Did system fail in deaths of children?

Questions remain in case of Berks mom accused of killing son, daughter

The horrifying deaths of 4-year-old Brinley and 8-yearold Conner Snyder are prompting renewed scrutiny of Pennsylvania’s child welfare system, even as they raise unanswered questions of what would motivate a mother to allegedly kill her children.

When Lisa R. Snyder was charged Monday with murder, she became just the latest of parents in the region to be accused in recent years of killing their own. Before Brinley and Conner were found hanged Sept. 23 in their mother’s basement in Berks County, there were other children whose macabre ends provoked

heartbreak in the community and cries for answers.

Among them, Grace Packer was 14 when she was raped and murdered in Bucks County to fulfill a fantasy of her adoptive mother and her mother’s paramour. JJ Schmoyer was 2-years-old when his suicidal father used a car bomb last year to blow up him and a family friend in an explosion that shattered much of a city block in Allentown. “Baby Boy Hein,” a child without a name, was killed by his mother in 2013 after she secretly gave birth to him in a bar bathroom in Lower Saucon Township.

With the charges against Snyder, one Berks County lawmaker renewed a push for a comprehensive review of the state’s child protection safety net, saying she worries other youths could be in danger. The proposal, for an Interbranch Commission on Child Welfare, captured attention this year after the release of two separate child fatality investigations into Packer’s 2016 death, which found that child welfare agencies repeatedly ignored red flags that could have saved her.

Sen. Judy Schwank, a Democrat who is co-sponsoring the proposal, said it is too early to say whether the system also missed warnings with Snyder, who has professed her innocence to police and on social media.

“I really do not know, but it is frustrating,” Schwank said. “It’s time that we step back and review this again.”

It is one of many aspects of Snyder’s arrest that is stirring public calls for answers. Authorities have not detailed a suspected motive in the killings, in which police charge Snyder used a basement beam and a length of wire to rig two loops that choked away her children’s lives in Albany Township. Experts on family violence described the alleged method of death as rare, saying mothers who kill their children more typically do so through less violent methods such as suffocation, drowning or drug overdoses.