Supervision of Children Can’t Be a Sometime Thing

It’s a story that has become more chilling with each new detail. The victim was 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson of Los Angeles, a beautiful child, loving and a good student. She was found dead early Sunday in the corner stall of a women’s restroom at the Primadonna Casino resort on the California-Nevada state line. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled, apparently after having been left unattended for hours, after midnight, at a game arcade near the gambling floor. Surveillance camera tapes show the victim, unaccompanied, in and around the arcade, one floor below the casino, until about 3:48 a.m.

All of the facts aren’t in, but interviews by authorities suggest that Sherrice was left in the custody of her brother, also a minor, by her father, LeRoy Iverson, sometime around midnight. During the next few hours, including the presumed time of his daughter’s murder, Iverson was reported to be gambling upstairs.

The idea of a parent leaving any child unattended in any location is unconscionable, much less leaving a youngster without supervision for hours. And what parental handbook says that gambling casinos and their environs (which usually have at least a few people trolling for the gullible and impressionable) are suitable for children at any time?

“Parents have a moral and legal obligation to supervise their children,” said Las Vegas Metro homicide Lt. Wayne Petersen. Added one resort official: “The arcades are not a place to leave a child alone. And that’s not what the overwhelming number of our guests do.”

But the gambling industry does woo parents and their children with family-oriented advertising (despite few options for child care) as eagerly as it seeks out single adults. And sometimes children are left to amuse themselves in arcades while their parents gamble. The same surveillance video that spotted Sherrice may have also recorded other unattended children in the arcade that night.

“I counted at least 40 kids in the arcade at 3 a.m.,” one investigator said of the surveillance tapes, “and I didn’t see any adults.”

That was despite the fact that the casino’s rules are said to prohibit children in the arcade after midnight unless they are accompanied by an adult. Moreover, Clark County curfews specifically prohibit children in public places late at night, including casino arcades.

Hotel security officials noticed that Sherrice was alone in the arcade at around 1:33 a.m. and called on the public address system for someone to collect her. Her 14-year-old brother showed up. So why did security officials drop the matter when the person who responded was another minor? Security guards later released the again unsupervised Sherrice to her father, and then to her brother for a second time. At 3:48 a.m., cameras showed Sherrice, alone again, entering the women’s rest room, later followed by a male in his late teens or early 20s. Whatever the lapses in supervision, it is the killer in the arcade who deserves public wrath.

Sherrice’s father, who now has an attorney, says he did not allow his child to roam around the hotel alone for hours. Yet the surveillance tapes suggest that on any number of occasions Sherrice might have been noticed and rescued by some responsible adult. Her father should have been first, but not alone, on that list.