Her attorney says Tenika Revell loved her son to death ... literally. The 40-year-old Brooklyn mother brutally killed her 7-year-old son, Bernard, using a hammer, a belt, and even her own bare hands last week. She tried to kill herself as well, but her attempt was unsuccessful.
What could love possibly have to do with that? Well, Revell was suffering from terminal breast cancer. According to the New York Daily News, even after undergoing a mastectomy, it had spread to her ovaries. She knew the end was near and that she wouldn't be there for her boy, so instead she chose to kill him, say those close to her.
“She was a yard and a half beyond wit’s end,” defense attorney Harvey Soss told the paper.
Revell's long-term boyfriend, Terrace Johnson, who says he helped raise the boy, said, “She loved him so much she didn’t want nobody else to have him.”
It's unfathomable that a mother could think this way, but Revell had demons from her past that plagued her as well. She was reportedly abandoned by her own mother at the age of 7, and had worked as a prostitute since she was a teenager. She also had problems with drugs, but she was reportedly a good mother who spoiled her son, and Johnson says she wanted to save Bernard from a similar fate. “She didn't want her mother or none of them to get Bernard," he told the paper.
It's a place I try not to go very often, but as parents I think we all at times imagine what would happen if we were to die and leave our children. It's painfully heartbreaking to think that we wouldn't be there to guide them, and see who they become, and love them along the way, but to take their life is unthinkable. Of course, for most of us, the life Revell led is unthinkable too.
None of us knows how we would react upon learning that we're going to die, and while Revell's actions are absolutely outrageous, I can't help but feel for her too. Because it seems like in her own warped way, she tried to do what she thought was right, even though it was so very, very wrong.
Do you believe this woman killed her son out of love?
Image via CarbonNYC/Flickr
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Comments 101
The ones suggesting she made a will miss the point, she didn't want to make a will, she wanted no one else period to have her son.
No I don't believe she killed him out of love, she killed him out of her own selfishness, not for the love of her child. What mother can brutally murder an innocent little child, you call that Love, I call that sick and twisted, she needed a shrink is what she needed. I hope that this women suffers greatly with her cancer, and feels as much and more pain then what her innocent son had to experience, looking into the face and eyes of the only person that he loved, and to not understand why this person is causing him such pain, while she bruatally murdered him....What is wrong with these crazies, in thinking this was gonna solve any of her problems, many people would of gladly adopted or cared for him....How could she possible of felt traplped with no options, that is flat out ridiculous, she was not right in her head, cancer or no cancer, I would never do such a thing, ....die you sick bitch no mercy from me when it comes to hurting innocent children who have only you to protect them!!!!!!!!
She had the death sentence not him. She is a child murderer. I have never heard a murderer say that they murdered out of love. If that is love it is the most warped sense of love i have ever heard. Many people get a diagnosis of cancer but they don't murder their children. Think about her logic; I don't want to leave my son alive so that he can be "hurt" in the way i was, so instead i will take a belt, and hammer and choke him to death instead. The only person that child needed protection from was her. If she had not killed him no one could have done any worse to him then what she did. She murdered him. How much worse off could he have been? The ultimate punishment is death. And he was murdered in a vicious way. So, it is fine for her to murder him, in a gruesome way, but at the same time she is "protecting" him from being harmed by others? Totally illogical! I wonder whether he had a choice in the matter? I wonder if he wanted to be bludgeon and strangled to death with a belt by the one person who was supposed to love, care for and PROTECT him. She is evil!! This kid probably fought for his life, and this is why she probably had to use: a belt to throttle him, and a hammer to bludgeon him. I can't imagine what he went through as he was fighting for his life and his own killer was his mother. She should be imprisoned for life and when she dies she should burn in hell.
So sad!
Why do they always " try"? if she really wanted to die she wouls have been successful. Jump off a bidge or something lady.
Can you say...SELFISH B*TCH !!!
Anyone who loves their child, would never hurt them! Am I right? She was a selfish POS period...