Columbia Missourian
Pre-term babies have a far
better chance at survival today —
but it can be risky and costly
First place winner of the Missouri Press Association’s 2017 Better Newspaper Competition feature story category (circulation 5,000-15,000)
By Allen Fennewald March 28, 2016 11 min. read
COLUMBIA — At age 11, A’Taliya Bass has already started to write her first book. She calls it “Forget the Looks,” a collection of her thoughts about inclusion and acceptance.
A’Taliya is smart, but she’s shy. Some of her classmates call her nerdy because she likes to lose herself in stories. For her last birthday, all she asked for were books.
She is one of the best violinists in the Mizzou String Project. She also won second place in the Columbia Science Fair for an experiment on ways to slow the oxidation of an apple.
If fifth-grade academics are any indicator, her future seems bright.
But when A’Taliya was born, doctors didn’t know if she would make it. Born at 27 weeks, her fists were as small as seedless grapes. Weighing just under 2 pounds, there was a 20 percent chance she wouldn’t survive.
If she did beat the odds, there was also a fair chance she would endure life-long disabilities. Difficulty breathing, eating, seeing and hearing, or cerebral palsy are common consequences of premature birth. Eleven years ago, more than 10 percent of babies born at 27 weeks had a severe disability, as well as a 30 percent chance of having a low IQ.
But A’Taliya survived, and she has thrived. Medical advancements in the last 50 years have dramatically increased the survival rate for infants born up to 4 1/2 months prematurely. And children like A’Taliya — born two months early or more — are the key benefactors, reaching a current survival rate of 88 percent.
Advancements are significant
Of the 15 million babies born prematurely each year, about 1 million — 7 percent — do not survive.
In the 1950s, 88 percent of infants born at 2 pounds, 3 ounces or less did not survive, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Pre-term infants during that period were generally recorded in weight, rather than gestational duration.
Controlled hospital conditions and advanced monitoring systems are keys to the increased survival rate. High-tech cribs known as Isolettes not only keep the babies warm, but also monitor weight and vital signs. Oxygen treatments can be delivered into the Isolettes if babies are breathing on their own, or delivered directly through tubes into the underdeveloped lungs of infants.
After A’Taliya was born in 2005 at Boone Hospital, she remained for two months in a temperature-controlled, computer-monitored crib. She breathed through an airway hooked to a ventilator and was fed through a tube.
Heart, oxygenation and carbon dioxide monitors were attached to her paper-thin skin. Two IVs were slipped through her belly button, reaching beneath her heart, supplying dextrose sugar, protein and fat to keep her growing.
Yet despite all this technology, in 2005, babies of her development remained on the fringe of survivability.
“Eleven years ago, 27-weekers were still a really challenging group of babies to take care of,” said Tim O’Connor, a neonatologist at Boone Hospital Center.
Babies born at less than 24 weeks of pregnancy are still at considerable risk, even though medical science has made significant strides since the 1960s at keeping premature babies alive and at preventing disabilities.
Neonatal care received serious attention in the United States around 1963, when the newborn son of President John F. Kennedy died after being born 5 1/2 weeks early. The baby boy weighed 4 pounds, 10.5 ounces, a little more than half the weight of an average newborn and about 2.8 pounds heavier than A’Taliya was at birth.
Patrick Bouvier Kennedy died of a breathing problem known as respiratory distress syndrome, and modern breathing treatments would likely have saved him.
“(Newborns dying at that age are) almost unheard of these days,” O’Connor said. “That baby was part of the push to say, ‘Why is it these babies can’t survive?'”
By the 1970s, it was common for 28-week-old newborns to be successfully treated, according to the Minnesota Medical Association. The first neonatal ventilators had been developed to assist breathing. Improvements had been made in monitoring blood oxygen levels, heart rate and blood pressure.
Ultrasounds to look for bleeding in the brain had been developed, and by the end of that decade, 50 percent of infants born at 27 weeks and about 2 pounds — as A’Taliya was — were likely to survive.
In the 1980s, availability of neonatal medical care greatly expanded nationwide. Skin-to-skin therapy with parents, known as kangaroo care, was introduced. During this period, A’Taliya’s chances of survival would have been around 50 percent.
By the 1990s, the survival of pre-term newborns between 23 to 25 weeks became possible with advanced respiratory treatments, pre-natal steroids and new technologies in monitoring vital signs, among other medical improvements.
In 2012, the survival rate for pre-term births of 22 to 28 weeks had reached 79 percent, up from 70 percent in 1993, according to a study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
Care can be costly
A premature birth can cost up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the level of treatment, O’Connor said. Critics of medical intervention in very pre-term infants point to the high cost of saving their lives.
In 2007, the Institute of Medicine reported pre-mature births cost the United States $26.2 billion each year. The expenses were split — $16.9 billion for medical and health care, $5.7 billion in lost household and labor market productivity associated with disabilities, and $1.9 billion for labor and delivery. Another $1.1 billion goes for special education services and $611 million toward programs for children as old as 3 with disabilities and developmental delays.
A 2012 study published by the American Journal of Obstetrics Gynecologyfound that if all of the world’s infants born between 22 and 23 weeks and 6 days — considered the limit of viability — were resuscitated, it would add $300 million more to the world’s health-care systems costs than current practices. Those practices now recommend limiting care to comfort for babies with especially bleak outlooks.
“The earlier you are, the more resources you use,” said MU Women’s and Children’s Hospital neonatologist John Pardalos. “It’s not just the cost in the hospital, it’s the long-term costs.”
In countries with socialized medicine, money allocated to health care is established for the entire population, and governments must balance the needs of the entire nation. This limits the amount of money that can be spent on infants on the edge of survival. In the United Kingdom, for example, doctors are asked to limit treatment of babies born at less than 23 weeks, with their parents’ assent.
Limiting the resuscitation of extremely pre-term newborns is not restricted to nations with socialized medicine. In the Netherlands, where health care is privatized and insurance is mandatory, babies born before 25 weeks who can’t survive without machines are euthanized or allowed to die in the delivery room, unless the parents request treatment.
In the United States, where health-care costs are typically shared between patients and insurance providers, parents and doctors must decide how much cost, suffering and risk the family can manage.
In 2002, Congress passed the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act, which safeguarded the life of any newborn showing vital signs. The act prevents doctors from euthanizing viable pre-term infants, which O’Connor said has never been a widespread issue. He and many neonatologists believe the act was a means for limiting late-term abortions.
But the act also gives doctors medical efficacy to only provide comfort care if the baby’s outlook is hopeless.
A 2007 article in the Journal of Medical Ethics spoke to this issue: “Few (doctors) insist that when life can be prolonged for however a short time, it always must be. What the baby, older child or adult is entitled to, morally and legally, is appropriate care. Neonatal intensive care is invasive and burdensome.”
According the the article, infants could be subjected to about 200 painful procedures in just two weeks. When treatment becomes more suffering than hope for survival, prolonging care is regarded as inhumane.
Pain is more intense in premature newborns, Pardalos said. The communication between body and brain is delayed, making pain also last longer. According to a 2007 article in Seminars for Perinatology, this pain was infrequently recognized or treated until 1980 because infants are unable to tell doctors where or how much it hurts. Today, pain is assessed through heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate and blood oxygen levels.
Morphine is the infants’ most common source of relief. The University of Arkansas’ NEOPAIN trial found that the opiate is generally safe when used with caution but causes decreased blood pressure in infants born before 27 weeks in the womb. Researchers in France, however, have questioned morphine’s ability to relieve the intense pain of surgery.
Some parents have deemed these trials too much for a baby to endure, and a few have taken measures into their own hands. A Michigan dermatologist, Dr. Gregory Messenger, was acquitted of manslaughter in 1995 after he turned off life support systems to his 15-week premature son without the knowledge of the medical staff.
When the infant was born, the medical staff members insisted on placing the hand-sized infant on a respirator, in accordance with hospital protocol. Messenger and his wife, however, had asked doctors not to resuscitate the boy, with Messenger quoted as saying he did not want doctors to do painful “experiments.”
In Missouri, as in most states, parents and physicians are left to decide the destiny of new lives on the mortal fringe. Pardalos said he works to educate parents and enable them to make informed decisions.
“I personally believe in giving the babies a chance,” he said. “So, 22-, 23-, 24-weekers, if the family wants it, I’m happy to help try to give the family a chance.”
Risks can be severe
Pardalos said he tries to ensure that parents are fully aware of the potential outcomes. The child could be physically or mentally handicapped, sometimes severely so.
In severe cases, “someone will have to change and feed (him or her) and he or she will never be able to walk without a wheelchair,” Pardalos said. “If that’s what they want for their baby, I don’t feel like I’m the type of person that can say, no you can’t have that.”
If the parents cannot decide, O’Connor said the medical staff will always resuscitate the infant, unless the baby is too small to use available equipment, like tracheal tubes to assist breathing. If a baby’s heart stops and the ribs are too fragile for chest compression, Pardalos will assess the parents’ willingness to let the infant go.
Although O’Conner and Pardalos said they always try to give parents a clear picture of the risks, this has not always been the case with all physicians.
According to the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, a procedure known as the Surfactant, Positive Pressure, and Oxygenation Randomized Trial (SUPPORT) was developed in 2004 to test and determine the safest level of oxygen saturation for premature infants.
Oxygen saturation is measured by the amount of oxygen absorbed by hemoglobin in the blood. Some infants were saturated at moderate levels, around 80 percent saturation, and others higher levels of 90 percent.
O’Connor said it was an important study, but the researchers were heavily criticized for how parental consent was obtained.
The federal Office for Human Research Protections found the consent process for the research to have violated federal regulations by inadequately informing parents about the “reasonably foreseeable risks” of death or blindness. The New York Times editorial board concurred, calling the debacle startling and deplorable.
In 2013, the Public Citizen Health Research Group wrote a letter to then U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services condemning the trial. The New England Journal of Medicine supported the study, however, finding the consent forms adequate, the publication accused the Office of Human Research Protections of giving clinical research a bad name. Leaders of the National Institute of Health also backed the trial.
Neonatologists face additional risks of using respiratory treatments on pre-term infants. When an infant needs more oxygen ventilation than it can handle, Pardalos said their lungs could rupture like balloons.
And yet some mothers, like A’Taliya’s mother, Renee Williams, are willing to do anything to give their child a chance at life.
The earliest pre-term survivor in the United States is a little girl from Florida named Amillia Taylor, who was born at 21 weeks and six days in 2006.
As African-American females, both Amillia and A’Taliya had an advantage. Although science has yet to explain why, African-American baby girls are among the more likely to survive. O’Connor said they appear to be slightly more mature, eat quicker and respond better to ventilators.
O’Connor treated an African-American baby girl born eight weeks premature who began feeding on her own a week later and never needed a ventilator.
“We love it when that happens,” he said.
On the other hand, white male infants are among the least likely to survive. O’Connor said it’s referred to as “wimpy white male syndrome.” And yet, the youngest infant to come through the NICU at the Women’s and Children’s Hospital, which specializes in pre-term treatment, was a white baby boy born at 22 weeks. Less than 10 percent of infants born at that age survive, Pardalos said.
That rambunctious child, William John Beversdorf, came into the world kicking and screaming at just 1 pound 3 ounces. His mother, Shelley Beversdorf, refers to him as a “tough little thing” who emerged “half-cooked.”
When he was born four years ago, his mother said William’s eyes were still sealed shut, like a kitten’s. His skin was extremely under-developed, so the medical staff warmed him with plastic wrap, a common practice in these cases.
He required oxygen treatment due to his underdeveloped lungs, but too much oxygen can cause blindness in newborns.
His chances of survival were extremely slim. With a brain that was so far under-developed, cerebral palsy seemed to be the likely outcome. He would probably spend his life in a wheelchair, Pardalos told his mother.
Pardalos, who handled the birth, prepared her for the worst before going into the first of three stomach surgeries to fix a perforated bowel. That dropped the baby’s weight to 15 ounces.
The oxygen needed to keep him alive also caused the blood vessels in his eyes to overgrow. Fortunately, it was a controlled with a newly developed medication injected into the eye.
This disorder, called retinopathy of prematurity, affects 14,000 to 16,000 pre-term infants each year, according to the National Eye Institute. It is the leading cause of blindness in the U.S., and the disorder is the reason musician Stevie Wonder is blind.
Beversdorf spent 165 days in a chair beside the incubator, yet like A’Taliya’s mother, she did not consider any alternatives other than keeping her child alive.
“It was horrible … it was certainly worth it, but you just don’t know,” she said. “Every day is a new crisis and a new drama. He was on the (ventilator) for nine weeks, which is an extremely long amount of time.”
Rewards can be great
In the end, the 4-year-old survived and today seems to be a normal, healthy boy. Although William looks to be about 2 1/2, his mother said he loves to run, play and pull silverware out of the drawers while she is on the phone. His vision seems fine, and he has no signs of cerebral palsy.
William’s mom said he has also become a part of the Women’s and Children’s Hospital. He serves as a prime example of how far modern medicine has come.
When William and A’Taliya were released from the NICU, both children were expected to be two or three years behind other children their age, both mentally and physically.
William now participates in minor speech therapy sessions at his preschool. Like A’Taliya was at his age, he can be less socially engaged than some of his classmates. Otherwise, he isn’t unlike any other kid who was born with fully formed skin.
His mother calls it miraculous.
A’Taliya’s mother said her daughter may be a little skinny, but she has a big appetite and is of average height. The girl was about a year and a half old before she said her first word, and for a time her mother worried if they would ever have a conversation, but now shyness is her only limitation.
Both mothers know they are lucky that their children do not have disabilities and that others aren’t as fortunate.
Renee Williams discovered just how lucky she is after joining a support group for mothers of premature newborns.
“It could have been worse,” she said. “Some of the kids there were really disabled, and it was going to be a struggle for the rest of the parents to deal with.”
The two mothers believe they would have cared for their kids either way, but they have certainly thought about what it would be like to care for a disabled child, as well as the pain both parents and patients go through. They don’t fault the parents of extremely premature infants who decide to let their children go.
O’Connor said that about half of the parents of infants born at 22 weeks choose to forego resuscitation, choosing comfort care instead. The babies are wrapped in a blanket and made as comfortable as possible until they pass on.
Beversdorf said each infant should be treated individually, legally and ethically.
“I think that Dr. Pardalos, if he couldn’t have done it or he didn’t think it was feasible, he wouldn’t have made the attempt.
“He just basically said, ‘There’s no reason to think that this baby is going to live, but we will try to get a tube down him,’ and he came out and got the tube down him, and that was what happened.”
Renee Williams said she knows what a challenge it would be if her daughter required 24-hour care, but she was willing to accept the risk.
“I don’t think there are words to describe how I would have felt coming home empty handed,” Williams said.
Supervising editor is Jeanne Abbott.
Vox Magazine
Long waits and high rises
While Columbia wrestles over luxury housing, Section 8 clients wait for safe, affordable and available homes
Feature story in first place winning edition of Vox Magazine in the 2015 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Student Magazine Contest places category
By Allen Fennewald Oct. 30, 2015
Paquin Towers are seen in Columbia, Mo. during sunrise Thursday, Oct. 22, 2015. Photo by Justin L. Stewart/Missourian
For the past three years, NeKeisha Williams has arrived to work under the yellow, pencil-shaped pillars of Nanny’s Neighborhood Childcare Center.
The quaint, one-story daycare sits behind a small flower bed and a wooden sign bearing its name in bright, primary colors. It is surrounded by
At the end of the workday, the 22-year-old single mother goes home to a one-bedroom apartment off Sylvan Lane, which she rents by the month.
Williams doesn’t want to commit to a longer lease. She wants to find somewhere bigger for her and her daughter, but that hasn’t been easy.
“Sometimes I just want to give up and just stay where I’m at now because I feel like it isn’t going to make a difference,” she says.
Williams doesn’t want her almost 1-year-old daughter’s first memories to include sharing a room with Mom. Her dream is to have a nursery — someplace to call the baby’s room.
Although she wants a bigger place, government-sponsored housing vouchers won’t cover the cost of another bedroom until Williams’ daughter turns 2. “(Everyone) keeps telling me to try to look,” she says. But I may have to settle for less.”
If Williams settles, it could mean sharing a room in a rough neighborhood throughout her daughter’s adolescence.
The Section 8 Housing Voucher Program, which assists citizens whose rent exceeds 30 percent of their monthly income, is flooded with applicants. Williams applied before she became pregnant and only recently received her voucher.
As of Sept. 22, there were 2,711 people in the program in Columbia, nearly 73 percent of whom are black. The city’s applicant waiting list opened and closed during one week this summer and accepted 1,200 applications. It won’t open again for about two years. People are turned away every day.
Issues like this are the downside of “the two Columbias.” City Manager Mike Matthes referred to this divide in his strategic plan presentation in September.
Matthes led into the subject with the positives. Unemployment is at 3.5 percent in a growing city with improving graduation rates, and 79 percent of residents are satisfied with the quality of life in Columbia according to a recent survey. “Although these are positive and promising indicators,” he said, “we also learned some troubling truths.”
For example, unemployment is four times higher among Columbia’s black population. The typical black household earns 60 percent of what the average white household does. Half of the manufacturing jobs in the city have been replaced by minimum-wage positions with no benefits.
“Clearly not everyone in Columbia is thriving,” Matthes said.
While more and more luxury apartment buildings are built downtown, this “other Columbia” is in the thick of a housing crisis. There simply aren’t enough places to live, especially for those with assistance vouchers.
Williams joined the voucher waiting list three years ago, before her pregnancy, and received a voucher earlier this year. But her current landlord doesn’t accept Section 8. Few places do. A home close to the daycare and where she feels safe enough to raise her daughter has been hard to find.
Racial and economic biases make many landlords unwilling to accept the vouchers.
Brian Nichols, the property manager at Stadium Apartments, says Section 8 isn’t accepted there. Nichols says, in his experience, voucher-holders tend to do more damage to apartments than other tenants.
And that is Williams’ dilemma. The only places she’s found that are near the daycare and accept vouchers are in dangerous neighborhoods.
“(I’ve looked) literally everywhere,” Williams says. “The (Section 8 housing) on Demaret I didn’t have an interest in because I didn’t want to raise my daughter over there. I just didn’t feel like it was a safe place for her.”
Nichols says management at the higher-end places generally prefer students because of their access to student loans.
“Government hands out student loans like candy,” he says. “Students borrow it; the schools raise their tuition. The investors of these big complexes come in and charge exorbitant amounts of money for rent because they know the students will pay it. They can get access to the money.”
Vacancies have been rare because former students haven’t moved out, Nichols says. They haven’t found careers after school that afforded them an upgrade.
Students who can’t afford the prices of the new luxury housing downtown look outward for cheaper rent in the same areas as Section 8 clients, causing competition among the university and resident populations.
The authority hopes downtown’s luxury housing boom will attract enough students away from low-income housing to create substantial vacancies, decrease the housing demand and eventually lower rent prices as well, according to Columbia Housing Authority CEO Phil Steinhaus.
But downtown, with the District Flats at capacity and The Lofts and Brookside Downtown almost full, the housing crisis has not diminished. Instead, low-income Columbia residents are spreading out to Section 8 housing in Prathersville and Centralia, and the marketplaces there are getting more competitive.
Williams says that even students who are financially supported by their parents and can afford the high-end housing might still prefer to pay less rent, leaving them in competition with voucher holders. “I wouldn’t say (the luxury housing) would make a difference, honestly.”
Margaret Patrick, property manager of Hanover Village off Clark Lane, says the housing crisis is largely due to the profits landlords can make from renting to students. She explains how duplexes split between students and a family can have vastly different rents between the two units.
“Sometimes, the students’ rent is $950 to $1,000; the family’s rent is $650. It’s ridiculous. Everybody’s getting hurt, but somebody’s making money,” Patrick says.
This puts the 116,906 residents of Columbia in direct competition with MU’s 35,441 students.
“Those of us in this industry, we get sick about it,” Lakewood Apartments employee Lori Fowley says. The owner of the apartments, The Yarco Company Inc., renovates run-down housing to offer affordable rent.
She says people have been waiting for vacancies, especially in the nine Section 8 units, for about two years. She had to send away people on her waitlist who lived under bridges. She resents that she’s legally not allowed to put people who are displaced ahead on the list. When their turn does come, Fowley knows she won’t be able to contact them without a phone number or mailing address.
Both Fowley and Williams, landlord and tenant, have a fairly bleak outlook. “It’s a crisis,” Fowley says. “That’s a good word for it.”
As Williams searches for a new home with her voucher in hand, she wonders if the housing programs and the private sector will be able to make a difference.
The years-long waiting list isn’t inspiring optimism. The new luxury housing downtown is just a few blocks east of the public housing and Nanny’s Neighborhood Daycare — a reminder that the private sector doesn’t seem very interested in modest rent checks, public assistance vouchers and the “other Columbia.”
Jefferson City News Tribune
Jefferson City resident takes journey of genealogy, discovery in Central Europe
Swirling white clouds followed Katherine Kral as she rode to the Terezin concentration camp, as if the spirits of her Jewish ancestors were urging her onward. This was her second trip to the Czech Republic in as many years, but the first she’d walked in the footsteps of the relatives her great-grandmother left behind when she immigrated to America, just before the Holocaust began.
“I knew it was going to be a hard day,” she said.
She viewed lines of sinks inside the fortress town’s spartan stone buildings and fantasized of her deceased cousin Ernest Dombi, once a touring Gypsy band member, hurrying about fixing mechanical malfunctions in Nazi factories. The old family story said Kral’s great-aunt Emilie Dombi survived by eating some of the noodles she made in one of those factories. Other members never left the camp.
“I could feel the weight of the world on me,” Kral said. “It was a sad, sad feeling (in Terezin).”
Despite the sense of despair that lingered in the old structures, Kral came to affirm the old adage: Through darkness comes the light.
Kral wouldn’t be where she is today — a Jefferson City grandmother and Missouri Highway Patrol criminal intelligence analyst — if her great-grandmother Albine Kleiner hadn’t avoided the Nazis’ grip by sheer happenstance. Before Jews were rounded up throughout Europe, Kleiner already had moved from her hometown of Turnov to St. Louis, where she met a man and went on to raise a family.
Kral began her genealogy journey many years ago to feel more connected with her family. Her parents died in a car crash when she was 19 years old, and her grandparents passed away soon after. In mourning their loss, she realized no one left in the family knew much about the past of her father’s parents, Stephen and Eva Kral, who moved to Missouri from Cicero, Illinois.
Relatives sent her boxes of old records to rediscover their story. Wills, immigration documents and other paperwork shed a little light on the family’s history and a dark past from Eva’s Jewish side of the family.
“I’ve lost my parents and my grandparents, and who else is there to tell those stories?” Kral said. “I’m trying to tell their story” to pass on to younger relatives. “To me, it’s very important that everyone know their heritage and where they are from. It makes me feel warm and close to my family.”
Years passed, but Kral still craved more information. In her search for additional documents, she ended up making vacation plans as well.
“I reached out to the genealogy society in Chicago, and I told (a representative), ‘Yeah, someday I would love to go to the Czech Republic,’ and she told me about this group that was about to go.”
Kral was soon connected with the T.G. Masaryk Czech School, which conveniently was heading across the Atlantic in 2015 and invited Kral along.
“There was like 28 of us, and I was about the youngest,” she said. “The average age was about 77 years old, but it was great. They were so nice.”
The group visited tourist hot spots, but Kral didn’t get the chance to see where family members once lived. Fortunately, it just so happened the T.G. Masaryk Czech School was going to her family’s hometown of Turnov in 2017. She also got a partner in family genealogy after another relative, second-cousin Carol Wimmer, got involved. The duo set out Sept. 9 on a 12-day journey to discover their Central European roots.
In Turnov, officials ceremoniously greeted the Americans as a group, but when Kral showed them her family records, everything changed. It turns out Kral provided the conclusion to a local ghost story.
“Someone from the library came over, and I could tell by their voice that they were really excited,” Kral said. “That’s when they told me, ‘There is a villa here that was the Epsteins’.’ My great-great-grandmother’s maiden name was Epstein. When the Holocaust happened, (everyone thought that none of the family survived) who were living in this villa, and they said ‘a lot of the people think it is cursed and nobody wants to live in this house, but this might be your family’s.’ That’s when everybody started getting really excited.”
The supposedly cursed house had become an art gallery, and Kral was able to view it when not giving interviews to local journalists and exchanging pleasantries with the town’s vice mayors. She quickly realized she had inadvertently become a foreign celebrity, representing a happy ending to the city’s haunted house story.
Later in the Turnov visit, Kral visited the concentration camp. Even there, she found an inspiring symbol of renewal within the dark history. As she walked out of the camp, she noticed a beautifully fertile pear tree growing from a mound of green grass. She wanted to pick a pear, but someone warned her the tree grew on a mass burial site. The roots may extend to where some of her relatives might have been buried, like her cousin Viktor.
“There’s this beautiful tree, and it was just so sad,” Kral said. However, as something beautiful can grow on the remains of an awful past, so too can a family carry on in the wake of the Holocaust. Ernst and Emilie Dombi survived the Holocaust and eventually visited their family in America, though Kral said the mental scars of the Holocaust forever pained Ernest.
Kral’s trip ended on a pleasant note, after leaving the homeland of her grandmother’s family to visit her grandfather’s relative, Vlasta Kral, who lives in a small village of Kvasov, Slovakia. The 70-year-old Vlasta took the visiting cousins to the village cemetery. Like the beautiful pear tree, the cemetery was bright and full of flowering plants. The dead were celebrated more than mourned in the small village, and as Kral thought about all this, she said she heard the clatter of bells. A shepherd was crossing his sheep across the nearby road — like in the times of old when Kral’s grandfather was just a boy — a living, bleating symbol of renewal.
“Even when I was in Turnov, where the Jewish side of my family is from, it was such a sad trip, but the people were so nice and grateful that I came,” Kral said. “To me, it goes along with that pear tree. It was so symbolic, and there was so much death and the Nazis killed all these Jewish people. But here is this beautiful pear tree, and it was packed full of pears on the green grass.”
Kral currently is planning a trip to Prague to visit Vlasta Kral’s sister-in-law — and just might bring some of her other American relatives along this time.
“I’m hoping that my grandchildren and even my nieces and nephews will find this interesting and that I can pass this on.”
The saga of Rose and 1954 MSP riot
Jefferson City Councilman and former Missouri State Penitentiary corrections officer Mark Schreiber stands in the doorway of James Creighton’s former cell on MSP’s death row.
June 4th, 2017 in Local News Read Time: 7 mins.
Retired lawyer Thomas Rose lay in a hospital bed Jan. 27, 2010, watching “Law and Order” with his daughter.
“This reminds me of a case I once tried — the Missouri Penitentiary riot of ’54,” he told his daughter, Susan Rose Wilson. “I was over at that prison every day.”
This was the first time Wilson had heard the story of Rollie Laster and the Missouri State Penitentiary riot of 1954.
A never-before-published slice of history recently found its way to the News Tribune office when Wilson shared her father’s personal record of murder and conspiracy at the heart of the infamous riot that literally set the state’s capital ablaze.
The defense
Wilson said her father was serious, yet loving. When her mom needed a break, he and the five children took walks along Hayselton Drive.
Rose, born 1923 — the second of June and Elizabeth Powers Rose’s three children — lived in Kansas City until his mother’s death when he was 15. Rose then lived with his father in Jefferson City and finished high school at St. Peter’s Interparish School. He left college at age 20 in 1943 to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He married his wife of 65 years, Mary Anne Edwards, before leaving the Pacific Theater to re-enter the University of Missouri in 1946. After graduating in 1950, he went into practice in his father’s office on the corner of High and Jefferson streets.
An April News Tribune story highlighted Jefferson City’s William Rose, the screenwriter who won an Oscar for his “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” script. However, as Shakespeare said, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” and William was not the only Rose with a historic, divisive legacy.
Former MSP corrections officer and 5th Ward City Councilman Mark Schreiber said Rose was appointed to represent many inmates. Schreiber often appeared on the stand while Rose was the defense.
“He was a person who would stand up and relay his case based on facts,” Schreiber said.
Although Thomas Rose wasn’t the Oscar winner of the family, he lived a crime drama. About a year after her father passed away, Wilson found a box Thomas had intended for his nephew, William’s son. Among manuscripts for films like “The Ladykillers” and “Genevieve” was “The Rollie Laster Story,” a typewritten true crime drama.
While his fourth child was in diapers, Rose’s sense of justice was tested when he was appointed to defend Rollie Laster, an inmate charged with a gruesome murder during one of the nation’s worst prison riots.
Laster, born in 1933, worked with his father as an adolescent migratory farmer. The family moved to St. Joseph in 1948. Poverty led to burglary. Laster first visited MSP after transferring from juvenile detention for a failed escape, the first of many. Released after 14 months, he couldn’t find work and was arrested for robbing a food stand. The punishment: 12 years in MSP at age 18.
Laster was often in solitary confinement for infractions like starting a shoe factory sit-down strike or overthrowing a guard tower with a Molotov cocktail. Due to crowding, his cell was on death row, where the murder took place Sept. 22, 1954.
The Truman report, led by Gen. Ralph Truman — cousin to President Harry S Truman — found MSP had problems like insufficient staffing, poor food and medical care. Almost 200 officers were older than 50 in a prison full of young men.
“(The report’s) finding was that anything and everything that was wrong with a prison was wrong with this one,” Schreiber said. “They said (the corrections chief and warden) were honest, but they came from the ranks of the Highway Patrol, as did all three of the parole board members. Just because you’re a law enforcement officer, doesn’t mean you know anything about administration of a prison.”
The riot
It began when 19-year-old William DeLapp broke his sink’s pipe after rotten watermelon was served. When an officer came for repairs, DeLapp stole his keys and began a liberation.
Roses grew in the yard where officers fired a machine gun on prisoners. Meanwhile, Walter Lee Donnell was bludgeoned and knifed in his death row cell, where he was under protective custody. Another informant, known killer James Creighton, was injured. Donnell was one of four fatalities, the only one not caused by lawmen.
Laster was among six inmates implicated for murder. Many, like DeLapp, helped lead the uprising. About a month later, 18-year-old Joseph Vidauri was accused after leading a smaller riot. There was no physical evidence. Rose believed the charges were retribution for the rebellion.
Donnell was serving five years after turning in evidence on St. Louis gang members, at least two of whom — Irv Thompson and Richard Lindner — were consequentially serving 25 years in MSP. Neither was questioned in the investigation.
When the accused returned from interrogation, bruised and bleeding, all had confessed giving contradictory information. The lead interrogator, Highway Patrol Sgt. E.V. Nash, was promoted to warden. He committed suicide in 1964.
The prosecution
Cole County Prosecuting Attorney James Riley argued the riot was instigated to kill a snitch, though the Truman Commission’s official report listed poor conditions and treatment as motivations. Riley’s son, Michael Riley, was a senior high school student in 1954. He said his father was overworked trying cases after the riot and based his arguments on what police presented.
“This is according to what my father had told me,” Michael Riley said. “They went down to kill (Creighton), who was a snitch (held in the cell beside Donnell). (Creighton) was able to fill his lock with gravel or grit, and they couldn’t get to him. But then they said, ‘Well, here’s this other guy who’s a snitch also,’ so they killed that guy.”
The strong-willed Riley was a fitting opponent for reserved Rose. “(My father) put the nails in the coffin,” Michael Riley said. “During that riot, we had security at our house if anybody got out because there were plenty of people who he had prosecuted in there.”
Democratic Gov. Phil Donnelly wanted convictions. Republicans lambasted him for the poor prison conditions, and he needed to deflect blame for the riot. “According to these inmates, Gov. Donnelly paced back and forth before their cells and collectively advised them that they would regret that they had ever been born,” Rose wrote in his records.
Their only hope was to show Laster had been beaten into confessing. Creighton and another witness said he was guilty. Despite Rose’s advice, Laster chose Cole County as the trial venue. Many residents depended on MSP for employment, and some had spent the riot armed outside.
“The prosecutor ordered the jury to return law and order to Cole County, Missouri,” Rose wrote. “I argued that the State had made a deal with inmates Creighton and (Herman) Trout to get them to testify against Laster. My argument made a hell of a lot of sense to me.” Donnelly later set the witnesses free on time served, Rose wrote.
The jury deliberated 69 minutes before finding Laster guilty and calling for the death penalty. Laster remained stoic, but Rose was devastated, realizing jurors never considered innocence. “I was positive the confession was involuntary,” he wrote.
Politics and punishment
Schreiber said there is a stigma against convicts re-entering the public: former inmates return to crime when they can’t find honest work, like Laster when he robbed that food stand. Schreiber has worked with many convicts who led productive lives, like award-winning investigative reporter J. J. Maloney, who Schreiber said did the most exhaustive reporting on the 1954 riot. Schreiber knew Maloney when he was held in MSP for murder, before the Kansas City Star took interest in his poetry and book reviews.
Presiding Judge Sam Blair disagreed with Rose’s assessment of jury bias, saying at least three rioters would also receive the death penalty. Despite Blair’s prediction, only Laster wasn’t sentenced to life in prison.
Rose was granted an appeal, but while the Missouri Supreme Court noted execution would be excessive, the court did not alter Laster’s fate. The court invited Donnelly — the governor who said Laster would regret his birth — to reduce the punishment. Rose requested clemency anyway. Even Blair, in a change of heart, wrote the governor requesting clemency. A written response arrived shortly after. Rose wrote, “By his letter, the governor told me that if Laster’s fate ultimately was placed in his hands, Laster would die.”
A petition for review by the U.S. Supreme Court was denied. Laster’s execution was scheduled for Jan. 18, 1957.
James Blair Jr. — Judge Sam Blair’s brother and Riley’s former law partner — was elected governor in November and set to take office in early January. The exiting governor, Donnelly, told the new Gov. James Blair that Laster’s fate was in his hands — which Rose interpreted to mean he wanted Laster executed.
In a turn of events, despite his relationship with the prosecutor and Donnelly’s wishes, the new governor commuted the punishment to life imprisonment Jan. 15. It is possible Gov. Blair’s decision was influenced by the other defendants’ life sentences. “When I told (Laster) he nearly collapsed,” Rose wrote. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The outcome
According to Maloney, in his story “In the Wake of a Riot,” Thompson confessed to the murder circa 1981. The former gangster reportedly told his sister to admit he killed Donnell, and the seven were wrongfully convicted.
In another twist, Riley was appointed as the circuit judge for all of Laster’s subsequent court appearances. Rose would take up his father’s former post as city attorney for 14 years, until Michael Riley defeated him in a 1969 election.
Rose had to take heed in saving Laster’s life, though Rose believed he was wrongfully convicted. He jested in his records, “Lawyers named Rose generally screw up a lot around court rooms, foul up their client’s interests horribly, and constitute a drag on their profession, but, so far, thank God, they haven’t gotten anybody killed yet.”
Laster attempted another escape in 1959 but died in a minimum-security facility just before his possible parole date.
The riot had positive consequences as well. Emergency response squads were created that can quell riots more peacefully, and administrators learned to accept greater responsibility for their officers, Schreiber said. This is something corrections personnel are still working on throughout the country.
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