Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 7, 1994 TAG: 9410070009
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JUNE ARNEY LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: HOPEWELL NOTE: ABOVE LENGTH: Long
- Three-year-old Tony Dillhoff says little about the afternoon of play that ended when he was engulfed by flames that burned 85 percent of his body. Nearly nightly, he relives the horror in his dreams.
``He wakes up crying,'' said his mother, Kimberly Dillhoff. ``He never did that before. No baby, no grown-up, nobody, should have to go through that.''
Three blocks away lives a 10-year-old boy under house arrest. He can't go outside without his mother's supervision.
At Crater Juvenile Detention Home a few miles away, the 10-year-old's brother, who is 11, spends his days in a room with a bed bolted to the floor and a stainless-steel toilet. The 18-inch-square window is covered with wire mesh. He watches videos and plays Nintendo in a common room, attends classes, and shoots hoops outside during the day. At night, he is locked in his room.
The two brothers are accused of pouring gasoline on Tony, then lighting the matches that set him on fire Sept. 19.
The day before, a Sunday, the older brother had been baptized at the Power of Praise Bibleway Church in Hopewell. The younger brother was getting ready to celebrate his 10th birthday.
Whatever happens now, the three children - a toddler, a third-grader and a sixth-grader - will be scarred for life.
The 10-year-old ``doesn't even understand what's going on,'' his mother said. His older brother ``knows exactly what's going on. He'll never forget this. He's never been locked up before. He's the youngest one up there. The others are all at least 14 years old. They look like men, and he looks like a tiny tot.''
The brothers are charged with aggravated malicious wounding and malicious wounding by means of a caustic substance. If they were adults, the first charge could bring a life term, and the second up to 30 years in prison.
Because of their youth, sentencing options are quite different. The maximum penalty for the 11-year-old is commitment to the Department of Youth and Family Services until age 21.
Since a child must be 10 to be committed to the department, there is some question whether the younger boy could be placed under its jurisdiction. Their names are not being published because of their ages.
Hopewell Commonwealth's Attorney John C. ``Jack'' Gould said the case places him in somewhat uncharted legal waters. The trial for both boys is scheduled for Oct. 14.
The three boys share a similar background. Each moved to Virginia from New Jersey. Tony and his mother, sister and four brothers arrived Sept. 3. The other boys moved here about a year ago.
They live in an area of Hopewell where split-rail fences zigzag across the park near working-class homes. A Civil War memorial is nearby. Many of the homes in the city of 24,000 were built during the 1920s and '30s as factory housing.
The events of that Monday afternoon, and the motivation behind them, are unclear. Just who is to blame and how much they should be faulted depends on whom is asked.
But there is nothing ambiguous about Kimberly Dillhoff's anger - or her son's pain.
``What I felt is so hard to describe; you can't put the anger into words,'' she said. ``I have no idea what them boys was thinking. Why did they do this? That's what I keep asking.''
Tony's legs remain bandaged, and he is unable to straighten one of them. A neighbor says she closes her windows because she cannot stand to hear his cries as the bandages are removed so his body can be scrubbed.
He suffered second- and third-degree burns on the backs of both legs, on his left arm, his lower back, his left ear, on his forehead and around his neck. Only his crew-cut hair saved him from more serious disfigurement. Because his hair was so short, it did not reach the flames that were engulfing the child's body, preventing the fire from spreading over his head.
The dining-room table is a makeshift hospital supply shelf at the home where Kimberly Dillhoff and her six children are staying with relatives. It is piled high with bandages, rubber gloves, soaps, lotion with vitamin E, cocoa butter cream and other things designed to keep Tony safe from infection.
Outside on the clothesline hang the sheets that require special soap, hospital disinfectant and extra bleach - cases of which have been donated to the family.
Friends and neighbors have brought food, money, supplies and stuffed animals. A bouquet of balloons sways in the living room. The mantel is lined with get-well cards. There is a toy fire engine and police car, a couple of Barneys, and a stethoscope that Tony carries around, listening to the heartbeat of anyone who will stand still.
Tony is tired of therapy and lotions and creams.
``All he wants to do is go out and play,'' his mother said, but ``we can't afford for infection to get into it.''
Tony's aunt, Lorle Trimarco, says he won't eat anything hot. ``Everything has to be cold for him,'' she said. ``He says, `Hot - burn.'''
She has heard him scream too many times, ``No, Mommy, no more.'' She has spent too much time trying to distract him with Barney songs long enough for his mother to bathe him.
All Tony would say in the hospital, Trimarco said, was, ``Ball, bad boys, fire.''
It may have been Kenny Dillhoff's fast thinking that saved his little brother's life.
There were about 10 children playing in the alley that runs behind the house where Tony lives. Children regularly gather to play on the gravel path, wide enough for a car to pass, between two metal sheds.
Late that afternoon, the children had been playing with a volleyball when the games took a dangerous turn: There was a can of gasoline, cigarette lighters and matches.
It was a small fire. Kenny, 13, kicked it out, but soon there would be a bigger fire. ``I told my brothers to stay in the yard,'' he said.
Then he heard someone say, ``Your brother's on fire.''
``First I got a bucket of water. It didn't do anything,'' he said. ``I ran and jumped on Tony. He tried to get away from me. He was screaming. I rolled once. I was patting him. I think I was on fire, too.''
Kenny's older brother, Shane, took over after Kenny put out the fire. Using training he'd received in elementary school during fire-prevention week, Shane, 17, whisked Tony into a bathtub of cold water. The toddler cried and kept saying, ``It hurts.''
The mother of the two boys accused in the crime says her sons have told her they didn't do it. They say another boy poured gasoline in a long line, then set it on fire with a lighter.
``The little boy was out there playing with the ball and it rolled into the flames, and that's how the gasoline must have gotten on the little boy's clothes,'' the mother said in an interview last week.
She believes that her children have been convicted by the news media.
When the officers came to her house to take her boys to police headquarters and told her that they were suspected of burning a little boy, she says she asked them if they were crazy.
``They're trying to put all the blame on my kids and make it an open-and-shut case,'' she said. ``There were a lot of kids down there, and they're trying to put the blame on two.''
Laura Rosar, one of Tony's neighbors, says she does not believe that the burning was an intentional act, based on what she has heard from her daughter and other children at the scene.
``The kids were all gathered around playing with gasoline,'' she said. ``It got splashed on him and a match got lit, and it trailed up his body. It's just kids doing something they shouldn't do. They shouldn't have been playing with gasoline.''
She is troubled by one thing, though. ``My children were telling me the boys weren't even remorseful,'' she said.
But other neighbors are convinced that what happened in the alley fits a pattern of delinquent behavior by the accused boys, including rock-throwing, bullying and bicycle thefts. The neighbors say they've called the police before.
The boys have terrorized the neighborhood all summer, says Rena Satterfield.
``They seemed to like to fight,'' she said. ``I've chased them out of here 100 times. I let them play in my yard, until they started beating my kids up.''
Satterfield remains shaken by the event, which set the neighborhood on edge. ``At 11, he ought to have a conscience,'' she said of the older boy. ``I knew they were mean, but I never thought they were evil. Now I think they're evil.''
Satterfield and her husband set jars out in area businesses to collect money for Tony and his family. Kimberly Dillhoff has no job, no insurance, no home of her own and plenty of bills.
Lorie Di Domenico, Tony's cousin, said that on the day after the burning, she heard the 11-year-old say to one of Tony's brothers, ``The cops will never find the lighter that I set your brother on fire with.''
Chris Bentley, 12, a sixth-grader and friend of the two boys who are charged, says he was there and knows what happened that afternoon.
``Everybody was outside playing around,'' he said. The 11-year-old "was shaking the can. It got all over the little boy. He was saying, `Stop.' [The two boys] were throwing matches at each other. I guess that's how the little boy caught on fire. They didn't like him in the first place, because he told on them a week before.''
Tony apparently had told his aunt that the boys were beating up another little boy, Chris said.
Chris said that on the day Tony was burned, the younger of the accused brothers lit half a pack of matches and threw them at him.
``I told them to leave the little boy alone, he isn't doing anything,'' he said. ``[The 11-year-old] says, `He snitched on us.' I said, `I'm going to snitch on you if you do anything.'''
Chris said he spent two days being taunted by classmates at Carter G. Woodson Middle School, where he attended class with the 11-year-old. Other children accused him of being involved, Chris said.
He knows he may have to testify against his friends when the case goes to trial, and he says he's ready.
Chris has a vivid picture in his mind of what happened that day.
``Everybody felt bad,'' he said. ``I saw their faces. They were scared.''
Anyone who wants to help the Dillhoff family can contact The Tony Dillhoff Fund at Virginia First Savings Bank, P.O. Box 2009, Petersburg, Va. 23803, or WMXB, 812 Moorefield Park Dr., Suite 200, Richmond, Va. 23236.
by CNB