The Avenger

Jeffries, who thought people went to prison for killing defenseless people, was stunned. She kept the infant's picture on her windowsill for years.

"I felt very protective of that child." She is musing in her office, lit by the weak sunlight outside. "It's often as if these kids had no one for them in life. Often, I'm the only one for them in death. That's the difference in [prosecuting] these cases and a lot of homicides, you got no family behind you. A lot of times, the mother is the defendant and the father's not there. The people who come to the hearings are either there for the mother or the father. None of them talks about the dead kid. Like this child [Aarius Cassell] with 17 rib fractures in six weeks of life? No one submitted one single letter or said anything on behalf of the child."

The Imponderables

American murder works this way: Something like 90 percent of all killings are carried out with a gun or a knife.

About 75 percent of the victims have some sort of criminal record themselves, and thus are likely to have enemies who are not happy people.

Investigations can be very straightforward: Six bullet holes in the head. Empty shells, known associates, find the gun, catch the killer.

Child cases, sometimes you don't even know it's a killing until the autopsy.

And kids -- here we're talking about boys and girls under the age of 10 -- are primarily dispatched with some blunt object that's never found. No fingerprints. No murder weapon.

Try pushing that big bag of nothing "beyond a reasonable doubt," the standard for criminal convictions. One of the worst cases Jeffries had, back in 1989, was a mother and her 8-year-old daughter beaten to death upstairs in their home. Holly and Kristin Kincaide. The killer, Cullen Byrd, rolled up the mom's body in a comforter, shoved her under the bed, dumped the girl's body in a filled bathtub. Turned up the air conditioning, partied downstairs for three days.

And even then, no murder weapon. (When Jeffries got finished with him, Byrd was doing life in a federal pen in South Carolina. Still is. The judge called him "a pig and a crackhead.")

But that kind of thing, the stranger as the killer, is the oddity. About 90 percent of the time, you're dealing with a killer who is a parent or close relative, which goes against what is expected of human nature, turning the search for motive on its head. Also, there are probably only three or four viable suspects, but it can be almost impossible to prove which one of the people did it, because nobody had a motive and everybody had an opportunity.

Forget calling a witness to the stand. There aren't any.

"They don't beat these kids in front of a crowd. It's not like you get Jo-Jo coming down and saying, 'Yeah, she was punching the kid in the head with a hammer.' "

It adds up to make child homicides among the toughest prosecutions in the trade; jurors just don't want to believe that a parent could beat a child to death, torture him, starve him.

Struck by the horror of it, Jeffries began a slow drift toward specializing in this sub-stream of American homicide.

"A lot of people run around, say, 'I couldn't do [this job].' Well, the fact is, somebody has to. The general public has no idea, and I mean no idea , about the messed-up lives these kids lead until they're dead. The public has no idea about the neglect, the foster homes, the violent acting out, the filth, the mother's boyfriend that abuses them -- the public doesn't know. Doesn't want to know."

But then, there's so much that she doesn't know either. In one of her filings, she mused upon the eternal: "Why would a grown man, over six feet tall, have it in him to beat up on a child not yet 2 years old, fully incapable of provoking life-threatening rage, and fully incapable of defending herself from the same? Why would such behavior be in his heart to begin with? The government has no real answer to that question."

The Moment of Truth?

"June is deliberate, thoughtful and methodical," says Superior Court Judge Michael L. Rankin, who, while presiding over the court's criminal division, often saw Jeffries at work. "She's the ultimate professional prosecutor. When you get the level of experience she's achieved, she could have a range of things she could choose from to do, and she chooses to do this. Those [child] cases seem to intrigue and motivate her, and she's very, very good at it."

Jeffries went to conferences. She became a member of the city's Child Fatality Review Committee, sipping coffee, looking over photographs, watching children's bodies being pulled apart on the autopsy table.

That's key, because you catch the killers a lot of the time because they're unfamiliar with the dark arts of the coroner's office. The caretakers will tell you the kid fell and broke that leg, yeah, that's it, then hit its head. But the broken bone will be what's known as a spiral fracture, which shows forceful twisting, not blunt impact, and you know they're trying to save their skin.

She's been working that type of angle for four years on just one case, Daniel "Bulldog" Cassell.

A 10th-grade dropout with a prison record, Cassell went to his mother's house and left his infant son, Aarius, there for a few days in May 2002. Aarius was brought back home to the apartment Cassell was sharing with the boy's mother, Laurehn Brunson, and a female cousin. Everybody said the boy looked fine. Everybody went to work. Cassell was left alone at home with his son.

Thirty minutes later, Aarius was dead.

Cassell, facing first-degree murder charges, told police that his mother, who had beaten him as a child, must have beaten the child over the weekend, and little Aarius died only after he came home.

Cassell's mother died soon thereafter, making it impossible for her to refute the claim.

Jeffries, once she got the autopsy report, didn't buy a word of it. The coroner said Aarius had 17 current and former rib fractures, a punctured lung, contusions and abrasions. Kids in that condition would be in such pain they would scarcely able to draw breath. Had the grandmother inflicted such abuse, it would have been immediately obvious.

It finally comes to a head a few weeks ago.

Cassell walks into court, maybe finally ready to plead guilty -- but only, he says, if he can claim he was negligent to leave the child with his mother, "something like a parent who left a child in a car on a hot day," says public defender Renee Raymond.

He still wants to say he didn't do it. There is a legal step that allows the accused, without admitting they actually committed a crime, to acknowledge that the government could convict them of it. This is called an Alford plea, and that's what Cassell wants.

Brunson, the dead child's mother, is here to watch, but not to see justice done for her dead child.

She wants Cassell to be released.

The pair has had another child while he has been awaiting trial for killing their first baby. He can't really care for this infant, though, because he is under court order not to have unsupervised contact with any children under 12.

Brunson, who believes Cassell rather than the coroner, blames Jeffries.

"Please don't take my love away from me," she writes Judge Christian, referring to Cassell. "We are love buds."

Jeffries is something close to livid.

"Government counsel would say this to Ms. Brunson: If Mr. Cassell did not kill your baby, then you should be able to tell this Court and the government who did," she writes in one motion. "The rib fractures this child had would have been extremely painful to him. The mere act of breathing would have been difficult. Thus, the child's mother (of all people) . . . should have noticed something was wrong."

Finally, Cassell stands before Christian. It's showtime. Cassell seems dazed. He asks the judge to repeat something, saying, "I was in a zone."

Christian looks over at the tall, lanky defendant, handcuffed and in an orange jail jumpsuit. He taps his forehead: "Are you with us today?"

"Yes, sir, I am."

Jeffries starts the case. "The United States of America would prove the following if this matter were to go to trial . . ." She reads the narrative of Aarius's injuries. The few spectators, the lawyers waiting for another trial, stop to listen.

Cassell begins weeping. He turns his head straight up, eyes closed. Tears stain his face. Raymond hands him a tissue.

Finally, Jeffries finishes. Four years since the killing. And now the price to be paid.

Christian asks Cassell if he accepts the deal. It could send him to prison for 15 years.

He's still crying.

"I love my mother. I mean. Yes."

He pauses.

Christian: "You have to do this yourself."

"Yeah. Yes."

Life Goes On

Jeffries remarried a few years ago, to a D.C. cop named B.J. Parker. They go to movies, on vacations, grocery shopping, regular life. After years of doing homework with Rudy and taking him to hockey practices, she now talks with him on the phone from college.

She has a little dog, Wizard, whom everyone calls Wizzy.

She has been around enough not to loathe her defendants.

"Most of them could have been like my son or me" had not they been raised in violent circumstances themselves, she has come to think. That doesn't mean she offers them anything like prosecutorial mercy.

Two defense attorneys a couple of years ago were passing time in a court hallway, discussing a new criminal case one of them had gotten.

"So, who's the prosecutor?" one asked the other, as a reporter happened to walk past.

"June Jeffries."

"My God."

Once Again

About 3:30 in the morning on June 16, Jeffries's cellphone rang in her home. She recalled a few hours later that she had awoken long enough to decide not to answer it. It rang again an instant later. She picked it up this time, and Carlos V. Hilliard, a homicide detective, told her he had a 5-month-old baby boy, beaten to death.

A few hours later, Jeffries walked into the coroner's office. She put on booties, a mask and an apron. She opened the door to see DeMarcus Malik Simmons, his short life over, already open on the table.

Nice head of hair, the mother in her noted.

The child's great aunt was arrested the next day.

The funeral was hot, muggy and a moment of despair.

The boy's father punches a street sign in front of the church. Th wanga thwanga thwanga, it echoes up and down the empty street.

In front of the altar, the casket is the size and shape of a picnic cooler.

The interment is on a hillside, waves of heat rolling across the grass. The grave waits. There is a breeze, a shadow rolls across those assembled.

Every head bowed, every eye closed. There is no whisper of an answer as to why why why why.

A Sustaining Drive

June Jeffries is at her desk, selecting the autopsy pictures to use in the upcoming trial of Gregory Donnel Mobley, a former prison inmate accused of killing his 2-month-old son, Tavonte. The names change, the caseloads do not. Soon DeMarcus's case will fill the folders in her office, the names written on the tabs in felt-tip pen, and then there will be another.

At 52, in a hard job, you learn things, and one of them is that love is not what we were told when we were young.

Sometimes life reveals it to be tender and sustaining. Sometimes it is the kind of love that sustains lost causes and broken dreams. Swing sets in the rain and the love of children who are no longer here.

She closes Tavonte's file, the pictures inside, and looks out the window. It is quiet.

Perhaps it is a form of love, this seeking justice, perhaps even solace, in demanding an accounting for these briefest of lives, by recognizing the flicker of the eternal that these children possessed.

Perhaps that is what sustains and abides in places like this; perhaps there is nothing else.