THE MIAMI HERALD TEEN KILLER DESCRIBED AS LONELY, POUTY, DISRUPTIVE Monday, February 5, 2001 Section: Front Edition: Final Page: 1A By CAROLINE J. KEOUGH, ckeough@herald.com Illustration: color photo: Lionel Tate (a) Shuffled back and forth from parent to parent, school to school and teacher to teacher, Lionel Tate was a lonely boy who acted out his need for attention by pestering everyone around him. "He didn't have any friends," his fourth-grade teacher in Mississippi, Charlotte Stockstill, said in a statement to police after Lionel was charged with first-degree murder. "He was kind of a loner. He was very loud, very boisterous . . . like a bull in a china shop. He was almost out of control." Lionel was convicted 11 days ago in the beating death of his 6-year-old playmate when he was 12, in what his attorneys say was an innocent attempt to imitate his favorite professional wrestlers. Now 14, he faces life in prison without parole and is being held at the Broward County Jail. Although his attorney chose not to have Lionel take the witness stand, the testimony of others, along with depositions and police interviews, paints a portrait of a boy who turned classroom disruptions into an art form, but who turned pouty when he was angry and never actually hurt another child. At least not until July 28, 1999, when he fatally body-slammed Tiffany Eunick in his Pembroke Park townhouse while his mother, in charge of watching both children, napped upstairs. "One week he couldn't stand Boy X, and the next week it was Girl Y, and it was a constant, nobody liked him, that's what the children told me," said Wendy Lopez, Lionel's fifth-grade teacher at Watkins Elementary School in Hollywood. "Nobody wanted to sit next to him because he stole their things - pencils, books, anything he could get his hands on. And under his breath, he would say things to the students, and then they would become incensed and enraged and yell and scream." During school, he couldn't wait to ride his bicycle to the convenience store and load up on candy and soda pop. `HIS THRILL' "That was his thrill for the day," Stockstill said. "I felt like Lionel wanted attention and lots of it, and to me, his behavior was a way of getting attention." Early on, his teachers said, Lionel wore wrestling T-shirts and mimicked the false bravado and tough talk of his favorite stars of the ring - but ran from actual confrontation. "I was constantly afraid that he was going to say the wrong thing [to an older child] and someone would just take him out," said Carla Smyth, who counseled Lionel in Mississippi. "He didn't know how to say the appropriate thing sometimes." Lopez and another Broward teacher said they suggested sending him to a special school for children with behavioral problems, but the school was full. Lionel's mother and father met in Germany while serving in the military together, and split 11 months after he was born in 1987. For seven years, John Tate didn't see his son. For two of those years, John Tate's mother took care of Lionel while Lionel's mother, Kathleen Grossett-Tate, played basketball for the military, and again when she went to Saudi Arabia to serve in Operation Desert Storm. His mother testified in the trial that, from an early age, he watched wrestling on television and played rough with her. "I used to try to pin him," said Grossett-Tate, who is six-foot-one. "If he was on the bed, I would jump on him. My mentality was: With boys, you're rough; with girls, you're gentle." LIVING WITH FATHER When Kathleen Grossett-Tate went to school to become a Florida Highway Patrol trooper in 1996, she sent Lionel to live with his father, who worked a double shift at the Batesville Casket factory outside Vicksburg, Miss. "I worked 2 to 10 at night, my family is in Jamaica," Grossett-Tate said. "I didn't want him to be alone." In a two-bedroom trailer in tiny Bovina, Miss., Lionel lived with John Tate and the woman his father eventually married. In fourth grade in Mississippi, teachers often complained about Lionel's disruptive behavior, Smyth said. He was written up for "disrupting the class, making noises, disruptive behavior in the hallway, disruptive behavior in the bathroom," Smyth said. "And when I say disruptive, I don't mean violent-type disruptive. I mean anything he could think of doing to start something - even if in the cafeteria flicking the corn kernel at someone." Stockstill, Lionel's homeroom teacher at Bovina Elementary, said she often split her class into small groups to work on projects. "Nobody wanted to work with him," she said. Stockstill said she would persuade Lionel to join a group, but "it wouldn't be 15 minutes and he'd be dragging his desk away, slamming his books. . . . Honestly, the other students were relieved that he had left the group." Lionel was once chastised for physically hoisting a tiny girl in his class without her permission, but he never got violent or physical with other children when he was angry, Stockstill said. "He would usually hit the walls, stomp his feet and then totally withdraw into himself," Stockstill said. "It was a pouty type of anger." The prospect of a paddling in the principal's office once turned the boy to sobs, she said. Stockstill said that once, over Christmas, Lionel's stepmother called her at home and asked, "What do you do with him to make him calm down?" "She absolutely said either Lionel has to straighten up or I'm leaving," Stockstill said. "He was just a handful and driving her crazy." RETURN TO FLORIDA When the school year was over, Lionel was sent back to live with his mother in Florida. In fifth grade at Watkins Elementary in Hollywood, Lionel's problems grew along with his body; even before the growth spurt, he was a head taller than other students in his class. Lopez, his first teacher there, moved Lionel to another class when she felt that she couldn't handle him anymore. "It got to the point where nothing I did mattered . . . no punishments, consequences, even rewards," Lopez said. "He was dragging down the rest of the students. I thought . . . maybe a change in environment, change of scenery and students would clear up the problem." Lionel's reading teacher at Watkins, Jefferson Foley, called his mother in to talk about the behavior problems the boy was having in his high-level reading class. "She came in," Foley said. "She was wearing her state trooper's uniform - a very imposing figure. She seemed to let Lionel get away with quite a bit." Rather than worrying about what Lionel had done, his mother wanted to "find some other place to lay the blame," Foley said. Through her lawyer, Grossett-Tate declined to be interviewed. PROBLEMS CONTINUE Lionel was again sent to live with his father in Mississippi, but the problems persisted. "He seemed to have less control over the impulses than he had before," said Smyth, who continued to counsel Lionel. "And there was more a tendency to be a little bullying. I'm not saying he was a bully, but I would say that he had discovered he was bigger and he could get what he wanted sometimes with that. . . . Toward the end of the year, there did seem to be more vulgarity and hostility toward authority." Although Lionel's work was sometimes good enough to merit a B, he was suspended six times - for a total of 18 days in one year - for disrupting class. "It was kind of a relief for those few days he was not in the room," Stockstill said. "We could actually get down to our work and get things accomplished." After the school year ended, Lionel was sent home to live with his mother. School was out, and Lionel had no playmates. Grossett-Tate struck up a friendship with Deweese Eunick, a fellow native of Jamaica with a 6-year-old daughter, Tiffany. They watched each other's children. A month later, Tiffany would be dead, and Lionel would be charged with her murder.