Streeter: The deaths of a young sister and brother are a sad testament that our children are in trouble

I can’t stop thinking about their mother.

How it felt to return from work to find her 15-year-old daughter Giovanna Myrie and 9-year-old son Steve Allen dead in their Gwynn Oak home. Did she call their names expectantly, then more frantically when they didn’t greet her at the door? How did she find her voice to call 911 to report that something had happened to her children?

How could you ever bear to speak again after such heartbreak?

Baltimore County Police allege that a 16-year-old boy from Baltimore, whom Myrie appears to have been dating, threatened to kill her if she “messed around with other guys.” And then, police allege, the boy killed her. And her brother.

As a parent, I have been haunted by thoughts of their mother. Perhaps she wonders, as she falls asleep without her babies, if there was a way she could have known what was coming, and maybe prevented it.

As parents and as a community, what signs are we missing when it comes to intimate partner violence among young people? Undoubtedly, the responsibility for this calamity rests solely on whoever pulled the trigger. But as I look helplessly around this broken world, I want to stop this from happening to my baby. And yours.

For kids in their first relationships, “strong emotions are common,” said Keaton Somerville, a clinical psychologist and research postdoctoral fellow for the Kennedy Krieger Institute’s Center for Child and Family Traumatic Stress. “What is not common is violence, power, control and intimidation.”

A 2019 study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that 90% of the perpetrators of teenage intimate partner violence were male, and guns were the most commonly used weapon.

Singer Paul Anka called teen romance “Puppy Love,” which seems adorable and harmless, until that love — or whatever it is — develops teeth.

Elicia McIntyre, a therapist in private practice in Rockville, said kids can be overwhelmed by the all-encompassing emotions of young love.

And it can be hard to parse when everything turns dark.

“This young man, this teenager, made a threat,” McIntyre said. “The first thing that struck me is that all threats are to be taken seriously.”

McIntyre, Somerville and Dr. Tanisha Drummond, a board-certified child and adolescent psychologist at Timonium’s E-S Consulting and Assessment, said it’s hard to pinpoint potential dangers in our children’s dating lives. That’s because we are not always on the same page about what’s normal.

“Some people have never heard the word ‘trauma’ or ‘domestic violence,’” Drummond said. “It’s hard for them to identify.”

So how do we have this potentially uncomfortable but crucial conversation with teens, whose frontal lobes aren’t fully developed?

McIntyre said it’s important to ask open-ended questions and avoid judgmental lectures. “We can ask them, ‘How do you handle big moments of stress?’” she said. “How do you affirm your boundaries? And how does someone respond to your ‘No’?”

The “No” part is huge, no matter how old you are. There’s a quote, attributed to author Margaret Atwood, that men are afraid women will laugh at them, while women are afraid men will kill them. We need young people to understand this isn’t normal, or right.

Drummond said that we have to notice not just what our teens tell us, but what they don’t. “They might be more irritable, but people see it as ‘They’re angry, or they have anger issues.’ It could be a sign of trauma and depression, or so many things that are not related to having an angry kid with behavior problems,” she said.

Other signs that we might be missing: possessiveness, seen in Myrie’s alleged killer’s threats to the victim, blaming the victim for conflict and refusing to take “no” for an answer. McIntyre said it’s also important to know what media, attitudes and influences they’re consuming, like the misogynistic red-pilled voices of the so-called manosphere.

This makes her, and me, curious about the alleged shooter, who is also technically a child. My son is entering seventh grade, and without being completely in his business, there are crushes. He is learning about girls and relationships not just from family but from friends and the sometimes accursed onslaught of the internet. We do parental controls on his devices, but this makes me feel like yeeting all our stuff into the sun and begging the Amish to take us.

The way we live our lives affects our kids, for good and bad. I feel helpless.

“What’s going on in this teenager’s life? What are the patterns of relationships he’s witnessed? I wondered who is available in his life, and in the victims’ lives, to talk to,” McIntyre said.

We can’t know, but we do know that he and Myrie conversed for weeks on social media. For a parent, that’s terrifying. Somerville said parents should be aware of incessant texting and monitoring or demands for passwords.

She also advised parents to look out for self-isolation, drastic mood changes and sudden secrecy, like locking their phones.

It’s important that teens observe healthy relationships. Somerville said she sometimes references popular television shows like “Love Island” as examples of good or bad dating behavior. I’m reminded of past trash examples of young couples once presented as positive, like whiny, possessive Corey and thwarted wildflower Topanga in “Boy Meets World.” Or Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” whose obsession with neighbor Laura Winslow was treated as a harmless goof until he wore her down. Ick.

Rejection sucks. But parents can prepare their kids for its possibility. Everyone has a right to say yes or no, McIntyre said. “It’s disappointing, but that doesn’t diminish you and doesn’t diminish the other person.”

Whoever killed young Giovanna Myrie and Steve Allen stole precious lives that never got to flourish. I want to stop any more mothers from experiencing such tragedy. And this means examining the world and home into which we bring our kids. What we watch. Whom we date. What they see us accept in relationships. They are watching.

And we better have an answer.