Family Mystified by Hanging of Brother and Sister

If it had been a hit-and-run driver that killed her two children, or a gang member’s bullet or a kidnaper’s knife, Francisca Mejia would have a villain to blame--or at least some explanation for her loss.

But the only culprit in the deaths of 8-year-old Nathalie and 9-year-old Dennis Jr. is a common household cord made of nylon, just a tad over five feet long, one-quarter-inch in diameter. In better times, it had served as a jump-rope for the children on the patio of their southwest Los Angeles home and as a leash for walking the family dog.

On Feb. 18, while their mother went to buy them school supplies, it became a noose. When she returned 20 minutes later, Nathalie and Dennis were both dangling by their necks--one on each end of the rope, its length strung over a door in their bedroom closet.

Since then, the family has been lost in grief, tormented by a tragedy that seems as mysterious as it is senseless. With few clues to resolve their questions of how and why, peace remains elusive.

“I really don’t know what to think,� said Mejia, 36, as she stared at a shrine of purple and orange bird of paradise blossoms and a Virgen de Guadalupe candle in the children’s bedroom. “If it had been something else . . . that might be different. But this? What happened?�

Los Angeles police, while acknowledging that they have never seen anything like it, say they believe the hanging was accidental. Officers suspect that the children were playing with the rope tied around their necks when one climbed on the closet door, possibly with the help of a laundry hamper, and jumped or fell.

The rope caught the top outer corner of the open door, probably pulling the other child off the ground and leaving both of their 75-pound bodies suspended about two feet above the floor.

Bolstering that theory, the coroner’s office said marks left on the children’s necks showed that they were slowly asphyxiated rather than swiftly choked. There was nothing missing from the home and--other than a slight bloody nose on the boy--no other injuries to the bodies.

“It is an unusual accident--I’d even say bizarre,� said Lt. Al Moen of the LAPD’s Abused Child Unit, which investigates undetermined deaths of children under 11. “But, basically, there is no other explanation.�

Mejia and her ex-husband, Dennis, contend that police were too quick to close the case.

Little Dennis, who loved to draw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and play the Nintendo game based on the characters, was a shy and timid child who avoided risks, his parents said. Nathalie, though a bit more gregarious, filled her side of the room with stuffed animals and paperback books.

How could these children, who were doing their homework when their mother went to the store, tie a rope around their necks and manage to hook the remaining three feet of cord over the closet door? Why, in their struggle for air, didn’t they knock off the dresses, the cap and belt also hanging on the door?

“It doesn’t make sense,� said Dennis Mejia, 36, of Inglewood, a union representative. “I need some straight answers, some real facts--something more realistic than to say this was an accident that happened to two little kids at the same time.�

While a simultaneous hanging might seem unfathomable, it is not all that uncommon for children to fall victim to such accidents.

In 1990, just nine blocks from the Mejia home, a 5-year-old boy hanged himself on a rope that had once held a punching bag in the garage. A 4-year-old Santa Ana boy died in 1988 when his neck got caught in some shoelaces tied to a playground slide. And a year earlier, an 8-year-old boy in San Diego County was strangled while playing on a rope swing in a back-yard tree.

No fancy knots are required, just enough pressure on the neck to restrict the blood flow in the carotid arteries and force a person into unconsciousness, said Los Angeles County coroner’s spokesman Bob Dambacher. That two people did it at the same time is “the bizarre side of the thing,� Dambacher said. “But I certainly understand how it can happen.�

To help the Mejias through their loss, Angeles Mesa Elementary School on West 52nd Street, where the two siblings attended third grade, has offered to provide psychological counseling. Teachers are also starting a collection to assist with expenses from last Tuesday’s funeral.

The Mejias’ only other child, 14-year-old Jimmy, went with his mother to the store that day and was the first to spot the bodies. Now, he is staying with an aunt, too terrified to return to the house on 5th Avenue.

Francisca Mejia has yet to go back to her cleaning job. “I don’t have the heart to do anything,� she said.

The school supplies that had once seemed so important are in a bag, still unopened, on her daughter’s bed.

A felt banner with a computer-generated photo of the children, the kind sold at carnivals, still hangs on the door where the children’s bodies were found. The caption reads, “Little Angels.�