Abuse begets abuse in a family's brutal legacy

A long history of dysfunctional parenting put a 6-year-old boy in the murderous path of a man his siblings called The Maniac.

By Hector Becerra
Los Angeles Times
November 29, 2009

"Sit down, Johnetta," Frances Hill told her 14-year-old cousin.

Hours earlier, police and a social worker had come knocking in the darkness, with news that stunned the South Los Angeles woman.

Now Hill had to tell the girl: Her little brother, the 6-year-old she had fed, bathed and babied as if he were her child, was dead. The killer was her mother's ex-boyfriend, a convicted rapist with a long rap sheet.

Johnetta Harrison burst into tears.

"What's wrong with my momma?" Hill, 65, remembers the child asking that morning in July. "She knew how he was and she sent my sister and my brother with him. What's wrong with my momma?"

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