I was reading old MTS entries in the “Time Machine” widget at the bottom of the page, and this was the first entry.

I hadn’t thought of Mike, who went by the hip-hop-inspired moniker M-Jezzy, in years. I thought about him a lot a few years ago, when his case was in the news, though.

The story is a compounded tragedy. I knew M-Jezzy’s background from working with him at a program for at-risk kids. To say he’d had the cards stacked against him was an understatement. Both his mother and his older brother were setting a splendid example for him. His mother was a pusher; his brother followed her lead; they were both trying to get M-Jezzy to join the family business.

Take someone from that environment and put him with a child. It’s not difficult to see how things could turn tragic.

An Asheville man will spend at least 18 years in prison after admitting Monday that he caused the death of his girlfriend’s son, according to District Attorney Todd Williams.

Michael Antonio Dixon, Jr., 24, pleaded guilty Monday in Buncombe County Superior Court to second-degree murder and intentional child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury in the death of 4-year-old Cedric Francois.

Cedric’s mother Taquita Francois said Dixon was taking care of the boy Oct. 19, 2011 while she was at work when he called in a panic because Cedric was unresponsive.

Cedric was taken to Mission St. Joseph’s Hospital where he was pronounced dead. (Source)

The story, I thought, was that M-Jezzy had just lost control — I’d seen it happen — and literally beaten the poor child to death. I imagined blow after blow coming down on the little four-year-old’s body, and I was filled with fury. “Someone should do some basic math: determine the pounds per square inch he hits with, compare that to the weight of the boy, then beat M-Jezzy with the force proportional to his own body weight,” I ranted to K.

But in reading about the tragedy anew, I found a new detail.

Judge Alan Thornburg sentenced Michael Antonio Dixon Jr., 24, to a minimum of 225 months and a maximum of 279 months in state prison for the death of Cedric Francois on Oct. 19, 2011.

Dixon, who originally was charged with first-degree murder, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and intentional child abuse inflicting serious bodily injury in the plea hearing in Buncombe County Superior Court.

Prosecutor Rodney Hasty said the district attorney’s office agreed to the plea because investigators didn’t believe Dixon intended to kill the boy when he struck him in the face after the child accidentally soiled himself.

Dixon, who was babysitting the boy while his mother was at work, put the child in a bathtub before striking him, Hasty said. Investigators believe the boy, when struck, fell backward and hit the back of his head on the tub, Hasty said.

The boy died from blunt force trauma to the head that caused bleeding around the brain, according to an autopsy report by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Chapel Hill. The boy’s mother, Taquita Francois, told police she left him in Dixon’s care at her Pisgah View Apartments home when she went to work.

“It does not appear to us at the time the defendant hit the child he intended to kill the child,” Hasty told the judge.

Dixon’s attorney, Al Messer, call the child’s death a “tragic situation.”

“Mr. Dixon is accepting responsibility and is pleading guilty,” Messer said. (Source)

It was in the bath as M-Jeezy tried to clean an accidental soiling. Perhaps the child wouldn’t sit down. Frustrated with having to deal with the child’s feces and irritated that the child wasn’t following instructions, M-Jezzy did what his mother might have done to him: slap him across the face. “Do it now!” Back the child flew, his head making a sickening thud against the tub that M-Jezzy must have known confirmed the path of the rest of his life.

But such things don’t usually happen in one-off situations. It was unlikely that this was the first time M-Jezzy or someone else struck the boy.

According to the autopsy, the boy had older injuries that were unrelated to the head trauma, including rib fractures on both sides of the chest and a human bite mark on the left forearm.

Asheville police began investigating the child’s death after being notified by Mission Hospital staff about “questionable injuries” discovered on his body. According to court documents, a detective at the hospital observed numerous injuries, including hemorrhages in both eyes, bruises on his face, buttocks and around his ankles, abrasions on his chest, forehead and under his left eye, a laceration on his right ear, a laceration on his lower lip and a bite mark on his arm. (Source)

The child of an impoverished single mother, the trajectory of Cedric’s life and death had begun long before, possibly when he was born, possibly before his own mother was born: a straight line that psychologists and social workers could have plotted as the nurses cleaned and weighed the newborn. Abuse begets abuse; parents who don’t know how to raise children raise parents who don’t know how to raise children; neglect begets neglect.

Did M-Jezzy see the parallel structure of his life and the life he took? Did he have the insight to realize that his life could have ended just as quickly as young Cedric Francois? Did he feel his own mother’s hand on the back of his head when he slapped Cedric?

Later, Cedric’s mother offered a plea to parents:

“I just want people to know that you need to cherish every moment with your kids because I felt like something like this could never happen to me,” she said. “Whether they get on your nerves, stress you out, just appreciate your kids fullest.” (Source)

That’s the rub of it all: there are very few people out there who wouldn’t feel this way, very few parents who are just willfully abusive to their children.

And that’s the other rub: isn’t that just an assumption? A projection based on the environment I’ve spent my whole life in? The news is filled with stories of children being tortured, being abused in the most wretched ways, and the assumption is that they are a minority, but what we see in the news is only a fraction of what actually happens, of parents actually caught and, if the children are lucky, stopped before it’s too late, before the last slap that ends in the crush of skull against tub, before the privation of food and water leads to death — the thousand and one ways parents neglect and abuse their kids to the very end of their short lives.

“I felt like something like this could never happen to me,” she said.