When 67-year-old Wayne Sperling appeared in a Denver courtroom for sentencing on December 30, 2014, his long, snow white beard and button nose made him look like a real-life incarnation of Kris Kringle. But he more accurately resembled a sinister character from Oliver Twist. Sperling faced 10 felony charges related to child abuse but pleaded guilty to just one, a Class 5 felony that carried a sentence of up to eight years in prison. He’d already lost custody of his children. Now the judge would determine what justice would be in a case that had horrified the Denver community.
It wasn’t the first time Sperling had appeared in court; it wasn’t even the first time he’d lost custody of his kids. In 2006, two of his children—four and two years old—were found playing without supervision on East 18th Avenue, the one-way, multilane road that shuttles more than 14,600 vehicles a day between City Park and downtown. The call prompted a child welfare assessment of his family. Sperling and the children’s mother, Lorinda Bailey (then in her late 20s), received probation, were advised to attend parenting classes, and retained custody of their three kids, including a three-month-old baby. By 2008, as the couple’s problems persisted, child welfare officials had moved all three of the children into foster care.
[For more of this story, written by Natasha Gardner, go to http://www.5280.com/news/magaz...r-children-ourselves]
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