METROPOLIS BRET GAITHER: HIS PARENTS’ NEXT VICTIM?

The mothers on the jury were crying. They were pressing crumpled blue facial tissue to red eyes. They were smearing long, inky rivers of mascara with wet fingers. They were blowing noses, staining eyeglasses, looking pinched and troubled.

They had reached a verdict. But it had come with a price-one that was especially high for the mothers.

“I just don’t understand this,” 58-year-old juror Betty Fields would later say. “In my day, we didn’t have these things. People just didn’t do things like this to their children.”

There was no publicity for this trial-no banner headline, no flash on the evening news. This was no high-profile murder, no grisly rape, no football star robbery. This was simply the daily fallout in the decay of a city. The splash from the boiling pot of poverty and ignorance and isolation. The saga of yet another invisible, uneducated, unsophisticated, unwed welfare mother who, armed with the sheer power of pregnancy, had at the tender age of 21 already left her mark on her city.

She sat in this courtroom on this hot August afternoon, surrounded by strangers who would judge her, with her head lowered dejectedly and her hands folded limply in her lap. “I’d hate to think she did anything out of spite,” juror Skokie Deb-nam would say after the trial. “I’d prefer to think she just didn’t have any sense.” The judge turned to the jury foreman. Had this mother, Cachena Simmons, engaged in conduct that endangered her infant son? And would it be in the best interest of this child that the relationship with her be terminated?

The room was still. Simmons still did not look up. Simmons’s lawyer drummed his fingers on his knee, then stared down at one polished dress shoe. The assistant district attorney-a man determined to put the baby up for adoption-peered into the faces of the jurors, intrigued by what he saw: fresh tears. Falling. Falling.

He had asked them to do the hardest thing imaginable, especially for the female members of the jury-take a woman’s baby away from her. Forever.

IT HAD BEGUN AS SO MANY OF THESE cases do, in the overcrowded, overwhelmed maternity ward at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Bret Simmons Gaither had been born in the early morning hours of April 5. He was six pounds, four ounces, curly-haired and pure-pure in that, unlike his four brothers and sisters, he had not yet been abused.

A man named Rob Smith, a child welfare worker employed by the state, wanted to keep it that way. “I wanted this baby safe,” he says. Smith had met the baby’s mother before, in November 1987, when he was sent to her North Dallas apartment on a child abuse complaint. Simmons and her boyfriend, Derek Gaither-father of all but her oldest child-had beaten two of the children with plastic hangers, belts, and extension cords. Demetra, age four, and Dashe, age three, were covered with ugly, oval-shaped welts and dark bruises. “They’re clumsy,” their mother initially tried to explain. Smith checked his records-seven months earlier, a coworker, responding to a similar complaint, had found Simmons’s two-year-old son Dirk with bruises on his chest, shoulder, and neck. “Accidental,” his mother had explained at the time.

Rather than fight the state over custody of the children, Simmons agreed to place all three with friends and family members, thereby assuring visitation rights.

Meanwhile, she was pregnant again.

When Denisha Colleen Gaither was born in January 1988, she was too young to hit with extension cords. Instead, she would suffer a different type of abuse: neglect. One August day, when Denisha was seven months old, Simmons left her daughter home alone in her crib, as she often did, while she went to run some errands-even though she knew Denisha could climb out of her crib. While Simmons was out, she was arrested for traffic violations and an outstanding warrant for possession of a deadly weapon. Though she assumed Gaither would care for the child when he came home from work later that evening, he, too, went out and left the baby alone in her crib the next morning. And he, too, was arrested on an outstanding warrant of his own.

Denisha Gaither was found dead four days later, lying face up on the pea-green carpet in her room, her body pinned under the dropped guardrail of her yellow-and-white crib. She had had no air conditioning, food, water, or attention. The tips of her fingers were purple.

The police charged Gaither with one felony count of injury to a child. He had not only left the baby alone, he had failed to check on her when he was released from jail, choosing instead to spend the night in a motel with an old girlfriend. Prosecutors believed they had a strong case against him-but when they went to trial this past April, they discovered they had a problem. Genetic tests could not prove beyond an 81 percent probability that Gaither was Denisha’s father. State law said they didn’t have a case. Prosecutors struck a deal-if Derek Gaither would plead guilty, they would give him seven years, much of which he had already served in the county jail while awaiting trial. Gaither took the deal.

Two weeks after Denisha’s death, Simmons explained what had happened to her daughter this way: “I told Derek that God took her for a reason,’’ she said, watching TV one afternoon in her federally subsidized, three-bedroom apartment. “She was here for six months, and that’s all God wanted her to be here for. Because if He had wanted her to stay, she would have stayed.”

Meanwhile, Simmons was pregnant again.



ROB SMITH DIDN’T WANT TO LEAVE BABY No. 5 in the hands of Simmons’s God. So when Bret Gaither was born in April, Smith went right to Parkland Hospital. Then he went to a judge, who put a temporary hold on Bret so his mother couldn’t take him home from the hospital. Then he filed a lawsuit on behalf of the State of Texas, asking for permanent custody of the baby.

Now it was in the hands of the jury.

The case against Simmons was strong; there were the grisly pictures of Demetra and Dashe taken after their parents’ handiwork with the extension cords; there was a picture of Denisha’s body trapped under the crib guard rail; there was plenty of testimony from Rob Smith.

But Simmons’s court-appointed attorney, Mark Werbner, was strong, too, A partner with a prestigious downtown law firm, Werbner was used to corporate clients, but he had taken this case as a favor to the judge, who wanted Simmons to have top-notch representation. The jury would later admit they were impressed with Werbner’s performance, but they were not impressed with his client’s. “I made my decision based on her testimony and her testimony alone.” juror Sharon Collier said of Simmons. “To me she did not depict any remorse for what happened in the past-and gave no evidence that she was going to change.”

The jury voted 12-0, after only 90 minutes of deliberation, to take the baby away.

In some ways, of course, the verdict mirrored the problem. Here was a young, black mother, a waitress at a JoJos restaurant, raised in an abusive home herself, used to the sharp sting of an extension cord across her back. Here was an all-white jury, much of it married and suburban and corporately employed, flinching quite noticeably at her history of arrest, history of child abuse, history of casual sex. Sitting on that witness stand, Simmons bristled with defiance and pride. “She could have convinced me to disregard all other testimony in there,” juror Collier says. ’”But she never did.”

Mark Werbner has been thinking about why the jurors voted against his client. “I think they didn’t want to take a chance,” Werbner says. Which all in all, considering the history in this case, is a pretty good reason to terminate the mother’s rights. But Werbner doesn’t think so. On September 14, not three weeks after the jury voted to give the baby a new life, Werbner asked the judge for a new trial-something the judge promptly promised to consider. For one thing, Werbner says, he saw Rob Smith smoking in a stairwell during the trial with some of the jurors, and he says that may have influenced the verdict. For another, he says, state law holds that one of the only reasons a parent’s rights can be terminated is if he or she does something to endanger the child. Since Simmons was never allowed to take her son home from the hospital, Werbner says, she couldn’t possibly have endangered him.

But it’s a pretty good bet that she will, ifshe gets Bret back. Because people need anawful lot of help to change. And in this city,when the pot is boiling over, people flinchquite noticeably. But then they walk awayfrom the courthouse. Or drive a little faster.Or close the magazine.