‘One of the worst abusers’: An Alabama case highlights the state’s physical child abuse problem

Serenity Renfroe, not quite 2, spilled her cereal.

It scattered across the floor of the little house on Rail Splitter Road where Serenity lived with her mom and her mom’s new boyfriend. They mostly kept to themselves. Rail Splitter Road cuts through a sparsely populated area near Phil Campbell in the rural northwest corner of Alabama.

Her mother’s boyfriend, Shannon Gargis, 28, had moved in with them two months before.

That Monday he was babysitting Serenity after driving her mom, Hailey Renfroe, 20, to the McDonald’s where she worked third shift.

The spilled cereal made Gargis mad.

He’d gotten mad at Serenity a lot that week, investigators would later learn.

Sometime that night, March 21, the blonde toddler from Franklin County became the third child to die from abuse in Alabama in 2016.

It was, the district attorney later told AL.com, “one of the worst beating cases I’ve ever seen. Still is.”

While child abuse and neglect take different forms, more than half of Alabama’s child abuse and neglect victims – 52 percent – experience physical abuse. That’s nearly three times the national average, according to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services’ 2017 Child Maltreatment report.

That puts Alabama in the top five states in the nation for physical child abuse victims.

And while Alabama’s rate of death from child abuse or neglect is only slightly higher than the national average, most of those deaths aren’t from things like unsafe sleep conditions or drug exposure.

They’re from physical abuse.

What we learned

The details in Serenity’s case are disturbing.

But the elements involved in her death – catastrophic physical abuse, a young victim, a male perpetrator – repeat themselves with slight variations in dozens of other child abuse death cases across the state.

Here’s how we know that:

In October 2018, AL.com requested information on every child abuse or neglect death between 2011-2017 from the Alabama Department of Human Resources, the agency tasked with identifying such cases.

Five months later, DHR provided information on 154 deaths. AL.comfound 10 more deaths that fell within the 2011-2017 timeframe and appeared to clearly be the result of child abuse, from news reports and publicly-available court documents.

Federal and state laws keep some details out of public view. And Alabama DHR is not required to keep track of what happens after a child abuse fatality - whether an abuser is convicted, for example.

AL.com used news reports, interviews and court documents to piece together additional information for as many of the cases as possible. Reporters from the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team provided AL.com with autopsy reports on some of the victims, gathered through their reporting on the issue of child abuse fatalities nationwide.

And while some pieces of information remain missing, the data overall offers a glimpse into the lives of Alabama’s youngest victims, like Serenity, and their families.

The youngest victims

Babies and toddlers are the most vulnerable to abuse.

Like Serenity, most of the Alabama children who officially died from abuse or neglect in Alabama from 2011-2017 were under 3 years old. Nationally, children under 3 account for about 72 percent of child fatalities, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The most common cause of child abuse death in Alabama was blunt force trauma, which accounted for nearly 40 percent of the child abuse deaths; no other cause came even close.

Those are situations like Serenity’s, where someone beats or shakes or throws a child so hard that the injuries are fatal.

The perpetrators in these cases are nearly always men; in at least two-thirds of the cases the killer was the father, another male relative or the mother’s boyfriend.

“The majority of the kid deaths I have dealt with are blunt force trauma,” said Tim Douthit, an assistant district attorney in Madison County who often prosecutes child abuse cases. “Somebody will come in, (saying) ‘Oh, the baby fell down the stairs.’ Well, the baby didn’t fall down the stairs, it got beat to death.”

Most child abuse deaths didn’t appear to be intentional, based on news reports and court documents. Often, the killer simply lost control.

“Most of those men are not intending to kill a child,” said Douthit. “Things are getting out of hand, the baby won’t stop crying and they keep hitting it, and because it’s a baby, it winds up dead.

“If there’s a standard child abuse death, that’s the standard child abuse death.”

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Child abuse deaths in Alabama by cause of death, 2011-2017, from data supplied by the Alabama Department of Human Resources.

Corporal punishment

One possible explanation for Alabama’s high rate of physical abuse may be the types of discipline that are considered acceptable in this state.

“We have a higher preponderance of physical abuse than the national average, and I think part of that is because corporal punishment is more acceptable in the Southern states,” said Paula Wolfteich, intervention and clinical director at the National Children’s Advocacy Center in Huntsville, Ala. The center provides services and programs for child abuse victims and for professionals who work with them.

“We do get quite a bit of that, and it’s hard to prosecute.”

Shannon Gargis admitted to investigators that he physically disciplined Serenity more severely than his own children, and he said he’d been too rough with her in the days leading up to her death, according to court documents filed by the DA’s office.

He also admitted to hitting her in the face and spanking her “harder than appropriate.”

Troubled history

The signs were there.

In February 2016, a month before her death, Serenity was at the local Piggly Wiggly with her mother and Gargis when two women noticed bruises or marks on Serenity’s head, according to testimony given by the women to investigators and filed in publicly available court documents.

The women said Gargis was talking harshly to Serenity and her mother. They said when they approached Gargis and Renfroe and asked about what looked like a head injury on Serenity, Gargis looked startled and said Serenity had bumped an end table while running around at home.

In the week before Serenity was killed, Gargis claimed she accidentally injured herself at least three times while he was babysitting her, according to testimony he gave investigators, said Franklin County District Attorney Joey Rushing.

“Every time he was alone with that child, the child ended up bruised or hurt or injured,” said Rushing.

Gargis claimed Serenity had a seizure a week before her death and that he tripped and fell on top of her, injuring her, according to Rushing. A few nights later, Gargis said, she climbed up on a pile of bicycles and fell, hitting her head.