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Mom got 2nd chance with son
However, she blew it, latest arrest in reported beating of boy
suggests August 18, 2007
By Laurie Roberts
 This
week's candidate for mother of the year: Tina Lynn Tatum.
When we last saw Tatum in May 2005,
she was in court charged with child abuse, sobbing to a judge how it
wasn't her fault that her boyfriend killed her baby. This, even
though she knew he'd been shaking the infant and had admitted to
smacking her older son around herself.
"I've been through hell since this
happened," she tearfully told the judge. "I know that nothing is
ever going to bring my son back and I have to live with it the rest
of my life. I shouldn't have to suffer any more."
These days, Tatum's out of jail and
apparently suffering still. Her latest bout of misery came Sunday
when police say she beat her surviving son bloody in a Mesa Wal-Mart
and then dragged him off in front of horrified customers.
So how could this happen, you ask?
How could someone with her past even have a son to use as a punching
bag?
Maricopa County Attorney Andrew
Thomas was so outraged by the matter he called a press conference.
"It is very disturbing that a
person who was involved in the violent death of one child apparently
was given unmonitored custody of a second child," Thomas said. "The
current system for protecting children from violence and live-in
adults is not working."
So says the man whose own office
offered a deal to the woman two years ago, reducing her role in the
baby's death to attempted child abuse.
In 2003, Tatum was living with
Pedro Peralta and her two sons by other boyfriends, a 5-year-old and
3-month-old Anthony Nieves.
On the night the baby died, Peralta
admitted that he had shaken Anthony, but Tatum appeared more
concerned with her beloved than her dead baby.
"What am I supposed to do without
you?" she told Peralta, in an exchange taped by Phoenix police. "You
mean (expletive) everything to me. And I can't (expletive) do
without you."
Tatum refused to cooperate with
police and no charges were brought at the time. It took 10 months
and another dead child - by then Peralta had moved in with another
woman and smothered her son - before the pair was prosecuted:
Peralta for murder and Tatum for child abuse for failing to protect
her infant son.
In 2005, Thomas' office offered
Tatum a deal: Plead guilty to attempted child abuse and we'll
stipulate a year in jail and lifetime probation. The plea also
required that she get counseling for domestic violence and have no
"victim" contact without a probation officer's approval - though,
given that the victim was dead, such contact seemed highly unlikely.
Tatum took the deal. Meanwhile,
Child Protective Services turned the surviving son over to her
father and closed the case. The agency says it never again got a
report of a problem.
When Tatum got out of jail in
spring 2006, she went to live with her father and son. Her probation
officer notified the court, saying she could find no orders from the
judge barring such contact. "Therefore," she wrote, "this officer
will allow her to remain in her father's residence with this son
unless the court opposes this arrangement."
It didn't.
Mike Goss, a spokesman for the
Maricopa County Adult Probation Department, said they had no reason
to believe she would abuse the boy.
"No information was presented to
the court from either CPS or the pre-sentence investigation that she
was a danger to the child as a perpetrator," he told me. "The danger
was that she failed to protect him from this other guy."
Court records indicate, meanwhile,
that Peralta told police in 2003 that Tatum had drawn blood when
hitting her older son in the face. Tatum denied it, saying she only
smacks the boy. "I don't ever close my fist to my kids," she said.
Tatum, 29, was arrested Sunday
after Wal-Mart customers say she closed her fist and repeatedly
slugged her now 10-year-old son, bloodying his nose then dragging
him off. This, reportedly because of an argument over a T-shirt.
Tatum, by the way, had just
completed 51 of 52 court-mandated counseling sessions for domestic
violence.
Reach Roberts at
laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com.
Read her blog at robertsblog.azcentral.com.
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