Several other local cases in the past year involved fathers.
In November, David Peter Brockdorff, 40, shot his ex-wife, two boys and daughter before fatally shooting himself at a small park in Howard County. Despite a bitter divorce, Gail Louise Pumphrey of Woodbine had intended to turn the chidren over to Brockdorff so he could spend part of the Thanksgiving holiday with them.
"Kids sometimes get in the middle of struggless that parents are having and become the weapons that parents use to get at each other, sometimes with tragic consequences," said Laura Kiser, a psychologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
FOR THE RECORD - An article in yesterday's editions about the mindset of parents who kill their children misspelled the first name of Laurel J. Kiser, a psychologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center.
The Sun regrets the error.
"This can happen when parents are unable to separate their children from their family conflict."
The circumstances are less clear in the case of a Salvadoran immigrant, 28-year-old Pedro Rodriguez, who killed his four children and then hanged himself in a Frederick townhouse last April.
Acquaintances said Rodriguez and Benitez appeared happy, though they had experienced some problems. Rodriguez had been caught twice for shoplifting and had recently found out that he would lose his job.
In February, Stephen Todd Nelson, 37, of Baltimore, was charged with first-degree murder for allegedly throwing his 3-year-old son off the Key Bridge. He and the child's mother, Natisha Johnson, had battled over custody and visitation issues.
"Obviously, a normal person wouldn't do this," Blumberg said. "But situational factors seem to play a greater role with men who kill their children as opposed to the women," who may be driven by delusions.
Dr. Paul Appelbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, said some men who kill their offspring do in a continuing pattern of child abuse.
"In a particular instance, it just goes too far. This is not to say it's true in every case, but that's the typical father who kills a child," he said. "The psychotic father who kills a child is a much less frequent phenomenon than the psychotic mother who kills a child."
While men tend to be driven by anger, often over marital or other personal difficulties, women are more often in the grip of psychotic delusions, experts say.
Mothers who kill their children tend to fall into one of two categories. "Immediately after birth, a mother may kill a newborn in order to hide its existence," Appelbaum said. "Often, that's a young unmarried mother who is in a state of panic and fearful of discovery and takes what seems to her to be the only available option."
On the other hand, mothers who kill older children "typically do so when they are psychotic and out of delusional motivations. They may hear voices, the voice of God commanding them to kill children."jonathan.bor@baltsun.com
