Spark of life

Dejan Kocevski lived a nightmare of a childhood. Starved, beaten and locked up in the basement of a Cape Girardeau home, the then-7-year-old boy nearly died in a house fire 23 years ago that sparked discovery of the abuse and led to the prosecution of his mother and her boyfriend on child abuse charges.

On Tuesday, Kocevski, now a 30-year-old street maintenance worker in Toronto, Canada, returned to Cape Girardeau to confront the past for a Canadian television documentary on his ordeal, but more importantly to put the bad memories behind him.

"I don't want to be haunted by this," said Kocevski, who spent years trying to get over the anger. He approached the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. about doing the documentary.

On Tuesday, his every move recorded on tape by a production crew from the CBC, Kocevski returned to the basement of the house at 141 S. Sunset Blvd., where he had been confined for four months.

He recalled his tortured past as if it were yesterday.

"I would be fed once or twice a week," said Kocevski, who weighed only 32 pounds when rescued from the burning house at the corner of Sunset and William streets.

He was so hungry, he routinely ate bugs he found by the basement steps. He drank water from a basement sink, which he also used to bathe.

He said his mother's Pakistani boyfriend, Akbar Esker, beat him daily, burned him with cigarettes and often made him kneel for long periods of time on the hard basement floor.

He was given few clothes. "I wasn't allowed to wear any clothes except underwear," he said.

The abuse, he said, began about two years earlier in Toronto and continued when he, his mother, Olgica Kocevski, and Esker moved to Cape Girardeau in late December 1981.

In November 1980, the boy was hospitalized in Toronto after the principal of the elementary school he attended reported that Kocevski kept fainting in class and appeared to have suffered from some kind of physical abuse.

The Catholic Children's Aid Society in Toronto and police investigated the case, but ended up allowing the boy to return to his mother.

When they moved to Cape Girardeau, Kocevski remembers that initially the basement door leading to the first floor of the house was unlocked. Kocevski said he used to sneak upstairs and steal pieces of bread from the kitchen.

But after Esker padlocked the basement door, Kocevski was trapped. He could hear neighbor children playing close by in a world he couldn't reach.

"I yelled many times for help," he said. "Nobody ever came."

Esker and his mother often abandoned him for days at a time, leaving him locked in the basement, Kocevski recalled.

His Yugoslavian-born mother pleaded guilty to child abuse charges and was sentenced to four years in prison. But the sentence was suspended in December 1982 when she was deported to Canada.

Esker was convicted of child abuse at the conclusion of a trial in Columbia, Mo., in July 1982. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

Dejan Kocevski blames Esker for the abuse. He said Esker used to beat his mother and kept her from seeing him.

But the prosecutor, police and the local juvenile judge in the case blamed both the mother and the boyfriend for Kocevski's ordeal.

"He was given a blanket, a package of Twinkies and a soda, a couple of toys and nothing else," said then prosecuting attorney Stephen N. Limbaugh Jr., now a Missouri Supreme Court judge.

The fire

Esker and Olgica Kocevski had traveled to Peoria, Ill., on the night of April 11, 1982, leaving Dejan in his basement prison.

The fire broke out about 10 p.m. on April 13. A motorcyclist, riding on William Street, noticed smoke coming from the house around 10:30 p.m. Firefighters said the motorcyclist pounded on the front door. When there was no response, he called the fire department from a neighbor's house.

The day after the blaze, fire department officials said the fire started in the basement wiring.

On Tuesday, Dejan Kocevski said he started the fire by igniting toilet paper with the flame from a gas water heater in the basement.

He said he did it because he was desperate to escape. He remembers the suffocating smoke. "My eyes started burning," he said. "I couldn't breathe."

Former firefighter Robert Thompson of Cape Girardeau believes the electrical malfunction wasn't caused by Kocevski lighting toilet paper. He said the fire appeared to have started upstairs in the electrical wiring.

Whatever sparked the fire, Thompson and others believe the fire may have saved the boy's life.

Thompson found the boy at the bottom of the basement steps. He was unconscious and barely breathing, his lungs full of smoke.

"I saw what I thought was a bundle of clothes at the bottom of the basement steps," he recalled Tuesday. It turned out to be Dejan.

"I said, 'Oh, God, there is a kid there,'" he said. Thompson picked up the boy and carried him out of the smoke-filled house.

Dejan Kocevski was on the verge of death. He was rushed to Southeast Missouri Hospital.

Limbaugh said doctors worked to resuscitate the boy, extricating "gobs of white ash and black soot from his mouth and nose and throat."

Doctors said the boy, with his "pencil-thin arms and legs" also suffered from malnutrition, Limbaugh recalled.

Newspaper accounts say the boy was on a respirator for five days.

He eventually was placed in foster care while then juvenile judge Marybelle Mueller decided who should have custody of the child.

Mueller wrestled over the decision. "When you have control of a child like that, you don't just cut him lose," she said.

Eventually, she awarded custody to the boy's father, Branko Kocevski, who worked at a restaurant in Germany.

Branko and Olgica had separated in Yugoslavia in 1980, with Olgica given custody of the boy.

In August 1982, the son and father were reunited in Germany.

Brigitta and Bill Tinsley of Cape Girardeau, who had befriended the father during the custody case, accompanied Dejan to Germany.

But the reunion was short-lived. Dejan ended up being raised by grandparents in a rustic village in Yugoslavia.

When he was 14, Dejan returned to Toronto to live with his mother. But their relationship was strained and he later moved out.

Within the last five or six years, the two have grown closer, he said.

Brigitta Tinsley believes the fire saved the boy whose existence wasn't even known by neighbors.

Without the fire, Dejan would have remained locked away in the basement and died from abuse, she said.

Mueller said Dejan Kocevski was lucky to survive.

"He has to learn to get on with his life," the retired judge said from her Jackson home.

CBC television producer Janet Thomson and her crew plan to finish three days of interviews in Cape Girardeau today. She and her crew expect to have interviewed about a dozen people before they leave.

The video will be edited and broadcast as about a 25- to 30-minute documentary on a CBC Sunday news show, probably in September.

Thomson said she doesn't know if it will be seen in the United States.

She said those interviewed by the crew reflect differing feelings over the role Dejan's mother played in the incidents of child abuse.

The same question keeps surfacing, she said: Why didn't his mother try to save him?

Thomson said no amount of research may resolve all of the issues surrounding the abuse.

"He may never get the total answer," she said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

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