Pubdate: Sun, 23 Oct 2005 Source: Contra Costa Times (CA) Copyright: 2005 Knight Ridder Contact: http://www.contracostatimes.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/96 Author: Sara Steffens WARNING SIGNS NOT ALWAYS EASY TO IDENTIFY People who know 16-year-old Scott Dyleski were stunned by his arrest this week on suspicion of bludgeoning a Lafayette neighbor to death. Despite his odd hairdo and eccentric look, friends and neighbors described the former Boy Scout as bright, respectful, even helpful. But investigators present a far darker picture. They accuse Dyleski of killing 52-year-old Pamela Vitale, who was struck dozens of times with a piece of molding and another object. Sources believe the killing grew from a credit card scam Dyleski allegedly launched to finance a marijuana-growing business. Because of the brutality of the crime, prosecutors will try Dyleski as an adult. For many parents, the disconnect between the two personas remains one of the case's most disturbing aspects. Whether Dyleski is eventually found guilty, it is haunting to imagine that a teenager who seemed relatively normal could get into so much trouble, so fast. "I think parents get frightened because they know, 'There but for the grace of God go I.' I could miss something too," said Rona Renner, a longtime parent educator and registered nurse. "It is a wake-up call to paying attention to what you know about your teenager." Warning signs are always much easier to recognize in hindsight. But experts in adolescent behavior recognize familiar themes in accounts of Dyleski's background, especially his response to the death of his half sister, Denika Dyleski, three years ago in a car crash. Scott Dyleski changed dramatically around that time, dressing himself in dark, gothic clothing and distancing himself from others, acquaintances say. "It's important to understand that the goth identity is not by itself a dark and scary one," said Dr. Lynn Ponton, a professor of adolescent psychiatry at UC San Francisco and author of "The Romance of Risk: Why Teenagers Do the Things They Do." "It can be creative, a healthy aspect of risk-taking. But it can also mask a depression." Many teens who lose a sibling experience "survivor guilt," the feeling that they should have been the one to die, said Ponton. And depression related to a traumatic event can fuel anger, irritability and impulsive behavior. "I've seen teenagers who have killed before, and one of the things that happens is if they're struggling with a mental illness, their impulsivity is higher," said Ponton. "They will act in ways that are not predictable." In some cases, depression can become so severe that sufferers can actually lose touch with reality, losing awareness of their actions, says Ponton. Dramatic changes in a teen's behavior and personality, loss of attention span, loss of friends and leaving high school, even to enroll in college, can all be signs of mental health problems, Ponton said. "Those are the things that parents need to be paying attention to," she said. "The goth behavior is like a red herring." Depression is a common precursor to violence in teenage boys, says William Pollack, author of "Real Boys," an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School "With school shooters, up to 70 percent were in a depression or around a depressive experience within six months of the shooting," he said. In boys, depression can take less familiar forms, like bravado, negativity, irritability or refusal to talk, says Pollack. "Does that mean he's going to kill someone? No. Does that mean he needs intervention? Yes. You can't go wrong in intervening, you can go wrong in leaving it alone." Kids who feel disconnected or alienated do sometimes gravitate toward alternative subcultures like the goth scene, said Pollack. But, he added, "If you took every kid who wore black and wore a trench coat and listened to weird music between the ages of 15 and 18 and said they're at risk, we'd have to close down our schools and our homes." A child's relationship with adults is a much stronger predictor than any peer associations, including gangs, said Pollack. "If he feels really cared about by a family member, a mother or father .. he is two times less likely to become violent toward himself or anyone else." For parents, the common lesson underlying incidents of teenage violence is the importance of staying connected, says Pollack. Many parents pull back during adolescence, but their teens still need them, he said. "You don't want to stop the channels of communication with helpful adults. It's so easy with adolescents to say, well they're on their own, you want to give them space. If the umbilicus were a metaphor, you would never really want to cut the cord. But it would stretch or hurt a lot at times." Since parents see their teens every day, it is easy to miss shifts in behavior that are obvious to others, said psychologist Mike Riera, author of "Staying Connected to Your Teenager" and the head of Redwood Day School in Oakland. "Kids don't change suddenly. Growth just happens slowly, a sixteenth of an inch here, an eighth of an inch there," said Riera. "Parents don't see the subtle changes." That's why he recommends that parents seek input from other adults who know their teens -- especially coaches, teachers, religious leaders, who see hundreds of kids and have a sense of what falls outside the realm of normal adolescent angst. "It's so difficult for parents because they have one or two teenagers; they don't have a baseline to compare it to," said Riera. "A kid just wearing goth (styles) doesn't set the radar up," he said. "With your kids, you always want to understand, why are you attracted to something, what is it about it? Is it the lifestyle? Is it the other kids? That's really the more important conversation." Teenagers go to great lengths to hide things from parents, said Meredith Maran, who spent years immersed in the lives of youths while researching her books "Dirty," on teenage drug use, and "Class Dismissed," which documented a year at Berkeley High. "So much of teenagers' lives are conducted in secret, deliberately out of the scrutiny of adult evaluation," she said. "The percentage of things that teenagers do in the course of a week that their parents would be horrified to know about is so high." Limiting disclosure gives teens a sense of power and control over their lives. Balancing a teen's need for privacy with the necessity of supervision is a hugely complicated task for most parents, one that continues well into the 20s, says Maran. "When these things happen, there's always an up surge. Parents look and say do I have too much information, not enough information, how do I know it?" Maran recommends what she calls a "multiple intelligence route," finding out as much as possible about teens from every available source. That said, not all the blame should be placed on parents when things go wrong, she said. Teenagers lack the moral boundaries of adults, and can make amazing leaps from minor mischief into horrifyingly dangerous behavior, she said. Particularly in white, middle-class areas, adolescents tend to adopt a sense of fatalism, Maran says. "Some kids, they don't think they are going to live very long, and they don't care," she said. "It wasn't just that they thought they could crash a car and not have any consequences. When they looked at what adulthood meant for them, they just didn't really want it. ... "There are bigger issues about what kids believe is open to them, what the stakes are in growing up." - --- MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman