Sister, 18, Takes on Role of Mother to 5

Clarissa Van Dyke didn’t know if she was old enough, but she knew her mother would have wanted her to try.

And so when it happened last Saturday--when the man who fathered Van Dyke’s four little sisters and baby brother shot their mother to death during a violent squabble over money--the 18-year-old woman went to the police and asked if she could take the youngsters home with her.

And home with her they went, to the cramped three-bedroom South Los Angeles house Van Dyke shares with her own 5-month-old daughter, Charmetra, the infant’s paternal grandparents and two other family members.

“I picked them up, brought them here, changed their clothes, fed them and put them to bed,” the soft-spoken Van Dyke said Tuesday as she hushed up one child, then told a second to be still. “My mother was a nice, wonderful kind of mother to have. . . . I think she would have wanted me to take care of them.”

Today, Van Dyke hopes to make the arrangement permanent. With her brother and sisters in tow, she will head downtown to Juvenile Dependency Court, where she hopes a judge will award her permanent custody. Otherwise, the youngsters could be farmed out to foster homes or the county’s home for dependent children in El Monte.

Although she is jobless and on welfare, Van Dyke figures the little ones need their older sister now. Aside from their father, she’s the only family member left.

“They are going to stay here,” she said adamantly. “I want them. They’re my brothers and sisters. . . . We’ll make do.”

By all accounts, the children--11-year-old Brenda, 10-year-old Kelly, 9-year-old twins Lannette and Annette and 6-year-old Cindy--would like that just fine. And so would Charlie and Margaret Thomas, who opened their 118th Street home to the youngsters within hours of Saturday’s shooting.

“The kids need a lot of attention and (Van Dyke) needs to be with somebody who can help,” said Margaret Thomas. “I raised six kids here and it’s no different whether they are ours or hers. . . . These kids need us.”

Although it has been only four days since what Van Dyke calls the “accident” happened, the children have already gotten back to acting like children. Alternately hugging, then teasing each other, they don’t even seem to mind the idea of sharing the same bed every night. They figure at least they will be together.

Just as they were last Saturday afternoon when the fighting started in the Main Street motel room the family called home.

And just as they were when the fighting so suddenly stopped.

“He’d been fighting her a lot, beating her up a lot,” Van Dyke said.

The argument this time was apparently over money. And this time, Los Angeles police investigators said, 41-year-old Betty Davis tried to call police, first from a phone in the motel and then from a telephone booth across the street.

Kelly said he followed his mother to the telephone booth when he saw his father, Jim Taylor, 51, pick up his gray gun and go after her.

“She had just put her money in,” the little boy said. “The first time he missed. The second time he didn’t. . . . There was a lot of blood coming right out there in the street.

“I cried. I was crying so loud.”

Betty Davis died en route to Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, and Taylor, her common-law husband, was jailed without bail after being booked on suspicion of murder.

Davis’ funeral is scheduled for Saturday. If Van Dyke has her way, she and the children will leave for the service from the same place. Then when its over, they will go home to the same place.