There was little reason to suspect that something terrible - the withering abuse and neglect of a child - was happening behind the walls of the Griffin family's rented brick townhouse in Rodgers Forge.
John Griffin, a graduate of private schools in Baltimore, had a job as a computer engineer that paid well. He and his wife, Susan, and their five children were all covered by health insurance. She had worked in a medical office before becoming a full-time mother. He jogged with friends.
But the family was unraveling, distracted and consumed with internal warfare. Ultimately, on the day after Christmas in 2007, the couple's youngest son, Andrew, who was almost 3, died, his body ravaged by blunt-force injuries too numerous to count. An autopsy concluded he had starved.
John Griffin, 40, and Susan Griffin, 39, will be sentenced Friday in Baltimore County Circuit Court after their convictions on charges of second-degree murder and first-degree child abuse in a case that drew national attention again to the plight of children left to the mercies of deeply dysfunctional parents.
Advocates for children's rights were aghast at the case. "Our society is paying dearly," said Jane LeMond-Alvarez, a retired crime analyst with the Oxnard, Calif., Police Department who estimated that 3 million children are abused every year in this country, and that at least three die of abuse each day. "We can no longer afford to tolerate child abuse."
According to testimony in the couple's trial in February, Susan Griffin was habitually jittery and unfocused. She had been arrested for obtaining amphetamines and painkillers with forged prescriptions three weeks before her son died and was distraught over the death of her mother months earlier.
Her husband told the court he was perennially exhausted, too consumed with work to pay attention to Andrew's increasing emaciation. There were nights lost to screaming fights. When the couple slept at all, it was in separate rooms.
In Rodgers Forge, just south of Towson University, some of the Griffins' neighbors on Old Trail Road insisted after the couple's arrest that nothing had seemed amiss.
"Far from true," said Ann Felter, a neighbor who said she often saw some of the Griffin children. "We would see the older three running the streets with no shoes, filthy, in clothes that were clearly too small for them. When speaking with the kids, one could see that they were starved for attention."
