Edition: U.S. / Global

A Father Says, 'I Wasn't There'

Published: September 7, 1996

Child welfare officials are still trying to figure out how 4-year-old Nadine Lockwood was starved to death as city agencies and other organizations stood by. But Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has said that the hard questions being asked of caseworkers should first be put to Nadine's family. He asks, ''What did the father know, and when did he know it?''

Trying to answer that question, Nadine's father, Leroy Dickerson, recently sat for an interview and spoke about his sporadic contact with his children and his unconventional relationship with his estranged wife, Carla Lockwood.

Ms. Lockwood, now pregnant with twins, was charged with second-degree murder yesterday. If convicted, she would face a minimum penalty of 15 years in prison and a maximum of 25 years to life.

Ms. Lockwood made a brief court appearance to be formally notified of the indictment. Wearing a black blouse and striped pants, she stood expressionless in court, pausing only on her way out to give the waiting press corps a slow, stolid stare.

Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, declined to say whether charges would be filed against Mr. Dickerson, although he said the matter was under review. ''As a father of seven children myself,'' he said, ''I find this a horrendous crime.''

During the interview on Thursday, Mr. Dickerson, 37, was by turns defensive and contradictory when asked about his efforts to see his children, his knowledge of his wife's drug use and the family's contact with the city's child-protection agency, then known as the Child Welfare Administration. He first said he did not recall ever having talked to a Child Welfare caseworker about his children. Then he said he might have. ''Maybe, maybe not,'' he said.

Later, he said he remembered being interviewed once by a caseworker, although he could not remember when, or what he was asked. ''It really was rather casual,'' he said. ''She took notes, but it was very casual.''

He never noticed signs of abuse or neglect, he said, even when he visited his daughter three months before he found her dead in her crib, weighing only 15 1/2 pounds. ''She's always been thin,'' he said. ''Even when she was born, she was a skinny baby.''

When pressed and told that city officials said her emaciated body weighed less than that of an average 1-year-old, Mr. Dickerson grew angry and questioned their findings. ''That's what they say,'' he said, adding, ''Who does the Medical Examiner work for?''

Mr. Dickerson, who had not lived with his wife and children for several years, said that if he had seen Nadine being physically abused -- ''being poked with a cattle prod or tied up'' -- he would have tried to take her from her mother.

But he said he had no reason to believe she was being mistreated. ''I came and left the house with the notion that my children were under no imminent danger at all,'' he said. ''So what I don't see I can't do anything about.''

He described a marriage and family life marred from the beginning by economic struggle. Mr. Dickerson, who already had a son from another relationship, and Ms. Lockwood, who was bringing up a 4-year-old daughter she had had when she was 16, met in a grocery store and dated for six or seven months before they married in a simple ceremony at the Bronx County Clerk's office in 1986.

Mr. Dickerson had been dishonorably discharged from the Marines, apparently after going AWOL. Although he worked off and on as a hospital security guard, he had difficulty finding full-time work. When the two married, he was out of a job, he said, and they lived apart, with their families, even as they began having children.

They lived with one of Ms. Lockwood's cousins for a while, he said, but not long after they had their first child, Nathan, they began to have differences and essentially never lived together again. ''For all the other kids that we had, broke up, I wasn't there,'' he said. ''I wasn't living in the household at all.''

He estimated that about $260 in child support was garnished from his twice-monthly paychecks when he was working as a hospital guard. The checks averaged about $600 before the deduction, he said. But that money was taken only to support Nathan and Mr. Lockwood's daughter Nicole from his previous relationship, not the five other children he had fathered with Ms. Lockwood. One of their eight children was put up for adoption immediately after she was born.

Even that child support was cut off when Mr. Dickerson stopped working two years ago. He said this occurred after he had injured his back trying to lift a patient. Since then, he said, he has been ''trying to make a life for myself so I could have one for my children.''

He now says he plans to contest the city's attempt to terminate his parental rights and intends to seek custody of the surviving children and the unborn twins.

While he tried to answer most questions about his family, Mr. Dickerson said he was unable to answer perhaps the most crucial one: why he and Ms. Lockwood continued having children even as it became apparent that they could not care for them as parents.

''What was the thinking there?'' he said. ''I don't know. I can't explain it. It happened.

''Life sometimes has no answers for the way things turn out. I always had an open-door policy, thinking that we would reconcile and have a home, and have a better understanding between us as parents, and raise our kids together. But it never really transpired.''

But he also said he felt somehow empowered by having children.

''I looked at it like this: they were my riches to the world, or our riches to the world,'' he said. ''We weren't doctors, lawyers, and we weren't professional people. But we still took care of our children the best way we knew how, and they still were provided for in the best way that was possible.''

''There wasn't any kind of standard in society saying, 'Don't have more than a certain number of kids.' '' he added. ''And we loved our kids.''

Photo: Leroy Dickerson in his Bronx apartment, where he discussed the death of his daughter, Nadine Lockwood, 4. (Susan Harris for The New York Times)