WARNING SIGNS NOT ALWAYS EASY TO IDENTIFY

People who know 16-year-old Scott Dyleski were stunned by his arrest
this week on suspicion of bludgeoning a Lafayette neighbor to death.

Despite his odd hairdo and eccentric look, friends and neighbors
described the former Boy Scout as bright, respectful, even helpful.

But investigators present a far darker picture.

They accuse Dyleski of killing 52-year-old Pamela Vitale, who was
struck dozens of times with a piece of molding and another object.
Sources believe the killing grew from a credit card scam Dyleski
allegedly launched to finance a marijuana-growing business.

Because of the brutality of the crime, prosecutors will try Dyleski
as an adult.

For many parents, the disconnect between the two personas remains one
of the case's most disturbing aspects.

Whether Dyleski is eventually found guilty, it is haunting to imagine
that a teenager who seemed relatively normal could get into so much
trouble, so fast.

"I think parents get frightened because they know, 'There but for the
grace of God go I.' I could miss something too," said Rona Renner, a
longtime parent educator and registered nurse. "It is a wake-up call
to paying attention to what you know about your teenager."

Warning signs are always much easier to recognize in hindsight.

But experts in adolescent behavior recognize familiar themes in
accounts of Dyleski's background, especially his response to the
death of his half sister, Denika Dyleski, three years ago in a car crash.

Scott Dyleski changed dramatically around that time, dressing himself
in dark, gothic clothing and distancing himself from others, acquaintances say.

"It's important to understand that the goth identity is not by itself
a dark and scary one," said Dr. Lynn Ponton, a professor of
adolescent psychiatry at UC San Francisco and author of "The Romance
of Risk: Why Teenagers Do the Things They Do." "It can be creative, a
healthy aspect of risk-taking. But it can also mask a depression."

Many teens who lose a sibling experience "survivor guilt," the
feeling that they should have been the one to die, said Ponton. And
depression related to a traumatic event can fuel anger, irritability
and impulsive behavior.

"I've seen teenagers who have killed before, and one of the things
that happens is if they're struggling with a mental illness, their
impulsivity is higher," said Ponton. "They will act in ways that are
not predictable."

In some cases, depression can become so severe that sufferers can
actually lose touch with reality, losing awareness of their actions,
says Ponton.

Dramatic changes in a teen's behavior and personality, loss of
attention span, loss of friends and leaving high school, even to
enroll in college, can all be signs of mental health problems, Ponton said.

"Those are the things that parents need to be paying attention to,"
she said. "The goth behavior is like a red herring."

Depression is a common precursor to violence in teenage boys, says
William Pollack, author of "Real Boys," an assistant clinical
professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School

"With school shooters, up to 70 percent were in a depression or
around a depressive experience within six months of the shooting," he said.

In boys, depression can take less familiar forms, like bravado,
negativity, irritability or refusal to talk, says Pollack.

"Does that mean he's going to kill someone? No. Does that mean he
needs intervention? Yes. You can't go wrong in intervening, you can
go wrong in leaving it alone."

Kids who feel disconnected or alienated do sometimes gravitate toward
alternative subcultures like the goth scene, said Pollack. But, he
added, "If you took every kid who wore black and wore a trench coat
and listened to weird music between the ages of 15 and 18 and said
they're at risk, we'd have to close down our schools and our homes."

A child's relationship with adults is a much stronger predictor than
any peer associations, including gangs, said Pollack.

"If he feels really cared about by a family member, a mother or
father .. he is two times less likely to become violent toward
himself or anyone else."

For parents, the common lesson underlying incidents of teenage
violence is the importance of staying connected, says Pollack.

Many parents pull back during adolescence, but their teens still need
them, he said.

"You don't want to stop the channels of communication with helpful
adults. It's so easy with adolescents to say, well they're on their
own, you want to give them space. If the umbilicus were a metaphor,
you would never really want to cut the cord. But it would stretch or
hurt a lot at times."

Since parents see their teens every day, it is easy to miss shifts in
behavior that are obvious to others, said psychologist Mike Riera,
author of "Staying Connected to Your Teenager" and the head of
Redwood Day School in Oakland.

"Kids don't change suddenly. Growth just happens slowly, a sixteenth
of an inch here, an eighth of an inch there," said Riera. "Parents
don't see the subtle changes."

That's why he recommends that parents seek input from other adults
who know their teens -- especially coaches, teachers, religious
leaders, who see hundreds of kids and have a sense of what falls
outside the realm of normal adolescent angst.

"It's so difficult for parents because they have one or two
teenagers; they don't have a baseline to compare it to," said Riera.

"A kid just wearing goth (styles) doesn't set the radar up," he said.
"With your kids, you always want to understand, why are you attracted
to something, what is it about it? Is it the lifestyle? Is it the
other kids? That's really the more important conversation."

Teenagers go to great lengths to hide things from parents, said
Meredith Maran, who spent years immersed in the lives of youths while
researching her books "Dirty," on teenage drug use, and "Class
Dismissed," which documented a year at Berkeley High.

"So much of teenagers' lives are conducted in secret, deliberately
out of the scrutiny of adult evaluation," she said. "The percentage
of things that teenagers do in the course of a week that their
parents would be horrified to know about is so high."

Limiting disclosure gives teens a sense of power and control over
their lives. Balancing a teen's need for privacy with the necessity
of supervision is a hugely complicated task for most parents, one
that continues well into the 20s, says Maran.

"When these things happen, there's always an up surge. Parents look
and say do I have too much information, not enough information, how
do I know it?"

Maran recommends what she calls a "multiple intelligence route,"
finding out as much as possible about teens from every available source.

That said, not all the blame should be placed on parents when things
go wrong, she said. Teenagers lack the moral boundaries of adults,
and can make amazing leaps from minor mischief into horrifyingly
dangerous behavior, she said.

Particularly in white, middle-class areas, adolescents tend to adopt
a sense of fatalism, Maran says.

"Some kids, they don't think they are going to live very long, and
they don't care," she said. "It wasn't just that they thought they
could crash a car and not have any consequences. When they looked at
what adulthood meant for them, they just didn't really want it. ...

"There are bigger issues about what kids believe is open to them,
what the stakes are in growing up."