Safety in Death

Try to remember a time when you were very young, and unbelievably scared of something or someone. Maybe you were scared of hats or helmets (I was). Or spiders. Or your scary-looking cousin, or the old man down the street who murmured to himself.

Now imagine that fear, and put it in place of your mother. Most of you love your mothers, I'm pretty sure, so having an unbelievable fear of your mother is probably something you can't imagine, but just try. Imagine your mother as a single teenage mother living with her boyfriend, a gargantuan of a male with a pockmarked face.

Then imagine your mother and her boyfriend beating you with belts. Holding your head underwater in the bathtub. Picking you up by your hair and throwing you across the room, letting your head smash on the ground. What pain, what fear do you think you might experience? Pain and trauma enough to kill you.

Oh, and by the way, you're only two years old. Imagine your vocabulary only a hundred words or so, barely able to form sentences, let alone run very far on your tiny legs.

This is most likely what happened to Riley, a toddler with a ringlet-framed face and daughter to teenage mother Kimberly Dawn Trenor. Authorities believe Riley was discovered in a Galveston waterway, stuffed unceremoniously in a box after her death with severe head trauma. The DNA tests continue to confirm her identity, but a confession from Trenor about the abuse and death makes the story all more horrific for the girl formerly known as "Baby Grace."

We have read the travesties of what happens when sex offenders get their hands on young girls, and what happens when mentally sick mothers murder their children. But at the hands of such abuse and torture... even the most fastidious of heart would gulp in fear. I, personally, nearly vomited at the account of the end of this little girl's life.

I have a two-year-old daughter with blonde ringlets. Maybe it's just a natural reaction from a mother. But the fact is, it makes it that much easier for me to envision just what happened according to that affidavit, and how little toddler bodies are so hearty and fragile at the same time.

My wishes for what should happen to the two people being held in custody are not proper to print here. In all honesty, if the father and grandmother who loved Riley so much were standing by, and that Riley could have had a love-filled life with either of them but did not because of the custody ruling (almost always goes to the mother with visitation rights for the father; exception of Spears, Britney), then Riley's fate was probably doomed to begin with as soon as the custody battle began.

The boyfriend, Royce Zeigler, apparently attempted suicide soon after the murder. Pity. He was probably ashamed of what he would have seen of Riley in the afterlife and chickened out.

Now Riley is safe in death. Let's hope neither Zeigler nor Trenor are safe in the bowels of American justice.