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
I don't know what to believe. Someone so abused as a child would be incapable of adequately responding to such a scenario. I think a lot of people need to make this issue cut and dry, black and white, but there's so much grey here. Of COURSE she didn't have the right to take his precious life, and of COURSE her c**t mother should have cared for her as a child. But to place blame now seems a little too little, too late. Sometimes you just have to accept the fact that THIS shit is what happens when we don't take care of our babies, dammit. At the same time...there has to be some way to break the cycle.
zombiemommy916 You hit the nail on the head! Wrong or not I could see her logic in doing it to if she had no hope of him getting a happy, healthy upbringing. However there is no explanation for the brutality!
In her own warped way she thought she was doing the best thing for her kid. She didn't want any of the people who screwed her up in her past to get a hold of him once she was dead beacause she barely survived that herself and did not want to put him through that, She could not see past her own problems and her fears to see and solutions or hope for her child's future and felt this was the only way to protect him.
Although I can see where she wouldn't want to leave her son behind, why did she have to murder him so horribly?? How selfish. He is a person all his own, and he deserved a chance to live his life.
how selfish of her...
This is absolutely TRAGIC. I can understand this woman and her actions completely, she was in her own way trying to protect him but at the same time how horrifying his last moments of life had to be... I think the horror he endured from her actions were much more than what he would have suffered at the hands of her family. To have the mother who doted on you all your life turn around and kill you. If you know you have a family that is not going to be good to your child if anything should ever happen to you this is exactly why you should have a will. It is your right to say you don't want your child going to relatives, put them into foster care or with a friend. By law a will must be followed. There are other options outside of this extreme!
OMG. I think I'm going to be sick.