Inside the Guilt, Torment Faced by the Parents Whose Kids Shot NYC Cops
Johnny Polanco. Photo by New York Daily News/Getty Images
Parents of a pair of gunmen who landed two New York City police officers in the hospital this week have come forward with apologies — and a jumble of explanations — on behalf of their grown kids.
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"I apologize to the families that my son affected by his actions,” Johnny Polanco, a 53-year-old pastor, told the New York Daily News on Wednesday regarding his 24-year-old son, Jason Polanco. “But,” he continued, “my son is not like this. The worst thing I ever did was bring him down to Decatur Ave. He was a good kid before we moved to this forsaken block.”
Polanco is referring to his neighborhood in the Bronx, where Jason, a Marine Corps dropout, and a second suspect, Joshua Kemp, 28, allegedly shot at five plainclothes officers and injured two during a botched robbery and carjacking. Jason was charged with the attempted murder of both cops, while Joshua was charged with robbery, grand larceny (for the car jacking) and criminal possession of a weapon.
The mugshot of suspect Jason Polanco. Photo courtesy of New York Daily News.
“It’s like I failed as a mom,” Joshua’s mother, Theresa Kemp, 50, told the Daily News. The single mother of three said her kids grew up in foster care while she was in and out of abusive relationships and added that, at one point, she was “eating out of garbage cans” while homeless. “God gave me a second chance to reunite with my kids and try helping them,” she said. “And I failed again.” Theresa apologized to the officers and their families in the Daily News article, saying, “I am so very sorry, so very sorry!”
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The parents’ public apologies are “very commendable,” according to Dr. Stanton Samenow, a Virginia-based psychologist and author ofInside the Criminal Mind. After all, he tells Yahoo Parenting, “You can imagine the trauma of learning your child has done this. For the parents to come out in public and make an apology says a lot about them as people.”
The guilt and disappointment expressed by both Theresa and Johnny is something other moms and dads can likely relate to, explains Jane Adams, a social psychologist and author of When Our Grown Kids Disappoint Us. “Whenever you hear about any particularly heinous crime, if you’re a parent, the first thing you think of is the poor parent [of the criminal],” Adams tells Yahoo Parenting. “Most of us didn’t raise our kids to become killers, but did the best we could with what we knew at the time. Sometimes it’s just not enough.”
In this case, the parents’ apologies and partial acceptance of blame isn’t surprising, she adds. “Feeling responsible is very typical. We take responsibility for our children starting when they’re very young, and even when they’re grown, we don’t see the criminal, we see the small child,” Adams says. “The guilt we feel is the sense that there was something we didn’t do, and it’s easier in some ways to blame ourselves instead of putting the blame where it belongs, on our children.”
One of the shot officers, Andrew Dossi, is an Iraq war vet who now faces arm surgery. The other, Aliro Pellerano, was released from the hospital on Wednesday.
Johnny said he and his wife (also a pastor), raised their son in a religious home. When Jason returned from the Marine Corps after just five months, he said, “he was a totally different person. He had a problem being around crowds and he didn’t like civilians.” When they learned of their son’s arrest, he told the Daily News, his wife “collapsed on the floor,” adding, “It’s a nightmare.”
And in case the parents aren’t feeling guilty enough already, Adams says, “In our country, we tend to blame the parents. We think they must have done something terrible to have a child turn out that way.” But individuals have “constitutional, innate selves,” she says. “All we can do is the best we can to give our children a moral center. The rest is not in our hands.”