Opinion ID: 3166086
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: McKinney’s Family Background

Text: McKinney suffered a traumatic childhood characterized by severe physical and psychological abuse, both by his biological parents, James McKinney, Sr. (“James”) and Bobbie Jean Morris, and by his stepmother, Shirley Crow McKinney. At McKinney’s sentencing hearing, his aunt (his father’s sister), Susan Sesate, and his younger sister, Diana McKinney, described the abuse. 10 MCKINNEY V. RYAN Susan and Diana both testified about the squalid conditions in which McKinney lived as a child. Susan testified that while McKinney’s parents, James and Bobbie, were still married, their house was filthy. She testified, “[W]hen you walked through the door, it wasn’t nothing to see, you know, diapers full of — all around. . . . Everything stunk.” James was an alcoholic, and Bobbie left him when McKinney was about three years old. When Bobbie left James, she took with her their three children, Diana, Donna, and McKinney. Susan testified, “She ran with them. . . . She ran to a lot of different states. I know she went to California first and Kansas twice. California again. I know she went through Texas, New Mexico.” James pursued and brought Bobbie and the children back to Arizona, but “she would run again.” “As soon as he brought her back, within a week she’d be gone again to Kansas. She had the kids there.” James told McKinney’s presentence investigator that Bobbie had “kidnapped” the children, and that he took them back “after he found out they were being physically abused and were being locked in closets, hungry and sick.” Bobbie eventually left James for good, and he got remarried. James got custody of the children and brought them to Arizona to live with him and his new wife Shirley. The conditions in the house with James and Shirley were even worse than they had been with James and Bobbie. Susan, a teenager at the time, lived with her mother (who was also James’s mother) in a house nearby. She was at the McKinney house frequently. Susan testified that the house “was gross. It was gross. I mean, the house was filthy, the kids were filthy, they never had clean clothes that I ever saw MCKINNEY V. RYAN 11 them in. If they had clothes, they were ill-fitting clothes. I mean, it was disgusting.” McKinney, his two sisters, and his older half brother Hedlund (Bobbie’s son by a different father) shared one small bedroom. Shirley’s daughter had a bedroom to herself. Susan testified that the floor of the four children’s bedroom was always covered with dirty clothes because there were no bureaus and no hangers for the closet. There were no sheets on the beds. The children had to share their room with animals Shirley brought home, including dogs, cats, a goat, snakes, and a monkey. The animals regularly defecated and urinated in the bedroom. Diana testified that the adults never cleaned the bedroom. Diana was 18 months old when James took the children from Bobbie and brought them to the Arizona house he shared with his new wife Shirley. Donna was three, McKinney was four or five, and Hedlund was seven. Diana and Susan testified that the four children were responsible for all general household cooking and cleaning, including cleaning up the animal feces and urine that were “all over” the house; feeding farm animals, including cows, pigs, and goats; taking care of James’s hunting dogs; doing all of their own laundry; and sometimes doing Shirley’s laundry. Diana testified that she and the other children cleaned the house the best they could, but “the house still smell[ed]” all the time. Susan testified, “It was nothing to see James [Jr.] and Michael [Hedlund] standing on chairs at the stove cooking or having to stand on chairs to do the dishes” because they were too small to reach the stove and the counters. Shirley’s daughter did not have to do any chores. Shirley kept the children from attending school as punishment for various supposed infractions. Susan testified that on one occasion McKinney 12 MCKINNEY V. RYAN sat on the porch for three days while the others went to school. When Susan’s mother (McKinney’s grandmother) sent Susan over to investigate, McKinney told her that Shirley would not allow him to go to school unless Bobbie bought him a new pair of tennis shoes. Susan’s mother bought McKinney shoes so he could return to school. The children never had regular baths and often had dirty hair. When the children went to school, they wore dirty clothes that reeked of urine from being on the bedroom floor with the animals. The children’s school sent letters home about their appearance and odor. They were regularly harassed and teased by other children. McKinney was frequently suspended for fighting on the school bus because other children made fun of his appearance and odor. The four children suffered regular and extensive physical, verbal, and emotional abuse. Minor infractions of Shirley’s rules, such as not doing the dishes properly, resulted in beatings. Diana testified that she could not recall a time when none of the children had a welt or bruise inflicted by Shirley. Susan testified, “They had bruises all the time. It was hard to tell what were new bruises and what weren’t.” Shirley used plastic switches, cords, belts, and a hose to hit them— “anything she could get in her hands.” Diana estimated that McKinney was beaten two to three times a week. Susan testified to repeated serious beatings, including one particular beating with [a] water hose. It was about a yard long like that (indicating), and she had like a pocket knife, and she snipped the hose and she went after him. She beat him on the back of the head, down his back, all over his legs, his MCKINNEY V. RYAN 13 arms; anything that moved, she hit him. . . . He had bruises for weeks after that all over him. . . . Michael Hedlund tried to stop her. He grabbed her arm, and so she swung back and hit him across the side of the face and bruised his face. Hedlund left the house to live with his mother when he was 14 years old. This left McKinney, approximately age 11, as the only boy and the oldest of the three remaining children. McKinney was too young to protect either himself or his younger sisters. Diana, the younger of the two girls, described their childhood experience as “horrible. It was scary. It seems like we were all stressed out wondering when the next time we were getting beat; wondering when we were going to eat next.” Shirley’s physical abuse was accompanied by verbal and emotional abuse. Diana testified that Shirley regularly yelled at them, telling them that they were “[s]tupid, ugly, [and] not worth anything.” Diana testified that Shirley showed consistent favoritism toward her own daughter, while treating her stepchildren as the “four bad kids.” Shirley often locked the children out of the house for hours without food and, sometimes, water. There was a hose in the yard, but Susan testified that if Shirley “was really angry at them, they couldn’t turn the water faucet on outside and even get a drink of water, and it would be 110 degrees outside.” Susan remembered one occasion seeing the four children outside on a hot Arizona summer day, clustered in the shade of an eave of the house. None of the children had shoes; the girls were wearing only underwear, and the boys were wearing cutoff shorts with no shirts. When Susan and 14 MCKINNEY V. RYAN her mother returned to their house four hours later in the middle of the afternoon, the children were still there, their faces “beet red.” They told her that they were not allowed to get any water and could not come back inside until their father got home, when he would “punish them.” On another occasion, Susan testified, Shirley “pick[ed] James [Jr.] up by the scruff of the neck” and put him out on the porch with no shoes or coat during the winter, when the frozen grass “would crunch under your feet.” Shirley spent most of her time at home, while James was generally absent. When he was home, James drank heavily. Susan testified that James’s mother confronted him about Shirley’s physical abuse of the children, but he told her to “keep her nose out of his business.” Susan testified to an incident in which McKinney, who was in first or second grade at the time, had stolen a lunch at school because Shirley and James had not given him any lunch money. McKinney was suspended for several days. James told his son that “he wasn’t going to punish him for stealing lunch; he was going to punish him for getting caught.” By age nine or 10, McKinney had become distant, quiet and withdrawn. He avoided other children. He began using alcohol and marijuana at age 11. He dropped out of school in the seventh grade. At about this time, he began running away from home. Diana testified that McKinney ran away four or five times. Susan remembered one incident in which, at age 11, McKinney showed up unannounced at her house in Gilbert, Arizona after traveling alone from Oklahoma, where the family had moved. McKinney had taken a bus as far as Flagstaff, but did not have enough money to go farther. He spent the next two days hitchhiking the rest of the way to Susan’s house. McKinney’s arm, shoulder, and face were MCKINNEY V. RYAN 15 bruised; he told Susan he had gotten into a fight with Shirley. Susan called his mother Bobbie on the telephone to tell her that McKinney was at her house and that he was dirty and tired, and hadn’t eaten in days. Bobbie did not come over to pick him up. She called the sheriff instead, who picked up McKinney and put him in juvenile detention.