God and the Underclass

LIKE the script of a horror film, the underclass nightmare lurches through the pages of every major urban paper.

—In Queens, a heroin-addicted mother with AIDS murders her four-year-old daughter, stuffs the body in a laundry bag, and with the help of her current boyfriend— also a drug addict—tosses the bag from a bridge into the East River. The woman is “mother” to four children through a succession of drug-numbed boyfriends.