FELONY CHILD-ENDANGERMENT BILL CONSIDERED

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 30, 1993                   TAG: 9301300189
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RICHMOND                                LENGTH: Medium
FELONY CHILD-ENDANGERMENT BILL CONSIDERED
A House of Delegates committee considered a bill Friday that would make it a felony to place a child in a situation likely to produce great bodily harm or death.
Del. Jay DeBoer, D-Petersburg, the bill's sponsor, told the Courts of Justice Committee the bill would apply to cases such as the one in which children were left home alone over Christmas in a Chicago suburb while their parents went to Acapulco on vacation.
Petersburg Commonwealth's Attorney Cassandra Burns had asked DeBoer to introduce the bill after an incident in Petersburg in September. Burns said a man who was baby-sitting for his girlfriend's two children doused himself and many of the clothes in the apartment with gasoline and threatened to strike a match.
The man never struck the match and the children were fine, she said.
Burns said she could have charged the man with misdemeanor neglect, which carries a one-year sentence, or with the more serious and harder-to-prove threatening to burn or attempted murder, each of which has a maximum 10-year sentence.
"Those two are kind of stretching it," she said. "It's hard to find intent to kill the kids."
Burns said the man was charged with threatening to burn.
DeBoer's bill would make child endangerment a felony, with a penalty of either one to five years in prison or 12 months in jail, Burns said.
It was referred to a subcommittee.
The House Education Committee unanimously endorsed a bill allowing schools to develop crime-line programs similar to community crime-stopper hot lines. The measure by Del. Frank Wagner, R-Virginia Beach, is designed to reduce violent crime in schools by allowing students to report crimes on school property anonymously to police.
School boards could establish a program, or they could authorize programs to be developed by nonprofit corporations or operated as part of a local crime-stoppers program.
No state or local money earmarked for schools could be used to establish a school crime line.
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by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB