Can Nate Ybanez Ever Be Forgiven?

In state after state, the age at which kids could be tried as adults was lowered, binding children as young as twelve to the criminal justice system. Those convicted were sent to adult facilities instead of juvenile detention and given radically lengthened prison terms for a range of youthful offenses. And for kids who played any part in a killing, what awaited them was the world's most draconian verdict: mandatory life in prison without parole, also known as LWOP.

Nowhere is that paradigm more on view than in the state of Colorado, which had long been a state of bold extremes that split its political differences down the middle. But in the early Nineties, the balance of power tipped when two conservative megachurches put their thumbs on the scale. Both Focus on the Family, founded by the Rev. James Dobson, and the New Life Church, run by the Rev. Ted Haggard, plunged headlong into local affairs, urging their congregants to vote only for candidates who were "right on pro-family issues," and to contribute their time and political money to get such people elected. (Haggard, a fierce and prolific foe of "the homosexual agenda" and a former adviser to George W. Bush, was recently dismissed by the board of his church for allegedly paying a man to engage in sex during a three-year period.) In short order, the legislature swung heavily Republican and began to churn out bills that prolonged the terms for adult and juvenile offenders.

In the mid-Eighties, there were roughly 4,400 inmates in this live-and-let-live state; a decade later that number was 11,541, and Colorado was hemorrhaging money. Social services tanked and at-risk kids were left stranded, particularly abused boys over the age of thirteen, whom the state decided were sufficiently grown to fend off their attackers. One such kid was Nate Ybanez, who begged anyone who would listen -- doctors, cops, other kids' families -- for rescue from the violence waiting at home. But every time he ran, the cops brought him back, telling him sternly to mind his folks, who were only trying to raise him a proper Christian.

What makes a teenager kill his mother -- an act so dire it seems to controvert nature and thwart hundreds of thousands of years of genetic code? Many children are mistreated for years, beaten or belittled or shunted aside, but don't pick up a fireplace tool and cave their mother's skull in. Nate Ybanez did, though he is described -- unanimously -- as a sweet, well-mannered boy, the kind of young man other parents admired and wished their sons were like. It's a conundrum whose roots go back at least five decades, to a meatpacking town in the middle of nowhere and a man who raised his family in holy terror.

Davenport, iowa, is the kind of place that kids grow up to leave. Fifty-five years ago, Bernie Ybanez, Nate's grandfather, arrived there as a shell-shocked veteran of World War II, having slogged through the carnage of the Pacific theater. A Filipino with a short-stack temper and a glare that "scared you down to your shoes," as one acquaintance describes it, he eventually found work at the local Oscar Mayer plant and lasted there almost thirty years. But at night he went home and drank, then beat his wife and kids till he got tired. He was particularly brutal to his only son, Roger, and to Maria, the oldest of three daughters. In the copious rap sheet Bernie compiled, there is a record of his arrest for battering Roger, then two, till his eyes were swelled shut. When the boy got older, Bernie would back him into a corner and whip him with a metal buckle, or flog him with a stick "from an acre away all the way back home," says his widow, Kathryn Benisch.

Speaking to Miles Moffeit of The Denver Post, whose series on the state's young lifers first brought Nate's past to light, Benisch described her former husband as "a jealous alcoholic" who didn't like to let her leave the house. "Bernie gave me black eyes, tried to kill me once or twice, and threatened to dump me in a ditch," she said. But evidence suggests the crimes against his children were actually far more egregious. Bernie Ybanez allegedly molested his daughter Maria for years; when she ran away from home, he tracked her down, beat and choked her to death, then dumped her in a shallow grave, say police.