Chandler Grafner and his little half brother seemed barely more than skin and bones to Vera DeBroeck when she met them a year ago at the Denver restaurant where she worked with the couple who cared for them.
“Bring them to my house,” she told Jon Phillips. “I’ll fatten them up.”
Phillips and his common-law wife, Sarah Berry, were caring for the kids after they were taken from Phillips’ estranged girlfriend. They took DeBroeck up on the offer – and a free night of babysitting. DeBroeck fed the boys grapes and bananas for a snack, then a dinner of meatloaf, a vegetable medley and some macaroni and cheese.
They cleaned their plates.
Skinny, 7-year-old Chandler hardly seemed to gain an ounce in the short time DeBroeck knew him. She says she cried all day when she learned that he died two weeks ago, after emergency workers called to Phillips’ south Denver apartment found Chandler emaciated and couldn’t revive him when he went into cardiac arrest.
“Chandler was a little timid, kind of quiet and shy,” recalls DeBroeck. “But after a while, he’d talk your ear off. He was a really considerate boy, very thoughtful and sweet. The first time I babysat with him, he was outside playing and he picked a flower for me – out of my flowerpot.”
Authorities haven’t determined exactly how Chandler died and are still awaiting autopsy results. But Denver prosecutors held the boy’s current legal guardians responsible for his “malnourishment and mistreatment.”
Phillips, 26, and Berry, 21, now face murder charges in the death of a boy whose biological mother, 28-year-old Christina Grafner, lost custody of him and his half brother, 5-year-old Dominick Phillips, amid charges of neglect.
“I feel betrayed,” says DeBroeck, who has moved to Texas. “Nobody could live with that little boy for months and just let him die and have good intentions. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Chandler’s death left sorrow, anger and recriminations as footnotes to a life played out among revolving-door relationships. His sweetness and innocence contrasted sharply with the human disarray that swirled around him from the beginning.
Unstable home life
Greg Grafner met Christina Herron about 10 years ago. They started dating and married six months later. Grafner says they were trying to have a baby, but without any luck.
One day he returned home from a camping trip, he says, to learn that Christina had left – she mistakenly thought he was having an affair and decided to have one herself.
While Greg Grafner pursued a divorce, Christina hooked up with Joshua Norris, who was an 18-year- old high school dropout when they moved into an apartment she paid for with settlement money from an auto accident.
Christina got pregnant in the fall of 1999, but early in the pregnancy, the couple split. Norris declines to talk about why they broke up, but Christina says it was because he didn’t want the baby.
To the contrary, Norris says, he wanted to do right by his child but couldn’t on $8 an hour at 7-Eleven.
“Chandler was the reason I joined the Navy,” he says. “Right before he was born, I joined because the medical and dental and all the benefits would be there for him.”
But while he attended boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Center near Chicago, the baby arrived several weeks early. Norris says he had planned to return for the birth, but his military commitment wouldn’t let him get away from basic training.
Several people converged on University Hospital on April 12, 2000, when the baby was born – including Christina’s new boyfriend, Darren McLain, an old friend from Platte Canyon High School in Bailey.
“From the first moment I saw him, Chandler was such a cute little baby, I’d do anything for him,” says McLain. “I would have fathered him through his whole life if that’s what fate would have had in it for us.”
Norris’ mother, Meredith Gallagher, remembers taking the bus to the hospital from her downtown job to get there in time for the premature delivery. At only 3 pounds, 4 ounces, Chandler had to be whisked away to neonatal intensive care.
She held him later that evening.
“I remember him on the IV, hooked up to oxygen,” Gallagher says. “I was rocking him in the rocking chair, talking to the nurse. He resembled Josh – the big freakin’ ears, Josh’s dark hair. You could tell they were family.”
Stefanie Evilsizer, Christina’s sister, recalls conflict over visits to the nursery by Gallagher and Norris’ sister.
When Gallagher came back the next day, she was turned away. She would never see the child again, in spite of what she says were efforts to find a family she knew little about.
She says she tried pursuing grandparents’ rights of visitation but was told that since her son’s name wasn’t on the birth certificate, she had no legal standing.
“I was devastated,” Gallagher says. “I’ve been looking for him for seven years. But Tina could not be found.”
Families disagree on whether Christina intentionally kept Chandler from the man presumed to be his father, or whether Norris and his family simply didn’t look hard enough.
Evilsizer: “She’s telling the whole sob story about searching for him, and she’s full of it. If she really wanted to find him, she could have.”
Gallagher: “They knew Josh was here, and looking for him, and they allowed this (tragedy). They knew he had a different biological father, and he lived in Jefferson County. My son pays taxes; he’s a registered voter. Why didn’t they find him?”
Norris’ first glimpse of the boy came last week, at the funeral.
“I always felt that I would meet him,” says Norris, now 26. “But I was never sure when it would be. I looked for Tina for a long time. And I could never figure out where she’d gone or how to find her. But I kept looking. And this is how I had to find her.”
There seems to be no disagreement among the families about Norris’ standing as Chandler’s father.
Nevertheless, Norris has agreed to a paternity test – against the advice of his attorney, who told him that social services may come after him for back support payments.
“I don’t care about money,” he says.
Greg Grafner says he, too, was asked by Denver social services to take a paternity test. He agreed, but nobody from the agency followed up.
“When I see this kid with my last name, and nobody knows whose kid he is, I end up having a couple questions,” he says. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering. But I do not believe he’s my child.”
A new relationship
Darren McLain embraced the role of father to a boy he knew was not biologically his – in fact, he says, the child’s legal name at birth was Chandler Ashton McLain.
But shortly after McLain and Christina started living together, she met a close boyhood friend of McLain’s who worked construction with him.
His name was Jon Phillips.
Eventually, he and Christina began a romantic relationship – circumstances that destroyed a bond between Phillips and McLain that dated back to middle school. But it also left McLain smarting from the loss of the boy he considered his son before he celebrated his first birthday.
“I always wished nothing but the best for Chandler and thought he’d truly have that,” says McLain. “Jon never seemed like the type of person who’d do this, but he always had problems with his ego, you could say. He had to feel like he was outsmarting everybody. He always had some shady qualities, but I never thought he was capable of doing horrific things to a child.”
Before long, Christina was pregnant with Dominick.
When the couple moved back to the Denver area shortly before Dominick’s birth, Evilsizer says, Phillips seemed to have changed.
Quick mood swings. Yelling at Tina. Odd quirks regarding the kids.
“He was so insistent that they couldn’t play anywhere except the bedroom,” she says. “They’d keep the bedroom door open but keep a baby gate on the doorway. He didn’t want their toys everywhere. He was such a control freak; everything has to be just his way.”
Phillips started working as a delivery-truck driver at a children’s furniture store in 2002. His boss, owner Bart Rivkin, made a note in an employee evaluation: “He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else, but he does a very good job.”
Rivkin says Phillips appeared to be an attentive father.
“He seemed crazy about those kids,” he says. “He mentioned he didn’t think Christina took good care of the kids. It seemed like the only one responsible to take care of the kids was Jon. It wasn’t a good situation.”
Three attempts on Thursday and Friday to reach Phillips’ attorney, Darren Cantor, for comment were unsuccessful. Several of Phillips’ family members either declined to comment or couldn’t be reached.
Christina’s description of Phillips seethes with claims of abusive behavior toward both her and the kids, as well as threats to kill the children and blame it on her.
She says she left Phillips eight times before leaving him for good.
“He’s the devil,” Christina says. “He’s a quiet, shy genius. He can be anything he wants. He’s a genius on every level.”
But documents paint an unflattering picture of Christina.
Child abuse charges in the fall of 2005 and spring of 2006 raised questions about the boys’ welfare, hinted at possible drug involvement and ultimately led to Christina’s losing custody of the children in January to Phillips and Berry, who also had been working for Rivkin and who had become involved with Phillips.
But Christina was not charged with any drug offenses in those incidents.
“I’m not the crackhead that everyone thinks,” she says, adding she has passed every urinalysis test she has ever taken.
Warning ignored
Rivkin says he warned Berry against getting involved with Phillips because “he had a lot of baggage” – but she didn’t listen.
In February, shortly after getting custody of the boys, Phillips and Berry brought the kids to Rivkin’s furniture shop, where Phillips made a show of peeling off bills from a large roll of cash to purchase bunk beds and mattresses for the boys.
“When it came to kids,” he says, “she was animated, patient and attentive. It seemed like she had a good level head. But she was also naive and innocent.”
He says he was shocked to see Berry’s appearance transformed from wholesome to a more provocative “goth look” after she took up with Phillips.
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, my God, she’s starting to look just like Tina,”‘ Rivkin says.
Berry, the youngest of four children, has been estranged from her family in recent years, says Beth Canono, a former neighbor.
“She’s a person you’d never hesitate to have babysit your children,” says Canono, adding that Berry babysat for her children.
Berry’s attorney, Willie Rios, did not return calls seeking comment. Her father, who owns a heating and cooling business, did not return phone calls.
Phillips and Berry wound up working at an Old Chicago restaurant in Tamarac Square where – after gaining temporary custody – they brought Chandler and Dominick for employee-discounted meals two or three times a week, says former co-worker DeBroeck.
Though vocally passionate about fatherhood, Phillips also had a disturbing side, DeBroeck adds. He seemed strangely compulsive at times. He wouldn’t drink out of glasses or eat off plates at her house. He brought his own drinks. He declined snacks.
Most troubling, he seemed to have Berry under his thumb.
“He seemed very controlling of what she did,” says DeBroeck. “He’d overreact to a lot of things. She almost seemed scared of him. I didn’t like him too much after a while.”
DeBroeck says she has heard from another restaurant employee that the regular visits with the boys stopped about a month before Chandler’s death.
“I hope in some way they just made a stupid mistake, that they didn’t hurt him intentionally,” she says. “But there’s a lot of holes in the story.”
The friends and relatives whose lives touched Chandler’s remember him as bright, polite, protective of Dominick, spunky, opinionated and good-natured.
McLain delivered the eulogy at last week’s funeral.
“I felt like I didn’t have time to say everything I wanted,” says McLain, “but I felt good that at least he had a voice to say something for him in death, since he didn’t have anybody speaking for him when it mattered most.”
“He was a shining star when he was alive,” says Christina.
“If ever there was a 99.9 percent perfect child, that was Chandler,” adds his maternal grandmother, Sandra K. Younger.
But at the funeral, she says, she saw a gaunt shadow of the Chandler she remembers.
“He was skeletal,” she says. “It was what nightmares are made of.”
The eulogy delivered at Chandler Grafner’s funeral Wednesday by Darren McLain:
I would like to start by saying thank you to all who have shown their love and support as we gather here today to celebrate the life of a very special little boy.
Most of you already know how special Chandler Ashton was to us. And as I look around here today, I see a lot of the lives that Chandler has touched. I will always remember the profound effect that he had on me. This past week has been very trying for all of us. And we just want everybody to know just how much love we had for Chandler and especially the heart full of love he had for all of us.
There are a few stories and memories I would like to share with you about a true Angel.
On April 12, 2000, Tina gave birth to a beautiful baby boy named Chandler Ashton at University Hospital. Weighing only 3 pounds 4 ounces, Chandler spent the first few weeks of his life in the intensive care nursery. Though he had to eat from a feeding tube and be on oxygen, Chandler was brave and courageous. The nurses would always comment about his strength. I remember how content he was, weather he was eating or sleeping or smiling he was just a happy baby. We were so excited the day we got to take Chandler home and I remember thinking how he was just the size of a football.
Chandler soon got the nickname BING from family. He was so eager to please and had a laugh that Angels could hear. Chandler had lots of love in his live including the love of his papa, David. David would take his BING BOT, as he called him, to the bridge over the river and watch the water flow under their feet. David would say, “look BING BOT here the river comes and there it goes.” Chandler would stare at the water with his bright blue eyes and smile with his papa.
As you may know, Chandler loved to swing and all to often fell asleep in that very spot. But there were times when he would be swinging and catch a glance of our dog Tibbs getting a drink of water or even just walking through the house. Chandler was so tickled by this that he would laugh so hard that anybody else around couldn’t help but laugh with him. His laugh was contagious and it brightened our days. There is nothing more precious then a child’s laughter and Chandler proved that to us.
A baby’s first Christmas is always fun for everyone, and Chandler’s was no exception. I remember it was snowing that day and thinking how awesome it was to see that happen for the first time in my life on his first Christmas. Tina dressed him in his ridiculously cute Santa suit. Not only was it fun helping him open all of his many gifts, but also seeing the look of surprise and excitement on his innocent little face.
Chandler had a very special aunt and uncle in his life, Uncle Jon and Aunt Stef. They both expressed what a gift Chandler was to them. Jon and Chandler had so many memories together it was hard for Jon to choose just one. Chandler and Uncle Jon would play on the floor and no matter how tired Uncle Jon was from work he would always find time for Chandler. Chandler’s face would light up anytime Uncle Jon and Aunt Stef were around. Chandler’s Aunt Stef loved to get hugs and kisses from him and loved to spend time with Chandler and watch him play. She remembers thinking how amazing it would be to see the world through the eyes of a child, so simple, so innocent. Things were so simple to Chandler; he had quite the imagination that would turn the most mundane things into joyful moments.
Chandler was a great big brother and was very protective of his little brother Dominick. When Dominick was born Chandler would say “he’s my baby”. Chandler would hold his brother as they slept to keep him safe through the night, protecting his baby. Sometimes, when playing with his brother and cousin there would be misunderstandings over who got to play with which hot wheel or ninja Turtle? But Chandler was a good mediator as well, always making sure that everyone was okay.
I would like to read a poem for Chandler. It is called ‘Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild’ by Charles Wesley.
Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild,
Look upon a little child;
Pity my simplicity,
Suffer me to come to thee.
Fain I would to thee be brought,
Dearest God, forbid it not;
Give me, dearest God, a place
In the Kingdom of thy grace.
Put thy hands upon thy head,
Let me in thine arms be stayed,
Let me lean upon thy breast,
Lull me, Lull me, Lord to rest.
Hold me fast in thine embrace,
Let me see thy smiling face,
Give me Lord thy blessings give,
Pray for me, and I shall live.
Lamb of God, I look to thee,
Thou shalt my example be;
Thou are gentle, meek, and mild,
Thou wast once a little child.
Fain I would be as Thou art,
Give me thy obedient heart;
Thou art pitiful and kind,
Let me have thy loving mind.
Let me, above all, fulfill
God my heavenly Father’s will,
Never his good spirit grieve;
Only to his glory live.
Thou didst live to God alone,
Thou didst never seek thine own,
Thou thyself didst never please;
God was all thy happiness.
Loving Jesus, gentle lamb,
In thy gracious hands I am;
Make me, saviour, what thou art,
Live thyself within my heart.
I shall then show forth thy praise,
Serve thee all my happy days;
Then the world shall always see
Christ, the Holy Child, in me.
Chandler was such a fine example of unconditional love. He didn’t know the meaning of hate. I know we feel Anger, pain, sorrow and guilt for such a promising life cut so short, Chandler didn’t deserve this, but we must remember Chandler as he was and what a wonderful blessing he truly was to so many of us.
Chandler wouldn’t want us to grieve for him; he would want us to remember all the happiness he brought to our lives. Chandler will forever be in our hearts and that is how he will live on.
Rest easy, little Chandler, for you are at peace now, and remember that we hold you in our hearts and love you so much!
