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The Tragic Case of Miriam White
When a child commits a violent crime, do we judge her like an adult? By Katti Gray
Few people in her South Philadelphia neighborhood understood why 11-yearold Miriam White snapped that afternoon two summers ago. They learned later that she had been hysterical after an argument with a family member and, seizing a kitchen knife and hiding it under her coat, had run out of the house and down the street. With the force of her frantic preadolescent body, Miriam, according to news reports, drove that knife blade deep into a stranger's chest. It cut through one of 55-year-old Rosemarie Knight's ribs and plunged six inches into her heart. Women at a neighborhood hair salon told police that the girl burst into the establishment on August 20, 1999, trembling and begging for help because she had just stabbed someone. Meanwhile, Rosemarie Knight, a hairdresser who had been out walking her dog, lay on the sidewalk in front of her home, bleeding to death. Miriam later told the arresting officer, "I wanted to kill the lady. That's why I stabbed her in the heart."
Her alleged brutal act certainly seems premeditated, although by a severely disturbed mind. According to court records, less than three weeks before she stabbed Rosemarie Knight, Miriam had been released from Horsham Clinic, an inpatient D facility for children and adults with emotional and behavioral problems. She was back with her adoptive family, but receiving no community-based treatment services, she was having trouble adjusting. She wanted to return to Woods Services, the residential facility where she had lived from age 8 to 10. She apparently wanted it very badly: Miriam told the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania psychiatrist who examined her months later that she had attacked Knight because she said she believed, "If I hurt someone, I don't have to go home."
She told the psychiatrist that she left the house fully intending to stab somebody-- but "a grown-up, not a teenager or a kid or a baby." She explained that she had seen children on the street and passed them by before she came to Knight. "I stabbed that lady," she told the psychiatrist. "I didn't think she had any kids." The doctor asked...