Teacher warned officials about 'intense' mom

Sydney Kamysz's first-grade teacher wonders if the "exceptional" little girl would still be alive if school officials had listened to her fears about Sydney's mother.

Magdalene Kamysz, who climbed onto the Metra tracks and stood in front of a train Tuesday, was "very intense" and would slap at Sydney for the slightest flaws right in front of her teacher, said Vanessa Hopp, who was Sydney's dual language teacher last year at Husmann Elementary School in Crystal Lake.

"If she didn't have her desk organized perfectly, she'd smack her," said Hopp, who now teaches at Arnett Lines Elementary in Barrington Unit District 220. "Or she'd pinch her, slightly on the arm, or give her a little whack and go off on her in Polish.

"If she had one thing wrong on a spelling test, she'd say, 'Oooohhh, I could just kill her,'" Hopp said.

Magdalene Kamysz volunteered in Hopp's classroom weekly and often chatted with Hopp as well.

Investigators found Sydney's body Tuesday evening on her bed in the locked room she shared with her mother at her grandparents' Crystal Lake home four hours after her mother stood in front of the train.

Police are still investigating but have indicated they believe Magdalene smothered Sydney and then took her own life.

It didn't have to be that way, said Hopp, who left Crystal Lake Elementary District 47 this year, she says, in part out of frustration with the lack of response to her concerns about Sydney's situation.

District Superintendent Ron Miller said the allegations are distressing and he would immediately investigate.

"They should feel guilty," Hopp said. "I told them. That's one of the major reasons I'm not there.

"Every time I saw something happen, I brought it to the attention of the gifted education teacher and the social worker," Hopp said. "I asked if I should call DCFS, but I was told it was going to be taken care of. I was told by the social worker that she'd take care of everything."

"Certainly if what she says is true, it is alarming and shocking to me," Miller said. "All of our people, including Vanessa, are trained that when anything like this happens they are a mandated reporter and it needs to be reported to DCFS. And it's made very clear to them you don't dump it on another person.

"The whole situation is shocking and sad," he said. "The fact a 7-year-old girl is dead is shocking. If what she says is true, then she's right … it's wrong. But in my tenure as superintendent I have found our people to be very diligent in doing that when a child is in danger."

He said he had never been notified, as he normally would be, that a call had been made to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

Family members could not be reached for this story.

Hopp said she'd taken a special interest in Sydney, especially after seeing the relationship between mother and daughter.

Magdalene clearly loved Sydney, Hopp said. "She was very intense, but she loved her daughter. I just think she was a little too extreme. She would get very upset if something was wrong, like obsessed."

The artistic little girl who absorbed knowledge -- especially anything about science -- like a sponge, changed when her mother was near, Hopp said.

"When her mother wasn't around, she liked to be a clown, tell me jokes, just be a 6-year-old. When mom was around, she sat perfectly straight, minded her P's and Q's and was perfect."

Her mother, too, was different with other children. "She always had a smile for the other kids. She was immaculate, very patient, very motherly with the other kids. With Sydney she was very stern," Hopp said.

Sometimes she wrote foul names atop the school papers of the youngster who could speak and read in three languages several grades in advance of her years, Hopp said.

"It would say 'butt monkey', (the F word), 'butt face.' I asked Maggie if it's true she put the names there, and she said, 'Oh yes, those are pet names.'"

Yet when Magdalene arrived to pick up Sydney at the elementary school just down the block from Crystal Lake Central where she graduated in 1997, the little girl came running.

"As soon as she saw her, she would jump on her like a little Koala bear," Hopp said, adding that the little girl never seemed afraid to go with her mom.

"They had a friend relationship." Hopp said. "Sydney called her Maggie, she did not call her mom."

The pair passed many days at Panera Bread in Crystal Lake where free Internet access and bagels made both happy, Hopp said. Magdalene spent some of that online time on her MySpace Web page.

The young mother, who also was a gifted student, wrote on her MySpace page that she loved beading and playing online Scrabble and "… educating my daughter. Because of me at the age of six she can read books that are 200-300 pages long. Her favorite author is Roald Dahl. And she can write stories of her own that can run up to 6 pages. I am very proud of that. I can't help it," Magdalena wrote.

She last logged in to the page May 31, right about the same time she told Sydney's teacher of her great distress over the custody battle with Sydney's father. Police say that custody conflict was the likely cause of the events this week.

News of the two deaths hit hard, Hopp said, adding she wished she'd done more to help an extraordinary little girl.

"I can't even express in words how phenomenal this little girl was."

Services

• Visitation for both Sydney and Magdalene Kamysz will be from 5 to 9 p.m. Tuesday at Querhammer & Flagg Funeral Home, 500 W. Terra Cotta Ave., Crystal Lake.

• The funeral will be held Wednesday at St. Margaret Mary Catholic Church, 111 S. Hubbard St., Algonquin. The time of the funeral has not yet been set.