

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The boys were identified as 8-year-old Jaikare Rahaman, 5-year-old Jeremiah Adams and 2-month-old Avery Robinson. In 2010, investigators were unable to locate the family when they received a report that Jaikare suffered a small abrasion on his forehead.

A year later, Rogers refused family preservation services offered by a Department of Child Safety private contractor after someone alleged child neglect because of the smell of marijuana in the home.

“There was no reason or legal grounds to take the children into emergency state care and the case was closed as unsubstantiated,” the department said in a separate statement Friday.

This year, someone alleged that Rogers’ infant was exposed to marijuana. Rogers again declined family preservation services, and the case was closed.

McKay’s department is conducting an internal review to see whether previous calls about Rogers and her children may have included signs of what was to come.

Statistically, there are no common factors among parents who kill their children, only types suggested by research. Fathers kill their children more frequently -- about 300 each year in the U.S., according to the American Anthropological Assn. -- but it is the 200 mothers accused each year who are more likely to make the evening news.

Children are killed by their parents in rich places and in poor places; in high-crime row houses and gated subdivisions; in North Loup, Neb., and in downtown Detroit.

Despite the lack of causal factors in cases of parents killing their children, social science has defined certain types of people who are more prone to committing filicide. Researcher Phillip Resnick of Case Western Reserve University codified recorded instances of parents who kill their children into distinct types of slayings.

According to Resnick, there is altruistic filicide, in which the parent believes he or she is killing the child for its own good. This is the most common reason given. Other types are unwanted-child filicide, spousal-revenge filicide, or filicide while the killer is experiencing a psychotic episode.

Rogers’ brother, who discovered her inside a bathroom trying to drown herself late Wednesday night, told police that she had no documented history of mental illness. Phoenix Sgt. Trent Crump said that police had no records of commitments to mental institutions in Rogers’ history.

The killings apparently occurred late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning. Rogers’ mother, who owns the home where the killings occurred, left for work between 9 and 10 p.m. Wednesday, Crump said.

Rogers’ brother found his sister about 11:15 p.m. at the home, where she “was talking about religion and having found the answer to her problems,” Crump said.

Rogers then locked her brother in the garage. Within an hour, he had forced his way into the home and found Rogers in a bathroom stabbing herself in the abdomen. She had already cut her throat.

Rogers, who had delivered a baby two months earlier, told her brother she had stabbed herself because she believed she was pregnant.

The brother called 911, and when he returned she was trying to drown herself in the bath tub, Crump said. He used towels to stanch the bleeding.

When emergency personnel arrived, Rogers told them that her children were with another family member. Police began to search the house and found the bodies of Jaikare and Jeremiah in a closet.

Told by relatives there was a third child, officers searched again and found Avery’s body, in the same closet, stuffed inside a suitcase.

The home is in a small planned neighborhood tucked behind a sound wall, just yards from the four northbound lanes of Interstate 17.

The older boys rode in circles on their bicycles in the street in front of the house, neighbors said, or made a ruckus with a group of other kids in the neighborhood’s fenced-off pool area.

“Nice kids. They needed to keep a closer eye on them,” said Ryan Rutt, 34, a neighbor who said he narrowly avoided running into the children while driving home from work one afternoon last week.

Carol Wheat walked her dog Jazzy past the neighborhood’s shuttered community center on Friday morning and peered inside at the 27-inch standard-definition television and covered pool table. Behind her, a memorial had cropped up on the street in front of the children’s house: white roses, a couple of teddy bears and a toy truck.

“No one can come in here, of course, but you’d always see [the children] in the yard or the street playing with other kids,” Wheat said.

Wheat, like nearly every other neighbor interviewed Friday, said that she did not know Rogers personally. But she said Rogers, her mother and the children all seemed to share a comfortable existence on a quiet street where overturned bikes lay in rocky, grassless front yards.

“It wasn’t like [Rogers] was keeping them inside all the time,” Wheat said, “and they were always smiling.”

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