9.Deborah Grey — Direct (Part 1)

DEBORAH GREY: Correct.

DEBORAH GREY: Correct.

DEBORAH GREY: Tim had experimented before he got involved with the church with marijuana and with alcohol. The alcohol, he tried at a family party. The marijuana, I believe that he got from his dad's stash without his dad knowing it. What he found with both of those was that almost immediately he felt a decrease in the anxiety and agitation that was pretty normal for him. He got involved with church and that went by the wayside. But after he left the church, he got involved with substances again, primarily, with alcohol and with marijuana. And what he found was that it came with a peer group, which was something that was kind of a first for him. If he was around other kids that were smoking or who were drinking, they didn't seem to notice or care that he was different, that he didn't have a mother or that he was socially quite awkward. It gave him a built-in group of friends, something that he hadn't had before. So he got involved drinking fairly heavily, smoking a fair amount of marijuana. It did not affect his grades until the point where one day he was at school and he was a junior and he had some marijuana in a cigarette case. The cigarette case fell by the wayside. It was found, it had marijuana in it. It had marijuana that he had taken from his father in it, unbeknownst to his father, and he was arrested there at school and walked out in handcuffs.

DEBORAH GREY: It was after that by a bit. This was the -- this was the end of his junior year. And he was fined and sent to treatment, which he completed, four or five months. And then over the course of the next year, for the first time, really, in his life, he failed a class and he got two or three D's, which had never happened before and it's never happened since.

DEBORAH GREY: He did. He enlisted in the Navy in the middle of his senior year.

DEBORAH GREY: Yes. He had a discussion with the recruitment people that he had a conviction for marijuana. And there's evidence in the record that they had a conference on that and they decided to give him a waiver because at that point, he had completed treatment and he was no longer using substances.

DEBORAH GREY: A couple of things. One was that this also corresponded with the end of a relationship that he had in high school. And when that relationship was ended by the female, he experienced that as a real loss. Also, he had a dream of being a Navy Seal and that was going to be a source of positive identity for him. So when he lost that, that was another loss. And the doctors there who diagnosed him with depressive disorder NOS, not otherwise specified, and alcohol and marijuana dependence also said that he had started off and on since 14 feeling depressed. At least, half of the time over the past four years, it had been greater and he felt like he didn't belong with others. All of which relates to what I talked about earlier in terms of looking for records that sort of back up what people tell me. Tim had told me that he first started having problems when he was a young adolescent with his thinking and with feelings of depression and here's a record that documents him telling someone that when he was 18 years old.

DEBORAH GREY: Yes, it was.

DEBORAH GREY: I think it was in the summer of 2000 that he came out of the Navy.

DEBORAH GREY: He came home to live with his dad and Carolyn, who were having a tough time at that point. Tim, Sr. was still drinking a fair amount. And what Tim, Sr. said was that Tim didn't seem like himself. He was, you know, talking out of his head. And he had begun to use drugs and alcohol again. He was smoking marijuana. He tried a variety of drugs, including heroin and cocaine. He started not getting along with his family, so he would sleep sometimes out in the woods and come into the house at night to get food. And then he started having problems with getting arrested.

DEBORAH GREY: His interactions with Tim, Sr. had changed back in high school, sometime maybe around his junior year. Instead of being on the flight side of fight or flight, he became more confrontative with his dad. He became more unpleasant with his dad. He would say things to his dad, like, go ahead, dad, why don't you just have another drink. Instead of trying to be consolatory and trying to get himself out of the room, he became more confrontative, which did not make things any better.

DEBORAH GREY: They did. Tim had come out of the Navy, was living off and on at home, had been arrested for driving above the speed limit on a couple of occasions and had been arrested for possession of a controlled substance. And it was after that arrest, a couple of months after that arrest that his Uncle Larry died. Larry is four years older than Tim was. Died in a motorcycle accident. It was very sudden, very unexpected and absolutely devastated this family.

DEBORAH GREY: Tim ended up being incarcerated for about a 16-month period. First, he was in the county jail and then he went to a boot camp. And it was in the boot camp that he got involved with a pastor there and religious movement and he made a commitment to turn his life around. So boot camp for him was a place where he saw the need to make some serious changes in his life.

DEBORAH GREY: Yes, it did. I should also mention while he was in prison that he was seen by mental health there and diagnosed with poly-substance abuse, rule out personality disorder with narcissistic traits, so one more diagnosis for him. He came out of prison and one of the first things that he did was to try to find a church that went along with the beliefs and values of the church that he experienced while he was in prison.

DEBORAH GREY: That's correct, Center Point Apostolic Pentecostal Church.

DEBORAH GREY: He was about 21 years old when that happened. He came out and was completing another substance abuse program as a part of parole, which he completed. And by the end of it, about a year after he had come out, his substance abuse counselor gave him an excellent prognosis. He was attending church and by then, he was married.

DEBORAH GREY: It was. And I should mention about the church there. There were -- I talked to Pastor Sutton in his home several months ago and there were three things that he said that I thought were significant for the social history. One was that Tim's passion and his faith were real and that his desire to live his life by the scripture was real in his opinion --

DEBORAH GREY: I did.

DEBORAH GREY: Yes, it does. And there are a couple of areas where that's the case. One is that people observed, including Pastor Sutton, that Tim took the Bible absolutely literally and he took it as a guidebook for how he should be living his life. His grandmother said to him at some point, Son, this is just a guideline for you. And he said, no, it's the literal truth. It's what I need to be doing. And then he started telling other people in the family what they needed to be doing according to his beliefs. And told his grandmother that his little niece, who was three years old, had been demon possessed. He could see it in her eyes and his grandmother needed to get her out of there or out of his presence. He told another family member, more than one family member that if they didn't go to a church like his and speak in tongues that they would go to hell. His beliefs were very strong and sometimes, he would jump up and, according to various family members, start speaking in tongues in the living room, which they all thought was very strange. He took one of his brothers to him to his church at some point and the brother said that Tim jumped up and was running around the church speaking in tongues. And he didn't understand that and it was kind of embarrassing to him. So his beliefs were outside of what his family was familiar with and it also seemed to be something that they saw him as heavily invested in and imposing on them at times.

DEBORAH GREY: There are a number of things that happen to individuals that are raised with a lot of chaos, with a lot of substance abuse, with a lot of trauma. And in the individuals that I used to treat, these are the things that I would commonly see. They had problems with attachment, problems with relationships and boundaries, difficulty with lack of trust, with socialization, not being able to make good friends, perceiving and having -- having difficulty understanding and perceiving other people's emotional states, empathy, difficulty identifying and expressing emotions of their own, problems with low self-esteem and shame and feelings of not belonging. So given what he had been through, that was part of the baggage that Tim would bring into any relationship. But that's also compounded by -- if you think about what we talked about earlier, there was a total lack of role models there for a healthy relationship. There was a total lack of role models there for healthy parenting or for protecting children. He took what he now had in the Bible and he used that to tell him how to parent and used that to tell him how to have a relationship.

DEBORAH GREY: Couple of years later, yes.

DEBORAH GREY: By this time, I believe that Tim's grandmother and father and soon-to-be new stepmother had moved to Mississippi. And so when he and Amber left Pennsylvania with Merah, they moved to Mississippi to be near his family.

DEBORAH GREY: He had. He had started with a community college where he took a total of about 80 hours and got a 4.0 in all of his hours and he was working towards being able to get himself into Mississippi State.

DEBORAH GREY: He did.

DEBORAH GREY: By 2008, he was at Mississippi State. He was 26 years old at that point.

DEBORAH GREY: Eli was born 11 months after Merah in 2007.

DEBORAH GREY: Tim had continued to think about, worry about his mother, not having a mother. It was a topic of conversation in his family on many occasions. Where is she? Why don't I know how she's doing? I think it was Roberta who took it on herself to find Cynthia and she arranged for Cynthia to come to Mississippi and to visit. And so, for the first time at about age 25, Tim met his mother.

DEBORAH GREY: It was in Mississippi. And all of his family that was present at the time met his mother. I thought his brother, Tyler, had -- his reaction to that, which was that Cynthia was crazy as a ball bat. She was talking to herself. No soul, just blank eyes. That it was like hugging a ghost when he went around her. Tim saw his mother and others did, too, fighting with her dead mother in the back yard. It was not a positive experience for him. I think it scared him. He looked at that and thought is this my future.

DEBORAH GREY: She left the family in 1984.

DEBORAH GREY: And we don't have any records to indicate really where she was from 1984 until she resurfaced in --

DEBORAH GREY: -- Syracuse, New York in 2008 -- excuse me, in 1988, after she disappeared.

DEBORAH GREY: Yes, that was 2007.

DEBORAH GREY: She arrived in Syracuse and she couldn't tell people who she was, where she had come from. She said that her name was Eve Jones, not Cynthia Jones. Was very confused, appeared to have amnesia and what they later described as a fugue state, which is a kind of amnesia state that someone goes into, oftentimes, when they have dissociative personality, which is one of the things she was subsequently diagnosed with. That began in 1988, a psychiatric history that has continued to this day that's encompassed many, many hospitalizations and an inability to ever live independently for any sustained period of time.

DEBORAH GREY: Correct.

DEBORAH GREY: I believe that it was paranoid schizophrenia.

DEBORAH GREY: If you think about what we were talking about when Tim was a baby is here on the spectrum and Cynthia just kept moving in this direction in terms of disengagement from her infant. Now, she's at the point where she's not even acknowledging that she had an infant, where she acknowledged she had had Tim. She was verbal about choosing not to feed him, choosing not to change him, choosing not to attend to him. Now, she doesn't even seem to notice. So she's just kept going in that direction.

DEBORAH GREY: Yes. I've met with her only once in the past three years. And what I found was she was in better condition than this letter describes her being in. She has certainly had her ups and downs from reviewing her medical records. At this point, she is not drinking or doing any kind of drugs as a requisite of the partial -- the assisted living facility that she's in. So she's sober and she's supervised in taking her medication. She's very flat in her affect and has difficulty giving information. Oftentimes, says I don't remember.

DEBORAH GREY: Correct.

DEBORAH GREY: First to talk about Donald, the baby that I was just discussing, was placed in foster care very shortly after he was born and, ultimately, he was adopted. And I had the opportunity to meet Donald and to meet his adoptive dad up in -- outside of Syracuse. Donald is like 27 or 28 years old now. He's still living at home. He makes doughnuts on the midnight shift at the local grocery store. He had a series of difficulties in school coming along, but he's never had any drug involvement, he's never had any legal involvement. And the significance for that, if you think about it, we talked about risk factors earlier. Here's a kid that he's got -- his mom is paranoid schizophrenic, fully diagnosed at this point. His father is -- her boyfriend, diagnosis unknown. And he is adopted into this family. It's a two-parent family that also has a grandmother living in the home that assisted in providing care for him, so he had a lot of structure. He had a lot of support. There was no substance abuse in the home. It was not a family that ended up divorcing. There is no evidence of domestic violence. He had some problems, but the protective family -- protective elements in this family were really significant compared to what Tim Jones had.

DEBORAH GREY: That's right.

DEBORAH GREY: Lydia was born in 2007. In fact, she was born shortly before Cynthia came to visit. So Lydia was the product of a -- not a full pregnancy. Cynthia did not know she was pregnant. She was still drinking while she was pregnant. She was taking monthly psychiatric injections while she was pregnant. And she gave birth at home on the toilet, which is how she gave birth to Donald as well. Both children were born at home. She didn't recognize she was going into labor. Lydia was born four pounds and 13 ounces with microcephaly, which means her head was too small. She had problems from the very start and was pretty immediately placed with Ms. Granado's new husband's sister, so the child's maternal aunt. That's where she went as a baby. Cynthia came down to Mississippi to meet Tim, went back home. And what the records show is that the aunt dropped Lydia off at Cynthia's house and went to work. Couple of hours later, Cynthia called her and told her that Lydia wasn't breathing. Lydia went to the hospital and two days later, she died. The cause of death was listed as cardiopulmonary arrest with a possibility of sudden infant death syndrome.

DEBORAH GREY: A couple of things. One is what we talked about just a minute ago in terms of the progression of going from being abusive and neglective to being totally oblivious and unaware of a child's needs. That would be one. The other is what the records tend to show is that at times when she was abusing substances, alcohol or drugs, her psychiatric condition became much, much worse and she became physically violent. When they would get her back into the hospital away from substances, over a period of time, she tended to clear and with medication, she could settle down somewhat. But this woman has had a very, very rough life.

DEBORAH GREY: They were living in Starkville and they had regular contact with the Jones family on the weekends. Tim was a full-time student. He was also working to bring income in. He also had student loans. Amber stayed home and took care of the children. During the summer, Tim's sister, stepsister, Jackie, would come and visit for a couple of weeks at a time to help take care of the children, saw how they were living. Described how they were living in a very Christian household, that Tim would come home and the children would crawl all over him and then they would sit and have prayer time. And then they would have dinner and then they would have some more prayer time and some Bible instruction. And then the children would go to bed and Tim would leave to go do more studying. So he was there. She said he barely missed a meal in the time that she was there and very involved and engaged with the children, as was Amber.

DEBORAH GREY: Tim, Sr. had married Julie by this time. And Julie came with three children of her own.

DEBORAH GREY: Yes.

DEBORAH GREY: I think I remember hearing a story about some online dating encouragement there that maybe that was how he ended up getting them together in some form or fashion. He and Julie and his dad have had a good and close relationship.

DEBORAH GREY: Very much.

DEBORAH GREY: He did extremely well. He was always on the Dean's List or a Presidential Scholar. He graduated Summa Cum Laude, that's how it's pronounced, with a 3.81 average. His professors subsequently wrote letters of recommendation for him that talked about he was a student -- good student, good person to have in class. What Jackie reported was that she never saw any friends. She never saw him have friends over to the house or Amber, for that matter, and she never knew of him to go out with friends. So he was still on the socially isolated side. Family would be the main people who would know what was going on in that family.

DEBORAH GREY: Yes.

DEBORAH GREY: I think so, yes.

DEBORAH GREY: Correct.

DEBORAH GREY: Right.

DEBORAH GREY: That's fine.

DEBORAH GREY: The home is still structured around a strict and literal interpretation of the Bible. Tim found this 20-year-old mobile home and he saw it as a fixer-upper. This was how it looked several months after they had moved in still. His intention was to renovate it, but very shortly after they got there, he went to work at Intel. His father came down and Julie and took one look at the trailer and were appalled and said that the outside of it looked like a trash dump and that it wasn't safe for the children. And the dad said the inside wasn't a whole lot better. So Tim, Sr. set about using his contracting skills to put in sinks and toilets and things like that on the inside to make it more habitable. Tim said and the family said Amber was disappointed and upset with where they were living. They had been in student housing all this time. And this particular mobile home was in a somewhat isolated area. Amber didn't have a license and she didn't drive. Tim's enthusiasm was that he was going to homestead, so he bought 30 chickens, three goats, two turkeys, three rabbits, four geese, two beagles, an unknown number of cats. They had a lot of animals. And, of course, he was gone most of the time. So Amber was at home with all of these critters and three small children and by now, she was also pregnant with Gabe. Amber's job was to homeschool Merah. And as she said earlier, it was something she didn't feel qualified to do, but it was something Tim urged her to do.

DEBORAH GREY: That's correct.

DEBORAH GREY: I think that there were problems there before and the move to South Carolina and this kind of isolation, social isolation and also isolation from the Jones family, which was an outlet for Amber, I think all of that combined to push this family over the edge in terms of their relationship and it seemed to get more and more argumentative.

DEBORAH GREY: One of the things that happened as things were beginning to go badly in the marriage was Tim's relationship with the imaginary friend changed. His perception was that it was still the imaginary friend, but now, the imaginary friend had turned into a monster. And it's a monster that he mentioned in the records with Dr. Hames as well. The monster was at him constantly, according to his description, telling him that he was a loser, that she was going to leave him, that he was going to lose the children, he was going to lose everything. And it was so much so that he was having trouble concentrating at work. He went to the EAP trying to get help, hoping that Amber would go with him, but she didn't. And he went to counseling for a number of times by himself. What I found significant about that was the very first thing that he went in and talked about and started crying about was his mother and said he had mommy issues, despite the fact that he had only ever met his mother on one occasion. And that was something that came up periodically in his treatment with Dr. Hames, who saw his issues as being largely related to attachment and problems in attachment with his mother. He talked about his own mommy issues, but he also talked about his fear that his children would grow up without a mother and that's what he had experienced.

DEBORAH GREY: Correct.

DEBORAH GREY: It came up through the spring. And then DSS lost track of them until they closed the case in the fall.

DEBORAH GREY: There came a time when Tim took first the three children and then the four children to South Carolina and he left them --

DEBORAH GREY: Not to South Carolina. Tim, Sr. [sic] took the children to Mississippi for his parents to take care of, and they did for the course of the summer.

DEBORAH GREY: Right. Tim, Jr. first took the three of them to his folks and then he turned around and went back and picked up Gabe and took Gabe back to his parents as well. And his sister, Jackie, helped to look after the children in the course of that summer.

DEBORAH GREY: It was. One of the people that I talked with who has children, but has a partner, a wife, said he never really stopped to think about it, but he didn't know what he would do if he was on his own and he only has two children. How in the world would he cope if he had five children on his own? Tim's kids were with his parents that summer. He would leave Intel after work on Friday, drive all night to get there by Saturday morning when they would wake up. He would spend Saturday, Sunday, tuck them into bed, drive all night and show up at Intel first thing in the morning on Monday. He was sharing an apartment with someone the jury may have met, a man named Jaimeet. And Jaimeet said -- told me that Tim was never there and when he was there, he was in the back bedroom. And he was very impressed by Tim's dedication to his children, that he would leave every weekend and spend two nights driving to spend time with his children. Ultimately, his dad told him, this is killing you. You really need to cut this back to every other week. And I think he cut it back a little bit, but he continued to go.

DEBORAH GREY: That's correct.

DEBORAH GREY: Neither he nor Amber were at the original property any longer and they lost touch with them. They sent a letter to Mississippi Social Services, but never got a response and they closed the case.

DEBORAH GREY: Yes.

DEBORAH GREY: Yes.

DEBORAH GREY: This --

DEBORAH GREY: This is also a picture that DSS took. It's a picture not from 2012, it's a picture from one of the subsequent investigations that you heard about when they went out. So this was how this trailer looked when they came out. And Tim, at this point, is a single dad with five -- four children. He's working full time. Amber is pregnant again, due to deliver in December of 2012. So school year 2012/2013 is the first year that Merah and Eli go to school. So he's got two children at home, Nahtahn and Gabe, and two that are going to school at this point.

DEBORAH GREY: Correct.

DEBORAH GREY: Correct.

DEBORAH GREY: Elaine was born, I think, on the 12th of December and Tim learned on the his birthday, that she had been born. She had learned that Amber had given birth right before he went to South Carolina -- to Mississippi to be with his family that Christmas. He didn't know whether this baby was his or not given all that had gone on, so there was going to be the possibility of some DNA testing done before he would know whether that baby was his. So he knew that, but he didn't tell his family. They didn't know that she had been born yet.

DEBORAH GREY: Well, to start with, in the 2012/2013 school year when the kids first started and that Christmas comes right in the middle of that, when Merah and Eli went to school, he learned that they were both behind their grade level. Merah tested out in the first and third percentile at the start of the year and Eli tested out at the first and fourth percentile in math and the 18th to 37th percentile in reading. By the end of the year, both of them had improved, but they still weren't working at grade level. Merah, in particular, was still -- she was in the 20 to 35th percentile as far as how she was doing. Eli had taken a variety of small items at school and was getting into some trouble for that. And then one day in the midst of that, he came to school with a pocketknife and it was Tim's pocketknife. And he brought it into the school, basically, for show and tell. And there's a zero tolerance policy for things like that, even if you're a kindergartener, so they took him in and they suspended him. And they told Tim that their recommendation was going to be that he be expelled, permanently expelled for the year because he had brought this pocketknife in. There was a hearing and Tim went to the hearing and they were able to revert it back to just a suspension and Eli was able to finish his kindergarten year. But that was a major to-do and probably the first big school stress for Tim as a single dad.

DEBORAH GREY: Yes. He's still seeing Dr. Hames on occasion. And I believe it was after that Christmas that he also took the children in. He took Merah and Eli in for counseling.

DEBORAH GREY: He was no longer living his life according to the plan. We had talked about how the Bible gave him the instruction for how to be a dad, how to be a husband, how to live this life and he wasn't doing that anymore. In addition to that, he was using substances that he hadn't used in a long time, substances that he had a genetic predisposition towards having problems with. Alcoholism and drug addiction run in his family. He knew that, but he was using substances, basically, to kill the pain, to deal with his anxiety. His church attendance had fallen off. He had stopped his tithing with the church. So things just weren't going the way that he had envisioned and lived his life. I think one of the things that occurs to me is that the lack of alcohol, the lack of marijuana, the lack of cigarettes, the fidelity in the marriage, all of those things served as protective factors for Tim. We talked about that earlier. And now, virtually, all of those were gone and he didn't have those kinds of protective factors in his life. What he had was Intel. Things were still going well at Intel. He could speak the language at Intel. He was no longer speaking the language of relationships or parenting very well. And Chrystal Ballentine noted a change around this period of time.

DEBORAH GREY: That actually happened more into the spring of 2014.

DEBORAH GREY: So he went through the summer of 2013 and, unlike previous summers, he didn't go visit his family. So this gentleman, who has no outside work friends to speak of at this point, is no longer going to church, no longer has a family that's laying eyes on him and his kids to see how they're doing. He is living in a rural area with a few trailers spotted around him. He's very socially isolated at this point. And what's significant to that for me is nobody is seeing him to know what's going on, but, also, that he has nobody else at this point to bounce things off of. He has no support. The only support he has are paid babysitters, who are not what I would call professional babysitters. They are ladies or girls in the neighborhood who are willing to sit for him. They might refer to them as nannies, but they're not nannies in the sense they have a childcare degree or a child -- they have childcare experience is what they appear to have.

DEBORAH GREY: He seemed to become restless at Intel. He had a belief that Intel was going to cut jobs. And periodically, I've seen it in the newspaper as I look back historically that there would be newspaper articles about Intel planning to cut jobs. He hadn't been there all that long. He feared on the one hand that he would get cut and he would have no income on which to support his children. But he also feared, on the other hand, if he didn't get cut, what was it going to mean to his work load. And those of us who have worked places where folks have gone know what it's like to pick up the work load that's now being done by you and used to be done by two or three people. So he had fears on both sides of that in terms of what would happen to him. He applied to an online program at Georgia Tech. He was accepted. But when he called the Georgia Tech people to iron out some things about some forms that he had going on there, he didn't like the way that they talked to him and said well, he wasn't going to go there because nobody should talk to someone the way that they had just spoken to him. So he withdrew his application. Over time, he had a variety of ideas. More of those in the spring of 2014, I think. Some involved going to Korea, saying his children spoke English well enough that they could teach English as a second language. He developed an idea of medical school. He looked into doing certain things online to make money. He did a variety of things to try to explore increasing his income.

DEBORAH GREY: Ultimately, it was. He saw something on the internet or on television that said if you want to be a millionaire, this is how you do it and there was a link to that and he followed the link. And the link said that they had a program that would teach you how to become a day trader and how to do things, among other things, to trade currency pairs. They had a program that would teach people how to do that and it was $4,000. He contacted them and said he didn't have $4,000, but he'd like to do it and they agreed to draft it out of his checking account on a regular basis. Over the next several months, he took out and sent in, I think, something like maybe $18,000 to this day trading organization. Ultimately, he took back a large percentage of that. It was hard to interpret that from the financial records. But one of the things that became significant, I think, is that he started running an overdraft. This is a numbers guy. So he's running an overdraft and every time he runs an overdraft, he incurs a $25 charge. He's writing checks for $2.76, for $5.50 all over town. And by the end of a finite period of months, he's got $700 in overdraft fees for writing checks like that. So he's handling money in ways that would not appear to be wise and they would appear to be impulsive and not guided by what he's certainly intelligent enough to know.

DEBORAH GREY: I think that it comes up somewhat before that and continues during it. He also had been having ongoing stresses with his children during the course of the school year 2013/2014. Now, he's got three children in school and each of them were having their own level of not abnormal difficulties, but having difficulties.

DEBORAH GREY: That's right, that began May 5th, 2014.

DEBORAH GREY: That's correct.

DEBORAH GREY: DSS got involved very appropriately when the school called and told them that Nahtahn had said that his dad had choked him and held him up against the wall. And DSS came out as soon as they got that complaint, interviewed the child, interviewed the father, went out to the home, saw the child the next day. You guys have heard most all of that, I believe. They followed up with the family. Dad and the kids were having cupcakes for Merah's birthday. Their visit to the family was unannounced, as they mostly are. And then they followed up with the babysitter, who said that everything was fine. There are two things that struck me in this. And that is, we know from the teachers -- and I didn't interview the teachers, but I've read their statements to the police. The teachers saw things as being far from fine at school. They had noted problems. They had noted difficulties. The DSS record indicates that when they went out there, there was a guidance counselor and a teaching assistant there when they interviewed Nahtahn and then when they saw Merah and Eli and Nahtahn and yet, there's no indication that DSS interviewed the teachers to say how are these children getting along in general. I don't see any dication about that. Also, both Elaine and Gabe had been having some difficulties that are noted in the pediatric records. Gabriel had been diagnosed as developmentally delayed with his gross motor skills as well as his -- that would be walking, crawling, creeping and his talking. And the doctor had referred him for further evaluation and for treatment and Tim did not follow through with that.

DEBORAH GREY: Correct. He apparently called the babysitter and said he was so sorry he had forgotten to pick them up. And she said, you already did, go check the bedroom. And he did. So, clearly, there were things that were not quite right there that social services was not aware of.

DEBORAH GREY: That's correct.

DEBORAH GREY: They find it both founded and unfounded. And what it looks like is the unfounded was, perhaps, a typographical error or an error of some sort. They found it for substantial risk of physical abuse, but they saw it as a one-time thing and it was closed with no services.

DEBORAH GREY: August 7th, yes. And the complainant was a Ms. Tanner. And the complaint states Tim beats Elias leaving extensive bruising, does not feed the children adequately.

DEBORAH GREY: It was.

DEBORAH GREY: They found adequate food in the house. They said that dad seems to be overwhelmed and he's unable to maintain the home, keep it clean, but the children appear to be clean, groomed and appropriately dressed. They had not taken any sort of action on this case. They still had time to do that. But when they did have their seven-day staffing, August 13th, they said there weren't any concerns of impending safety concerns at the time.

DEBORAH GREY: I do.

DEBORAH GREY: That's the bare bones genogram, that's correct.

DEBORAH GREY: So we talked before about how the squares were male and the circles were female. The line represents a marriage and children. The squiggly lines represent sexual abuse. So you see that going from Ted Montaine towards the girls in this family and from Domingo down towards Tim's mom, Cynthia. The colors represent different things. The blue represents someone who's been abused, neglected or molested. And I'm having a hard time reading that, so I'm sure you guys are, too. The pink represents a psychiatric diagnosis. The red is a suicide attempt and the brown is substance abuse. And what I did was, the majority of this is documented and I have records to go along with it. If I don't, instead of just being noted or having a D by it, it has an R by it and that means it's been reported to me by, at least, two people.

DEBORAH GREY: What I can do is tell the jury the essence of what these various diagnoses are that these family members have. You can tell from looking at this that on each generation, there are problems that are shown. And we'll start with Tim Jones, Sr. And what I also have on here are legal difficulties because -- if the legal difficulty relates to substance abuse or if it relates to domestic violence. So Tim Jones, Sr., we have 1982, domestic violence, choking and striking his wife. 1995, battery, breaking furniture, choking and punching his wife.

DEBORAH GREY: I've either confirmed it through documentation or if it's been reported to me, I mentioned that it was reported.

DEBORAH GREY: Not that I know of.