Monday, December 22, 1997

When you leave with what you have on

By BOB GREENE

CHILTON, Wis. - The attorneys for Michael and Angeline Rogers, because they apparently consider it their job to do such things, did their best to try to trip up the weeping 11-year-old boy.

It didn't work. Even the judge at one point looked as if he wanted to throw up. Still, the lawyers kept at it.

Those window frames that were stacked horizontally on top of the plastic container the boy's sister had been stuffed into - the window frames that trapped her in there so she couldn't get out. Was the boy certain they were regular windows? Might they not have been screen windows? That's what the attorney for the boy's father asked this child on the witness stand.

"I really didn't look at the windows," the boy said to the lawyer. "I just pulled them off and threw them to the side and got her out."

The lawyers tried to trip the child up about dates, too. The boy admitted that, at 11, he wasn't sure how many days each of the months has: "I know most of them." So the lawyers, obviously attempting to confuse him, tried to pin him down: Was he sure that Oct. 31 fell on a weekend? Was he, in fact, absolutely certain the day he found his sister stuffed in the container in the basement was Oct. 31?

On the night he and his 9-year-old brother had been thrown out of their house with no coats, no shoes, no socks, alone in the freezing darkness - on that night, the lawyer for his mother asked in accusing tones, "You didn't take a jacket to put on, did you?"

"We couldn't," the child on the witness stand tried to explain to the lawyer.

But the lawyer cut him off: "You didn't put shoes on?"

"We couldn't," the boy said. "The rule is, when she kicks you out, you have to leave with whatever you have on, and that is it."

The lawyer for the mother tried to establish that when the child and his brothers and sister were allegedly beaten with rods, as the child had testified they were, his parents must have had a good reason for doing it: "Do you recall what you did that you were disciplined with two sticks?"

The boy: "I didn't do anything."

Next to the attorneys, at the defense table, sat Michael and Angeline Rogers. After they were arrested - after they were charged with keeping their 7-year-old daughter in a small dog cage in the cold, unlighted basement, after they were charged with beating their children with heavy wooden rods - they were provided with the separate attorneys, paid for with tax money. So this little boy - who had walked to the Brillion police station in the dark to ask for help for his sister - now was facing four adults staring at him: his mother, his father, and the two lawyers.

The lawyer for the father tried to argue that all of this was simply a question of "whether (our clients) violated (their) privilege of being allowed to discipline (their) children."

That's the point at which Circuit Judge Peter Grimm looked as if he was going to be sick. Judge Grimm noted that, according to the child's testimony, he and his brothers and sister were beaten, and she was locked repeatedly overnight in a dog cage, because the parents became angry when, after being kept hungry, the children were found to have surreptitiously eaten food.

The parents had apparently exercised their "privilege" of "being allowed to discipline their children" in this manner, the judge said in incredulous tones, because of "candy wrappers being found behind furniture or under mattresses."

And the judge ruled at this pretrial hearing that the criminal case could go forward. Calumet County District Atty. Ken Kratz issued formal charges: 10 felony counts each against Michael and Angeline Rogers. If convicted, each parent faces up to 95 years in prison.

At one point, the attorney for the mother - evidently trying to shift to the father the focus of blame for the little girl being kept in the plastic container - asked the 11-year-old boy if he was "shocked" to find his sister, covered in human waste, inside the container.

"Yes," the boy said quietly. "Because she was supposed to have a better life."

Chicago Tribune