UPDATE!! Outrage of the Week: Mom Convicted in Death of Her Son (Who Ran Across the Street)

What happened to being judged by a jury of your peers. Obviously her defense dropped the ball during jury selection. A shame, because this again promotes the wrong mindset. It is impossible for parents to keep their kids safe 24/7 and it is about time we stop believing that.

Too bad I wasn’t on that jury. That poor woman. My heart breaks for her.

How in the heck can she be charged with vehicular manslaughter when she wasn’t the one driving a vehicle?! Jaywalking I can see, and in my opinion is the ONLY thing that she could possibly have done wrong by the letter of the law.

@kaletee. I guess I can see there reasoning (though am in two minds about it). Free ranging is all about giving kids skills that allow them to reduce the risks around them. This story is about a mum, who under a lot of stress, made a stupid decision to lead her kids into a dangerous situation (one that is illegal because of its real danger). The price she paid make me cry for her, it is too much too pay.

However when the story dies down and the prosecution is forgotten the story of a mum leading three kids across a busy road will remain as a real warning of a real risk that many free-rangers commonly use as a statistic to represent real risk in our lives (much as I remember the local story of the man who dropped his child off at school and then ran him over resulting in his death).

Oh, geez, this is horrible. I live in the Atlanta area, and I can tell you this is NOT a pedestrian-friendly city AT ALL. It’s a shame that they’ve prosecuted this woman like that. Even though she may have been careless in her choice to cross without a crosswalk, how on earth was she expected to know that a drunk driver would be there at the same time?? And let’s not forget the fact that she witnessed her own child hit and killed by a car! I’m sure she has plenty of remorse over the whole thing, without adding to it by prosecuting her. Talk about punishing the victim.

IMO the mother was also negligent in the fact that she didn’t have all her children under control.

They weren’t crossing at a pedestrian crossing place.

Because other people were crossing doesn’t mean she should have crossed.
Did the other folks crossing have 3 children with them???
Whether the driver of the vehicle was drunk or not, he/she was responsible for not braking in time, but the mother was responsible for crossing at the wrong place on a busy highway, whether her apartment was in view or not. Both mother and driver were responsible.
What if the child running across the road had caused an accident killing other drivers?

I feel sorry for the mother that her child was killed, but she should have known better. She’s responsible for the welfare of her children, and because she was in too much of a hurry ………………….. !

It’s too easy to blame the highway designers, traffic engineers, transit planners and land use regulators.
There is nothing wrong with the highways, it’s the people who use them that’s the problem. Drivers and pedestrians!

@Henry: No I don’t miss the point, but the jury thing just jumped out at me. They added insult to injury and decided on some parental discrimination on top of the trauma.

Not clear what the best option is – walking 1/2+ along a busy highway is ALSO very dangerous. The child could have dodged off the sidewalk, too.

My heart bleeds for what this mother is living through. The community should be supporting her and her kids, not criminalizing her. But it seems to be nearly impossible for some people to bridge the gulf between the bus riders and the car drivers.

I used to live in Los Angeles, where I often took buses – at first b/c I didn’t own a car, then b/c it was convenient. One Sat morning I was sitting at a bus stop, small suitcase at my feet, headed to the airport for a flight to an academic conference. As I sat there, a BMW pulled up and an anxious young man got out and walked over to me.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I looked at him, for it took me a minute to identify the source of his concern — a young, well dressed white girl at a bus stop. Clearly I had to be in some sort of real trouble.

“Are you running away? Is your boyfriend after you?”

(I am not making this up.)

“No,” I replied, “I am waiting for a bus to go to the airport.”

He was finally convinced that I was not in imminent threat of my life, and got back in his car — only to realize 1/2 a block down that even if I wasn’t in danger, I might be in search of a ride. He stopped, and back up the 1/2 block, rolled down his window and asked:

“Need a ride to the airport?”

I didn’t take it. My bus was already visible in the distance. But the event brought home to me a central truth – in Los Angeles, white people do not ride buses.

@Valerie, did you read the full description of the incident in the other blog article? The mom had to take two buses to go grocery shopping with three kids. They missed the transfer and had to wait an additional hour and a half for the next bus on the way home. To cross at the cross walk would have required dragging them on foot another half mile. (What kind of a bus route/pedestrian plan is that?) Obviously, in retrospect she should have done it. I bet if you asked her, she would say she’d walk around the world to bring her baby back. She may be guilty of J-walking as another reader observed. But deserving three years of prison time for this? Outrageous. And what about the other kids? Will they really be better off without their mother? Highly doubtful. As a mother who finds it a full-time job to keep one young child close, I can’t imagine handling three. If, as you asked, one of them had run out and caused an accident, it would have been a tragic *accident.* Not something the for which the mother should be criminally liable. It’s so sad that we as a society insist that *somebody* has to go to jail for every tragic accident, especially those involving children.

This is so totally wrong. The mother is already in her own private prison over the death of her child. Convicting her is senseless and cruel but a demonstration of how we focus so much on having to have someone to blame, twice over.

That said, I am a tyrant about crossing at lights. Former coworkers would laugh at me because I would insist on crossing at the light. This is only because I recognize how dangerous cars and bigger vehicles can be.

I feel for this mom and – knowing Atlanta – can’t even say that I wouldn’t have done this. Atlanta is terribly unfriendly to pedestrians. I’m not sure what came first – building pedestrian-unfriendly communities for anti-freerange thinking. They go hand-in-hand.

Since this poor woman did not hire a cab to take her family home from the store I’m willing to bet she also did not have the resources to hire the best lawyer in town.

This is heartbreaking. I can only imagine how long it would have taken to shlep 3 kids including 1 hot, tired 4 yr old an extra MILE to get home after a multi-hour trip to the grocery store.

She probably knows how long it takes and that’s why she decided to chance it. Who can blame her? Who would have anticipated such an outcome?

Thanks for sharing this story. What an outrage!

I find the path to reason (criminal charges) utterly illogical.

Parenting these days is hard enough but to add manslaughter charges for improper hand holding and poor common sense makes every accident open to prosecution. She should have crossed at the intersection. But she didn’t. Parents shouldn’t feed their kids junk food, but they do. Is it a crime if the food leads to obesity (and early death?) How many laws do we need to dictate common sense?

I remember vividly the day my children “pantsed” me outside a Wawa convenience store. With 3 kids in 5 years, I had one hand on the infant carrier, one on the bag of groceries, and instructed my two toddlers to hold each leg of my loose fitting, post-pregnancy sweat pants (probably with pancake batter on them.) Unfortunately, my 2yo tripped, and pulled down my pants to the ground, for all of the parking lot to see my big girl panties. (My daughter loved telling that story at circle time.)
The reason for this story is I feel for this mom as my children could have disobeyed and darted in traffic, but they didn’t. Sometimes kids don’t listen. I have had feral child moments when they do not behave. But if any of these moments ended in tragedy, I now live in fear of being charged?
T

In Memoriam

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend by the name of Common Sense.
No one knows for sure how old he was since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.

He will be remembered as having cultivated valued lessons such as knowing when to come in out of the rain, why the early bird gets the worm and that life isn’t always fair.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don’t spend more than you earn) and reliable parenting strategies (adults, not kids, are in charge). His health began to rapidly deteriorate when well intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place.

Reports of a six-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate, teens suspended from school for using mouthwash after lunch, and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student only worsened his condition. It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer aspirin to a student but could not inform the parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Finally, Common sense lost the will to live as the Ten Commandments became contraband, churches became businesses and criminals received better treatment than their victims.

Common Sense finally gave up the ghost after a woman failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot, spilled a bit in her lap, and was awarded a huge settlement.

Common Sense was preceded in death by his parents, Truth and Trust, his wife, Discretion; his daughter, Responsibility; and his son, Reason. He is survived by two stepbrothers; My Rights and Ima Whiner. Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone.

File another one under lazy parenting. Please don’t break the law and blame it on city engineers, or by saying “we’ll people get hit in pedestrian walkways all the time!”. I mean do freerangers take responsibility for anything, or is it just an exercise in how to pass the buck?

Valerie, when we want to be given nonsensical religious messages, we’ll all ask for them.

Darb, when the street is designed so poorly that you have to walk half a mile to cross it, that’s not my fault. That IS a fault of design. What are we supposed to do, pretend that it’s okay to design things so badly that poor people and those who can’t drive are unable to reasonably get around?

According to the Streetsblog piece on this, the driver had been convicted of two previous hit-and-runs, one on that very same hideously designed road.

Who has not had a 4-year-old burst away? If the streets were patrolled by drunk drivers, we’d all be guilty eventually.

So we need a crossing at every bus stop now. Wow.. Utopia will be a very expensive place to live. I hope you all don’t mind paying exorbitant municipal taxes for the fantasy world you envision

As a bus rider by choice in a community of non-walker/non-bus riders, I feel sickened by this. I can’t believe that they charged her with this – for all the reasons already stated.

I’ve done my groceries by bus more times than I can count, often with my young daughter in tow (now she’s 17 SHE does the groceries by bus too!). It is very trying at the best of times, with only a 30 minute ride and excellent connections. I can’t imagine doing it with bad connections and three kids 🙁

Part of the problem here is definitely poor infrastructure design, but part is also the “food desert” that meant that she had to go on two busses just to get to the grocery store in the first place! Many grocery chains are pulling out of lower income areas, and the convenience stores that are replacing them rarely (if ever) have fruit or veggies or any kind of non-processed food. Read more about food deserts here: http://www.cdc.gov/features/fooddeserts/

Wow. Since when is having a runaway preschooler a crime? I’m sure she would not have let him dart into the street if she thought he was likely to try it.

Also, who’s to say that if she’d dragged her kids to the crosswalk, none of them would have tried darting into the road on the way there?

Why do some idiots think a mother’s grief after a pure accident is not enough punishment?

I lived in Atlanta for a year in 2000. At that time the MTD stop across from Cumberland Mall had a crosswalk that lead to… bushes. I don’t recall if there was a traffic signal or not, but I do remember anyone taking the bus to the mall had to walk through a bunch of landscaping.

At other places sidewalks would just end. Or lead to driveways, so a pedestrian could enter a crosswalk from one side, and end up stranded, either walking through flowers or mixed with the the first class citizens (those in cars).

Once Bellsouth had a contractor dig a deep pit on the side of the road where I walked to work. Being fit and able bodied, I was able to walk over the pile of dirt. People with strollers had to take their chances on the road with cars doing 50 in a 40 zone. I called Bellsouth a few times, threatened to fill the pit in, mentioned their liability if their pit caused an injury, but yet it remained for months. I’m only sad I didn’t have the vinegar to fill it. Today, older and more vinegared, I would.

I could go on. Consideration for anyone not driving was non-existent.

Common sense died when people decided to cut and paste Internet glurge in place of critical thinking and research.

PS–pardon my type “fautl vs fault.”

Valerie–the mother was in “too much of a hurry?” Well if wanting to–gee, I don’t know–go straight to your destination vs having to drive from New York to Florida & loop-back when all you wanted to do was go straight to West Virginia–if that’s “being in a hurry,” I suppose ALL of us are “in a hurry.”

Shaking my head. (No, not “SMH.”)

LRH

I skipped to the end, so if anyone has already mentioned it, my apologies. Google “unmarked crosswalk”.

Every intersection has a crosswalk, whether marked or not, unless the state laws specifically state only marked (I doubt Georgia has). Jaywalking is crossing other than at an intersection, and obviously can be done safely. Reasonable and prudent should be the rule.

In this specific case, I think Lenny Bruce said it well: “in the Halls of Justice, the only justice is in the halls”. This should never have been charged, let alone gone to court.

Thank you, Ariel.

LRH – Thank you for the “f-you” comment. It reaffirms that there are crazies on both ends of the “helicopter vs “free-range” spectrum.

And I was aware of my grammatical error. This POS website doesn’t allow us to edit our comments after submitting. That’s LAZY website management!

Darb, if you can’t see the qualitative difference between drinking and driving and between crossing at an intersection, you have no right to be calling other people crazy.

So, basically, we now have this. A woman made the reasonable choice not to walk a mile out of her way with three hungry, tired children. One kid darted into traffic in front of a drunk driver. The woman is being punished for this – and she may have been within the law in the first place!

haha now that’s a stretch. Do you know what the term “yield” means? As in the pedestrian must first yield to traffic?

Which she HAD done. She was standing on the island, the part of the road designated for NO CARS.

She could have walked to the crosswalk, only to have the toddler wiggle away (this can happen to any of us, right?) and then have the drunk driver come along. The only person responsible for this child’s death is the person who got drunk and then got behind the wheel of his car. I can’t believe people want to see the mother (and by extension, her other children) punished for the actions of an irresponsible drunk.

I used to work in suburban Maryland on a road that sounds just like this. I was one of the only people working there who took the bus to work, and like in this instance, the bus stop was directly across the street from my workplace with no crosswalk. I could have walked a quarter mile in either direction to a crosswalk, but guess what? I jaywalked. And if you were there, you would have too. It was the only rational thing to do.

Ironically, as part of my job I sat on a pedestrian safety task force. When you have busy roads with few traffic lights, multiple lanes and rare crosswalks, drivers travel at highway speeds, even though this was a business/residential district. Of course, the residents were mostly low-income Latino families, so little was done to improve the situation. Every few months, someone was killed crossing the street. I regularly saw women rushing across the street with their kids in strollers, pausing at the median to lift the strollers over the divider, wait for a break in traffic, and run for it.

It’s truly, truly tragic that someone is being treated this way by the justice system. It’s also truly tragic that local leaders have no sense when it comes to transit planning. You could make a lot of helpful fixes with not that much money: narrow the traffic lanes so that drivers travel slower. Put in a few more traffic lights. Paint some more pedestrian crosswalks.

I am sorry, but I fail to have sympathy for someone who attempts to jaywalk across a major roadway, with three little kids in tow to boot. That’s not free range, that’s stupid.

Yes, city urban planners have made it difficult for this woman. This is not an excuse for crossing the way she did. Lobby the city to add a crossing there or move the bus stop to the nearest pedestrian crossing. Jaywalkers are endangering themselves (that’s their problem) and innocent drivers (and this I DO have a problem with). And teaching their kids to do the same, unfortunately.

On my way to and from work, I drive through an area where there are tons of jaywalkers, and they are just astonishing. They see red ligh flashing at them at the pedestrian crossing, and the cars going full speed – yet they still cross. And at leizurely pace, too, as if they are doing the right thing.

And yes, I have used public transportation for years and I still use it a fair bit. However, I know better than to cross six to eight lanes of traffic just anywhere I please, or when the light flashes “stop”. Even if I have just spent 14 hours on my feet and my feet ache.

However, I know better than to cross six to eight lanes of traffic just anywhere I please, or when the light flashes “stop”.

Five lanes, with a median in the middle. She was stopped at the median when one child darted into traffic – something that could’ve happened if she crossed at the light and waited there.

And, again, examining the picture closely and what I now know of Georgia’s law on the subject, it seems she wasn’t even breaking the law. She was crossing not just “where she pleases” but at the intersection.

I don’t think the mother should have been charged but some parenting lessons might need to be taken. You know how we had the big debate over child leashes not that long ago on here? WELL! If this woman had been using a leash and/or a stroller this might not have happened. I wrangle two 4 year olds in parking lots and all over regularly by myself and they know by now to stay with me because I have strictly trained them. I know its a unfortunate accident and otherwise the child may have been very well behaved, but it could also be a discipline problem that the kids always ignore her and then some parenting classes might help her with that.

Also bad idea to have a bus stop not near a crosswalk. That goes on the city planners. However, there is never an excuse to jaywalk. My husband and I were big pedestrians at one point in our lives in an area that no one else really was, and even though it meant going out of our way we ALWAYS crossed at a crosswalk on busy roads.

Dolly, I agree, in retrospect a stroller or a leash might’ve done a world of good. But managing a stroller on the bus is insanity (seriously) even without groceries with you, and a leash might not have restrained the child enough.

Also, because the link is now going down periodically, here’s another one. No picture, though. (Also, does anybody live in that area? I can’t tell from the picture if the median is raised or not. It looks to me like it’s flat, but I could be wrong.)

The most awful part though is that she saw her child get mowed over by a car and so did the siblings. They are all going to have nightmares for the rest of their lives. I cannot imagine thinking about that happening to one of my kids without wanting to vomit. They do have my sympathy even if I may have done things differently.

Like another poster I always cross at crosswalks and with the light. Even when no one is coming I will stand there and wait for that “Walk” to light up before I go. At least that way I know I did everything right and if I get hit, at least I know it was not my fault.

Now Hels I will agree with one about one thing–the jaywalkers who see a car coming & then proceed ANYWAY, and most of all, at a leisurely pace. I do think that’s disrespectful. To me, that’s a misappliaction of “pedestrians have the right of way.” When it’s done that way, it’s wrong. The people in the cars need to be able to get where they’re going without seemingly 30,000 interruptions, and jaywalkers who sashay across like they’re the only ones there, showing no regard for the drivers they’re inconveniencing by making them have to slow down–that’s wrong.

However, I do disagree with the idea that not enough crosswalks isn’t an excuse. Wrong. You don’t give someone an impossible situation like that & then cry fowl “you broke the law”–well yes, only because you didn’t accommadate my reasonable situation enough. It’s on YOU (the city planners.) The expectation that I’d have to go way out of the way on tired feet just to satisfy some nit-picky law? Sorry, that’s horse manure. At a time like that, I could care less what the law is or says–and that’s the RIGHT attitude, by the way. When the law doesn’t respect what I’m going through and only cares about following silly legalisms and jumping through their hoops like I’m a freak in a circus show, they can stuff it where the sun doesn’t shine. If I have tired legs and feet and I see my destination right there–I’m going for it, and they can kiss whatever they like if they don’t approve of it. You deal me a bad hand and then expect me to still dance to your stupid song? Sorry, not going to do it.

And ESPECIALLY since I don’t do the “leisurely” thing and I zoom across at just the right time to assure that not only I don’t get hit but ALSO that the driver isn’t having to slam on his-her brakes (because their time & convenience does matter too), then I say–leave me alone to get around however I need. Get off of my back. I don’t exist to serve the law, the law exists for MY benefit (and those around me in a reasonable balance).

LRH

Honestly, I think in her shoes I would have gone to the stoplight. I would be too scared to tempt fate with all those kids and not enough hands to hang onto them. Aside from the fact that it teaches the kids to jaywalk in an unsafe situation.

But the point is, she did not kill her child. She jaywalked. Maybe you could even say she endangered her kid by taking him into that busy street. But she did not kill her child. A drunk driver killed her child.

As tragic as it is, children die in accidents every day. In hindsight, nearly all of these could have been prevented by the parents or adult in authority. That doesn’t turn an accident into manslaughter.

I am really not trying to point fingers here at the mom. I feel so horribly for her but sometimes my brain just goes “WTH!?” with stuff like this.Why would you have three kids when you cannot afford a car to transport them in in a large unpedestrian friendly city? Or move somewhere where you cannot walk with your kids safely when you know you are going to have to walk? I know it was probably because they were lacking funds and I do feel sorry for them for that. Still, that is why you only have as many kids as you can afford. We cannot afford more than 2 and guess what? We are not having more. It just seems common sense.

Dolly, even though life can get complicated with a bunch of kids, they are only little for a while, and most of them come out of it in one piece. For all we know, she had successfully taken her kids all around on the bus for years, before this incident happened. I’m a single mom with 2, and I’ve had some moments when I could have cried because of bad logistics, but overall we do pretty well. My mom had 4 close-in-age kids and no car, and I can remember us all walking to the shopping center, with various kids holding onto the stroller. She never felt like she had too many kids (and we never had a traffic accident). Can’t judge based on 1 minute of a person’s life.

Why would you have three kids when you cannot afford a car to transport them in in a large unpedestrian friendly city?

Maybe when she had her children she had more money? Maybe she has limited access to an abortion clinic and her health insurance doesn’t cover birth control? Maybe she just doesn’t believe in that? (NOT a belief I favor, but people are welcome to whatever beliefs they like.)

Or move somewhere where you cannot walk with your kids safely when you know you are going to have to walk?

Maybe she had no choice. Maybe there are no easily walkable areas that she can afford in that area – and we can’t all pick up and move cross-country to manage it! Maybe she normally has a car, but it just broke the week before.

We cannot afford more than 2 and guess what? We are not having more. It just seems common sense.

Great, and what if next year your husband dies and you lose your job and one of your children gets seriously ill and you suddenly find you can no longer afford any children, much less the two you already have?

Sometimes my brain goes WTF? too, at comments like that. It’s not just you this time, but it’s like some people live in perfect little worlds where everything goes according to plan and nobody’s circumstances ever change for the worse. That must be nice, but back here in the real world you’re criticizing somebody who may have, five years ago, thought the same thing you do, that poor people who have children deserve hardship for making bad choices.

And by pinning everything on individual personal choices, you manage to punt the bigger issue – Atlanta has poor people! Atlanta has poor people with families! Atlanta has plenty of poor people with families who can’t afford to drive! Why isn’t the government in Atlanta working to improve the infrastructure so that it’s easier for people to get around without having to be chained into cars?

(And, for that matter, why don’t we demand cities restore the original infrastructure that was there BEFORE car companies bought up the public transportation and pushed local governments into making public transportation harder, encouraging cars? Free market my butt.)

Why did this woman not choose a better paying job so she cuold afford a Toyota Highlander with DVD player?

I wonder how much of the jury was going on snob bias. On the surface, this woman doesn’t sound particularly well-off. She lives in an apartment building and can’t afford to own a car, necessitating the use of bus travel. I lived in the South for 4 years, and there are so many layers of class issues. It was a real eye-opener for me. Also, I don’t know what it’s like in Atlanta, but the South isn’t pedestrian friendly *at all*. SC had the nation’s highest pedestrian fatalities, in large part because there were very few crosswalks, and motorists are not required by law to stop for pedestrians.
I think what they really need to do is to blame the miserable pedestrian set-up they have. Not some harried mother trying to do her best. I have a car, and resources, and it’s hard having little kids! I do the best I can, but I still make mistakes. Just like every other parent out there.

“Why would you have three kids when you cannot afford a car to transport them in in a large unpedestrian friendly city?”

Seriously Dolly, WTF? My family was comfortably middle class when my father was involved in a terrible accident that turned our lives upside down and caused us to slowly sink into poverty over the next five years.

I suppose my parents should have drowned us in the bathtub when they could no longer “afford” my sister and I but thankfully they didn’t. I don’t think we would have been better off in foster care either even though my parents were committing the heinous, awful, terrible, unforgivable crime of being poor.

WTF indeed.

I guarantee the only reason this poor woman was even charged in the first place, let alone convicted, is that she’s black. If this had happened to a middle-class white woman, she would have gotten nothing but sympathy.

Yet another example of why we have to work harder to make America more pedestrian-friendly, especially as fewer and fewer people can afford the high price of gas.

This story is absolutely tragic.

The link would not work for me, so I haven’t seen the pic of the intersection someone else mentioned. I have no reference for this particular road. However I have crossed many multi-lane highways on foot, in varying amounts of traffic. I personally seriously disagree that crossing at the intersection is always the safest choice. In cities with constant traffic and large amounts of pedestrians, like NYC, it make sense to keep all the pedestrians at one place. Someone darting across a busy road that is wall-to-wall cars is sure to cause a chain-reaction accident.

The multi-lane roads I usually cross are a different story. If you cross at the light, even with the crossing signal, you have to be concerned with potential traffic from several directions at once. You cannot trust the signal to keep you safe, too many drivers aren’t watching the signal, especially if a right-on-red is allowed.

On the other hand, if you cross mid-block, the traffic flow is totally non-existent when the light is red. When the cars are stopped on one side, you can safely and easily make it to the median with absolutely NO cars coming anywhere near you. Depending on the timing of the lights, you may or may not have to wait until the light changes in the opposite direction before it’s safe to cross the other half of the road, again with absolutely NO cars. Both crossing only require attention to cars coming from ONE direction.

And don’t tell me it’s not safe to wait in the median. Our larger intersections are designed with the pedestrian crossing time set so short that they have a separate post with crossing activation button in the median, because it’s practically impossible to get all the way across except at a dead run.

Meggles is right about the South not being pedestrian friendly. Atlanta being a big city does have a lot of walkers in some areas but it is also very spread out and not all areas are probably great for walkers. That is just the way the South is made and I often wish they would improve it. That is why people from other areas have no idea that around here for most people biking or walking or even public transit is not always an option for Southerners.

I don’t think the mother deserves to be charged with anything. I do think she could benefit from some counseling or parenting classes. Just to help her manage her life and help her deal with what has happened and give her some better coping strategies about getting her kids around safely. Maybe moving might help. Or buying even just a clunker car that can get to the store and back. There are places to live in the South where you can safely walk to the grocery store. I would know because I used to live where you could and it was not a high rent place. It was cheap rent. I also have some friends who don’t drive and manage. But that did require moving.

I just know that many many do have kids when they are already unemployed and in debt. I know some personally.

Well, go tell them they suck, then. You don’t know THIS woman, you don’t know HER situation, so don’t make general statements along the lines of “oh, I don’t get it, how could she have three kids she can’t afford???” when you don’t know her. It’s completely pointless.

As far as “she should have parenting classes, she should move, she should buy an old car” (assuming she can afford to move, can afford an old car, can afford gas) – if you “wish things would change”, stop wishing and start working on it. Start pressuring your local government to make things more walkable. Start pressuring your local government to improve public transportation. Start pressuring your driving friends, the ones with cars, to be more pedestrian-aware and more conscious that there are walking people on the streets. Start trying to change things.

And stop blaming this woman for doing a reasonable thing and trying to get home in the most direct way possible. She didn’t do anything wrong, she may not have done anything illegal, and if you’re saying “Oh, she should’ve done this instead of that” you’re removing blame from the people responsible for the urban design (or lack therof) that led her to make this choice in the first place.

(And btw, as a pro-choice individual, I am not just pro-the-choice-to-abort but also pro-the-choice-to-have-kids. Even if it’s not the choice I would make. Poor people have just as much of the fundamental human right* to reproduce as the rest of us.)

*Human? Heck, the lowliest slug makes babies!

How do you know I don’t rally for more pedestrian friendly things? You are just assuming I don’t which makes you look like an ass.

Uly: so someone who has no income, no money, no education, no home, no transportation, should have kids? Yeah thats a WTH! moment. I know they do all the time, but they certainly shouldn’t. Because you know babies need to have a roof over their heads, food to eat, clothes to wear, etc and that cost money! So if the parents have no money, then who ends up paying for it? Oh yeah, the taxpayers. No thank you. I am paying for my own kids and I really don’t want to pay for kids that I don’t get to hug and play with.

I didn’t say they should have kids, I said they have a right to have kids. And it’s not your job or your place to tell them not to, believe it or not.

As for how I know – I don’t know. I do know that you’re sitting around criticizing this woman for having the gall to have children while poor, and acting as though her crossing the street at the intersection is a crime that she should be taught carefully never to do again. That doesn’t leave me with much faith in you.

My heart is breaking. How terrible this story is!

As for some of the comments, geeze, there is an entire list we could create of things that could have been done/should have not been done, but I think at the time all was quite reasonable.

“At least that way I know I did everything right and if I get hit, at least I know it was not my fault.”

And that moral superiority get you….?

I’m all for obeying reasonable laws and being cautious, as well. And if there’s any reasonable degree of traffic around, I also obey the walk signs even if it appears safe, because drivers often fail to yield (and on a turn, they ARE supposed to.) I will ignore them when there’s little to no traffic at all, and I can clearly see that no car could possibly get between me and the other side before I start. But I can’t imagine how “at least I did the right thing” is supposed to comfort you when you’re lying in a hospital bed, or worse.

Yes Dolly, we all know that you are all for eugenics.

The point is that YOU HAVE NO IDEA what this woman’s situation was a year ago, or six months ago or tomorrow.

You don’t know if she left an abusive husband who got everything but the kids and she was ok with that because at least they weren’t being beat on anymore. You don’t know if she spent every last dime on the middle kid’s cancer treatments, or on paying back her student loans for a degree that “guaranteed” her a job, but didn’t because the economy tanked the year she graduated. It might be any of these things, or a million more, or it might be none of them, she might be a 3rd generation welfare mom, but:

YOU JUST DON’T KNOW.

So until you do, how about you save your judgement? There are thousands of people in the world who wouldn’t have been born if everyone had been following your “if you are poor don’t have kids” rule. Including (off the top of my head) Oprah. And I can’t think of many people who don’t think that she is successful (if they believe in her politics or not).

I think that using Oprah as a good example of someone the world would be so bad off if they had never been born is a poor poor example. I do not care for Oprah at all.

No we CAN control if we become parents or not. We CAN use birth control. We CAN have an abortion if we want to. We CAN give our baby up for adoption if we want to. We CAN decide to let someone else we know raise the baby if we are unfit to raise it. We CAN turn the baby over to the state. So yes, you 100% CAN choose to become a parent and parent a child. So you then have to live with those decisions.

I am not saying this mom is or is not responsible for getting into a situation that unfortunately ended up being the death of her child. I and other posters up above if you looked, pointed out it could.

And yes, Uly. I do advocate for pedestrians regularly since I have mentioned numerous times on this blog that I used to be a big pedestrian. I am involved in a group right now that is trying to get Rails to Trails built.

So yes, you 100% CAN choose to become a parent and parent a child. So you then have to live with those decisions.

Yes, sure – but it is not YOUR choice, Dolly, whether or not OTHER people become parents. You don’t get to choose whether they do, and you don’t get to choose whether they don’t, and framing a child’s life in terms of “my taxpayer dollars!” is petty and crass.

You are getting me mixed up with other posters.

Maybe, it wouldn’t be the first time. Let’s see!

I don’t think the mother should have been charged but some parenting lessons might need to be taken.

That’s your comment questioning her ability to parent.

Even when no one is coming I will stand there and wait for that “Walk” to light up before I go. At least that way I know I did everything right and if I get hit, at least I know it was not my fault.

That’s your comment implying that if somebody did NOT cross at the light (even if the law does not require you to do so, which seems to be the case in Georgia) and gets hit, it is their fault.

Why would you have three kids when you cannot afford a car to transport them in in a large unpedestrian friendly city? Or move somewhere where you cannot walk with your kids safely when you know you are going to have to walk? I know it was probably because they were lacking funds and I do feel sorry for them for that. Still, that is why you only have as many kids as you can afford. We cannot afford more than 2 and guess what? We are not having more. It just seems common sense.

That’s your comment questioning her family planning and making assumptions about her situation prior to having children.

do think she could benefit from some counseling or parenting classes. Just to help her manage her life and help her deal with what has happened and give her some better coping strategies about getting her kids around safely.

That’s your second comment questioning her capabilities as a parent and also implying that her choice to cross the street at the intersection was bad.

I also have every right to think others that have kids when they do not have good circumstances are selfish because ultimately it is others that will have to pay for it.

And that would be your comment saying that people who have children in situations where you would choose not to have children are selfish.

Gosh, I can’t see why any of us got the idea that you’re judgmental!

Really pleased to see you blogging on this story Lenore. It is truly shameful, I think. I hope your readers will get the take-home message: building a child-friendly, free range society is way too big a job for parents alone. Far too many areas are so car-dominated and hostile to pedestrians that they literally imprison children and families. The powers that be have to turn towns & cities around. Do check out blogs and writing on urban design and promoting walkable, cyclable, livable communities, and if you can, start to take action. (I have written on this – there are links from my website.) It may take a generation, but it has to start now.

Wait, since when did owning a car become a prerequisite to have kids? That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

We are a one car family that means when my husband is at work I’m without a car. It means if we need something at the grocery store I walk the 1+ mile there and back (in some places without sidewalks) sometimes with my kids (usually with at least 2 of them since they aren’t in school). That means when there is something going on at the kids’ school 2 miles away I can’t go because 4 miles is a long round trip for a 5yo to walk in the pouring rain.

We were also a one car family when I was growing up. At first it was because my mother didn’t have a license. We took buses (in Chicago). She did her grocery shopping by bus with 1 or 2 kids in tow. Went to the laundromat, went to the park, everywhere by bus. That’s not an easy task even in a mass transit friendly city like Chicago.

Last summer I was completely without a car for 3 months (my husband moved to another state and took the car with him). I was on foot with 4 kids and in my 3rd trimester. I had to walk or take the bus everywhere. I hadn’t had to do that since high school (when I took the city bus home from school every day). Most of the time I had my 4yo with me in the blazing heat (not unlike what they are having this week there). It SUCKED. I noticed signs on the bus that ALL strollers and shopping carts MUST be FOLDED while on the bus.

WTF! Talk about family unfriendly. I can’t imagine trying to go grocery shopping by bus with small children. You would have to take them out of the stroller, fold it up and somehow wrangle the kids, bags of groceries (some probably melting in the heat) and a stroller onto the bus, pay, keep the seated, quiet and keep all of that stuff out of other people’s way. Nice. Maybe doable with 1 kid but not with multiple small kids. It’s the reason I never went anywhere on public transportation when my kids were in strollers (I had 3 kids under 3–could have never taken the CTA like that).

As for the street crossing. From what I understand this woman crossed at an intersection just not one marked with a crosswalk and had no light. That’s legal in Chicago. It’s not jaywalking if it’s at an intersection. In fact when I was a kid you were taught how to cross at those busy unmarked corners.

First you watch traffic coming in the direction closest to you. When it looks like you can make it to the median you go for it as quickly as you can. Then you wait, hopefully out of the way of people wanting to get in the left turn lane. Then you watch traffic mostly in the direction you want to cross next but you also keep an eye on traffic from the other direction (that you just crossed) in case some moron can’t see you standing there in the middle of the street. And when it looks clear you run for it.

This was one of those common sense, street smart things our parents showed us and I was in the process of teaching my kids (although I preferred to cross at the lights on those 5-7 lane streets since I had 4 kids with me). If you didn’t learn that skill you were stuck walking 1/4 mile down to a light just to walk 1/4 mile back to the street you were just on. A 1/2 mile walk to cross a freaking street. Ridiculous. And drivers in Chicago aren’t ones to stop for pedestrians. You’re lucky if they stop for you in a marked cross walk. I was almost hit crossing at a stop sign when I had the right of way (meaning the guy wasn’t even at the stop sign when I left the curb after waiting for the other traffic to clear first). He blew through the sign, almost hit me in the middle of the crosswalk and then honked at me like it was my fault. Geesh. Luckily I didn’t have any of my kids with me.

Keeping track of multiple kids, traffic and bags while crossing a busy street is stressful. You hope your kids understand the danger they are in and stay close and behave but sometimes they make stupid judgement calls. I used to hold 3 kids hands at once and we’d get half way across the street and 2 of them would bolt for the sidewalk. No matter how many times I told them there could be a car that didn’t see the stop sign or light and hit them (crossing legally at a light/marked crosswalk).

In fact were almost hit in PA crossing on the light on a 1 lane 1 way road (actually the highway through town but the speed limit was like 30mph). There was only 1 lane with parking on both sides of the street but people always cut into the right side parking to turn (which was illegal). We were crossing on the light in front of a semi and just as we stepped out from the other side of it some idiot in a van came barreling up and misses us by an inch.

If I hadn’t been aware of the danger from morons like that I wouldn’t have looked first and had a split second to grab the kids and yank them back before we were all slammed. And he honked at us. Not to mention in PA vehicles must yield to pedestrians in crosswalks whether there is a stop sign or light there or not.

This poor woman is already paying the ultimate price but the only person guilty is the drunk driver. And possibly the jury that convicted her.

@Dolly I am outraged that you even suggest that someone needs to own a car before having a kid.

Well, I don’t own a car by choice. Did you ever consider that? I also happen to be single with no kids. However, if I ever decide to have a child, whether or not I own a car is not on my list of deciding factors beforehand as to whether I choose to have a child or not.

The fact is that too many think that everyone should have to have a car to get somewhere is the real problem. It is ridiculous that we think everyone should own a car. Communities used to be a lot more friendly to walkers and communities also used to be more condensed, and therefore also more friendly to free rangers.

I have crossed worse points in order to get to from one place to another, granted I do it without kids, but still a little bit dangerous. I am actually a cautious person, and I take my chances within reason. If daylight, I generally refuse to call a cab for a few blocks or to walk like two miles out of my path. I love walking. Especially if I can see where I am headed, I want to be able to just walk there. Walkers and public transportation riders have rights and should not be thrown in jail as a result. I get the point about jaywalking, but there needs to be balance that people should be able to walk places too.

Why is it that the rights of car drivers should trump everyone else?

Case in point:
My daughter was two years old when we were standing in the elevator. I was holding her hand, with my other hand on the stroller which held my 2 month-old, when the door opened and – to my utter shock – my daughter yanked her hand from mine and ran out. She had never done so before and it was not in her general temperament to run from me, so I was not expecting it at all — hence, I didn’t have my vice-grip on (we were, after all, in an empty elevator going 2 floors to another floor of the upscale mall where we were attending story time, so the flight risk seemed minimal), and away she went. Although I yelled to her to return, stuck my foot and arm between the doors, and frantically pushed the “open” button, the doors nevertheless closed before me, and the elevator continued on… leaving my daughter, alone, on another floor. (Because of the stroller and the way it was positioned, I couldn’t just run out after her, either, unless I wanted to strand my 2 month-old on the elevator.)

When the elevator reached the next floor, I ran out as fast as I could and weighed my options: I could either wait – who knows how long – for another elevator to take me to the upper level, 2 month-old in tow… or I could leave the 2 month-old behind, in an effort to reach my older daughter as quickly as possible. Seeing a security guard 10 feet away, I chose option B. Asking him to watch my baby, I raced up the stairs and found my daughter, happy as a clam, standing outside the elevator. Just as I was about to admonish her for running away from me – and for scaring me like that! – a lady, who’d been standing there the whole time, leaned over to me and said, “You know, you should NEVER have allowed your daughter to get off the elevator without you. What kind of parent ARE you?”

These days, after this blog, I’d have a good response… Back then, I simply took my daughter by the hand and high-tailed it back to the security guard, who was chatting away with my perfectly content baby.

Of COURSE I didn’t want my toddler wandering off without me. But I’m human. It happened. Just as it happens all day, every day, to parents everywhere, because kids are simply not controllable all the time, in every situation. To reiterate: prosecuting parents when their kids run from them is not only wrong, but terrifying.

Kris: I agree with you that this is a ridiculous miscarriage of justice, but re the thing about parents who forget their children in cars, you might want to read this article (warning: it’s depressing). That, too, is a tragic mistake and error of the faulty human mind, not neglect. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html?sid=ST2009030602446

Amanda, she was going to have to cross it at some point. There or at the light, she couldn’t just stay on that side of it forever.

This posting is a bit “late,” but anyway.

Yes darb, cross-walks & stops etc most certainly should be closer than a mile apart. That’s ridiculous, end of discussion about that aspect—it’s just RIDICULOUS. It is also ridiculous for you to paint free-range as being “passing the buck” and “lazy parenting.”
Frankly—we don’t need that attitude of “white horse” superiority
around here. Free-speech issues aside–save it.

Free-ranging ISN’T about laziness or passing the buck, and your
mis-characterization as such is, frankly, a large part of what’s wrong
with society nowadays. If something goes wrong, no matter what the
circumstances, blame the parents. Hell, if you were vacationing at the lake & the Loch Ness monster showed up & killed your child, it’s your fault—you should’ve known the Loch Ness monster was there. It’s exactly what Lenore was properly addressing in her prior posting. What a dumbed-down way of thinking all of that is.

(And by the way, it’s not “we’ll people get hit” unless you mean to
say “we will” people get hit” versus “well people get hit.” Maybe I
should accuse you of laziness in your English.)

I used to live in Tucson AZ, about 500,000 persons, and on occasion took the bus. Most of the time we had a car, but we weren’t exactly comfortable financially, the cars were often-times borderline. Typically after a year or so they’d give up the ghost & it would take us a month or so to get another one. In one stretch, we were car-less for nearly 6 months (although that was an extreme-unusual case). During such times, we had to get around on the bus system.

And yes—it is horrible. We had no kids to deal with, and it was STILL
horrible—I can barely fathom how bad it is for people dealing with
kids at the same time. It seems as though you run like a jackrabbit
from your home to the stop but you still just BARELY miss the bus and have to wait for the next one. On busy roads that may only be 10-15 minutes, on other roads—it can easily be 45 minutes. If you are going east-to-west and then have to go north-south, you then have to wait for the bus and “transfer” and yes, it’s not unusual for you to get to that stop & find out you barely missed the connector and now have to wait for nearly 30-odd minutes—in 107′F temperatures, by the way—for the next one.

It is NOT a fun way to get around, I can promise you. Once we got a
car, it was like we had won the lottery. It really does make THAT much of a difference.

As a non-parent at the time, I can tell you—I jaywalked all the time
and could’ve cared less. Why should I have to walk a mile out of the
way when I can see my destination right there—and I had the fast legs to quickly hop-skip over WITHOUT slowing down the traffic or
endangering myself. It is a HUGE time-saver, and yes—that IS relevant, it is NOT “lazy.” I can certainly imagine I would’ve done so with a child.

The problem here is we have too many people like darb on that jury, and not enough people like Lenore Skenazy, Donna, Uly, SKL etc. The woman is suffering enough, she was trying to do the best she could in a world not designed as it should be. Shame on you darb, for your attitude.

LRH

This has gone far afield, but since fear-mongering is what this site is partially about I just wanted to throw out that the single greatest killer of children aged 5 to 9 is …. wait for it….automobile accidents!!! So, as a responsible parent, I should have my children before I own a car and since some of those deaths are pedestrian then no child of mine shall ever approach a street. Of course, this was sarcasm directed at Dolly (dear, you stepped in it on this site and it’s going to be hard to wipe it off).

However, my real point is that this site called this stat ( if there were 10 million children aged 5 to 9 in 2002 then it represented 6 thou of a percent), as well as 1/8 of 3000 deaths, “preventable deaths”. The mindset that in a large population all accidental deaths are preventable is the problem, they aren’t. It can’t happen because we are fallible. It can’t happen because the cost would equal the national debt. And it isn’t the fault of any parent unless they were beyond a reasonable doubt negligent. She wasn’t, but there’s the rub, because in today’s world reasonable doesn’t mean what it did 40 years ago. Really, your eyes weren’t on your child every second? How could you look away and put your child at risk? You relaxed your hand for a second? How could you, after all, I never would!!!

The verdict isn’t the fault of the jury, as they were instructed on the letter of the law, however convoluted.

I hope the verdict is overturned on appeal.

As a PS, regarding Ismene mentioned the “Casey Anthony hysteria,” let me tell you–it sure has been that. The extreme overboard level of attention this case has received was even more annoying than what happened with JonBenet Ramsay some 15 years ago. No way in the WORLD this case should be receiving the extreme over-the-top level of attention it has been receiving.

LRH

@Amanda Scott

I actually have crossed five lane plus highways by myself in multiple cities. Even when I travel, I walk when I can. There are road situations that I won’t cross, but I have crossed highways similar to the picture. I have crossed much worse points, but being careful, I did not even think too much of it.

The problem is the kid got free and darted in front of car. This could have happened in a driveway or in front of one’s own house. Kids always seem to make everything more dangerous. LOL

I honestly consider driving a car to be more dangerous. I am serious. I hate driving even though I have a driver’s license. Driving a car scares me. Risk is sometimes what we get used too.

I was thinking that not only are kids not allowed to be free range any more, but adults are making decisions that keep from adults from being free-range equivalent too.

SKL,

And my point was that arguing that one shouldn’t have children until you have a car (thus protecting them from pedestrian v. car accidents, but not the “goodbye syndrome”) is ridiculous. I was addressing Dolly’s point as to where you should be economically before having children (the human race wouldn’t have made it through the last ice age). I tend not to use /sarc, though the hint should be clear.

My first child was a runner. Do I need to explain further?

(And as an aside, my family has gone through about every damn thing you could think of: from loss of child in womb; horrible back surgery and type 1 diabetes for my oldest child; near death and six days in hospital for same; ADHD and molestation for my youngest (I have absolutely nothing to do with one side of my family because of how they acted, but I allow my children to see their grandparents now that one can drive); as well two chronically ill parents. But s**t happens, life is tragedy as well good fortune, thank you Shakespeare. We as a society need to understand that not everything is preventable and therefore people aren’t always responsible for bad things, except the driver in this case.)

Again, I hope the verdict is overturned on appeal.

Strollers on busses:
I witnessed a family from France (limited English) have an argument with a bus driver about a stroller. As the argument continued with a supervisor at the terminal, I found the issue was safety regulations regarding the aisle being blocked. Standing passengers are ok because if the bus must be evacuated, presumably they can move themselves off. Anything that might get in the way of people moving down the aisle is not.

Would be nice if they had seats that could quickly swing up to allow a stroller to be parked in a seat.

I don’t know anything about the woman in this case, so it’s not fair for me to presume certain things about her. However, I do have to agree with Dolly that people should try to be in the best possible position before having kids. This doesn’t mean you have to be rich, just have a job and a place to live. Yes, terrible things happen, and people can lose their jobs (especially in this economy), but a person’s future kids deserve the best start they can get. If more people kept their pants zipped or used birth control (admittedly, harder to get if you don’t have insurance), we wouldn’t have such problems with poverty. I don’t think it’s mean to wish that people wouldn’t perpetuate the cycle of teenagers/unwed mothers having babies, and their kids doing the same. It’s just common sense. Don’t procreate unless you have a good chance of providing.

Have babies when you can afford them (food, clothing, shelter, and a playful parent with stamina). Have teenagers when you can afford them (everything else not listed previously, and they’ll ignore you so playfulness is less important). Affluent societies make a mistake on what children need; adult needs projected on the child. I grew up poor, but so needed less and had a lot more fun. I still remember the dairy farm I walked pass to my great-grandparents at seven, about a mile and a half to two. I adored them, so it was a pleasurable walk. This in the San Gabriel Valley in 1962.

Children need to explore and experience. The box can be better than the present.

I hope this verdict is overturned on appeal.

How awful. As others have said, watching your child be hit and killed by a car, and having his siblings witness it too, is truly tragic. Compounded with a conviction, hellish.

When I read the post header, I had assumed this would be a case of an unaccompanied child running into traffic. A case of blaming a mother for not watching her child, not a situation of a mom WITH her 3 Kids, with groceries and a wiggly 4 year old…I couldn’t imagine what she had done to be charged

In keeping with FRK, I try to teach my kids crossing safety so they can be safe crossing independently. I *try* to model always crossing at the crosswalk and waiting for a new light when walking across multi-lane busy streets (like the corner we live on) with my kids here in Manhattan. Because of this, my kids are more likely to say, “we don’t have the light” than to jaywalk; however, I can’t claim to have never rushed across when I saw no treat of oncoming traffic when late for an appointment or trying to catch a bus. I don’t hold their hands when waiting to cross or crossing. I cannot pass judgment on anyone but the drunk driver.

As for the leash/stroller argument. My son at 18 months did not want to get in his stroller. He liked to walk. I put our pot luck diner items in the stroller instead. I waited for the light then stepped into the crosswalk with my then 4 year old beside me…wham… A turning SUV took the front wheels off the stroller. We were fine, but my son would be footless or worse if he HAD been in the stroller…my 4 year old could easily have been killed if even a step ahead of where she was. I will say, she is still (at 10) very aware of turning cars and does not rely solely on having the light and being “right”…dead right is no better than dead wrong.

So what if she was poor? Is it now a crime to be poor?

Look, I’m all about not procreating when you can’t care for your kids. What does that have to do with this? A 4-year-old ran in front of a car that was being driven by a drunk. That could happen to anyone! People drive drunk in rich and poor neighborhoods. Kids run off in rich and poor neighborhoods.

I think we ought to shelve the whole “irresponsible to have kids” discussion, because all it’s going to do is piss people off.

This is a sore point for me because growing up, and in college, I was constantly hearing about how the dumbest, most hopeless kids were from big families, 3rd-born or later, female, with young, low-income parents and working moms, who were latchkey kids, spanked, bla bla bla – and if you do the math between all the factors, my IQ should be about 12 and I should be a great granny on psycho meds. Ha! Just because there is statistical association between income and social outcomes does not mean that every person below middle class is an ineffective parent. (And though it gets a bit personal for me, I know I’m not the only person who gets offended by this stuff.)

Or maybe Dolly thinks we should just take away all the kids of below-middle-class parents as a preventative measure, since obviously they are all going to end up destroyed by their irresponsible parents.

Off-topic completely now, check out this picture:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-yApTxPINuiI/Th9o-a1319I/AAAAAAAAFfg/PljZVJDTvCo/s1600/Helen+Levitt+New+York+1940+danger+play.jpg

Has anyone dangled this case in front of MADD (“Mothers Against Drunk Driving”)?

“Georgia: drunk drivers kill toddler, then sit on jury to convict mother”

It is a safe statistical bet that at least one (probably more) of the jurors (all drivers, no bus riders) had driven drunk in the past, even if he had never been caught. I can just hear such a person deliberating with the other jurors:
“We gotta get these damn kids off the roads. If it weren’t for these damn kids, it wouldn’t matter if one had a drink or two.”

Still, I am on the same side as the ones trying to argue with me. She does not need to be charged with anything. And yes, even if she was being 100% perfect parent sometimes these kind of things still can happen. I acknowledge that. But I also point out things that could be improved upon or other points of view too like if the child was in a stroller or a harness this might not have happened or that maybe it is just not safe to be crossing that street with that many kids.

SKL: the “goodbye syndrome” is again something I don’t really understand how that happens. My kids are not outside by themselves till they are old enough to KNOW not to run behind a backing up car. My kids can’t get outside on their own or even to the garage either because of child gates. So mine have never ran to see me off in my car ever. They wave from the windows where they are contained.

The Blog has not been around for very long, so I don’t know if it is new, but I see what seems to be an almost perverse reaction of some people to other people woes.

The more tragic the misery that befalls some poor SOB, the harder these people try to blame the Victim.

Would I be wrong to assume that they are so affected by the knowledge that a moment’s inattention or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time, can turn their life into crap in an instant, that they somehow have to believe that bad things only happen to bad people or careless people or lazy people?

Or are they just Shadenfreude creeps that secretly enjoy the misery of others and think they are smarter than everybody else?

Monte Haun mchaun@hotmail.com

Elle: if someone’s birth control fails they still have options. Abortion, adoption, letting a friend or relative raise the child till you are better able to take care of them, etc. So every single parent out there still CHOOSES to be a parent and therefore the job and responsibility is on them.

WHY are we talking about abortion? How dare you decide that someone else’s kid should be killed before birth?

Dolly, did you notice that the death rate for abortion is nearly 100%, far higher than the rate of all other causes of infant/child death combined? You are really not about helping kids survive, are you?

Regardless of my disgust for your position, it is completely beside the point. Children who are born have (or should have) the same standing, regardless of their parents’ circumstances. “Oh well, that child should not have been conceived” does not solve a single problem. The child is alive now, so get over it. I’m getting angrier and angrier here. You obviously think your children have more right to be alive than mine. Shame on you.

Oh that poor mother…. I can’t even imagine. We’ve all had those times when a young child runs out in a parking lot or street despite our screams of “STOP!!!”. It just happens.Fortunately, most of the time, the child is not hurt. This poor woman would probably beat herself up over her decision to cross that street for the rest of her life. I can’t believe a jury chose to give her more punishment than that.

Hele, you FAIL to have sympathy for a mother who watched her son be killed by a drunk driver & now will alsO be separated from her other two children while she is in jail for 3 years for making a mistake??!!?? I wonder what, in fact, you do have sympathy for.

Dolly: Do you know, I am one hundred percent pro choice (which also includes the right to choose to have a baby, not just the right to abort it), but I have studied the issue quite a bit, and guess what? Nobody I have ever come across says “whoops, according to some self-righteous commenter on FRK I am not financially stable enough to have a baby, so I guess I’ll just get the thing aborted!” No. Abortion services are not available in all areas (sometimes whole states are without a clinic), they can’t always be accessed at low cost, and even if you can access them in a lot of areas you’re going to be harassed by people on the streets calling you a murderer, telling you you deserve to die, etc etc. Or you can do what half of all women who have abortions do — get it in a back alley from a dodgy practitioner, risking death or serious injury (70000 women a year die this way). If I were pregnant at this moment, I would 100% have an abortion, but I would never ever judge someone for not doing so, for not putting themselves through that kind of crap. I have no right to assume I know what is best for another grown, law-abiding woman.

Adoption is not much better if you aren’t likely to give birth to a blonde haired, blue eyed, shiny-white-skinned little child. Adoption rates for the children of POC in America are abysmal, because they people who are adopting (middle/upper middle class) want a baby who looks like them (ie. white, most of the time, because surprise, class divisions are largely race divisions as well). Not every adoptive parent is like this (thankfully), but many would sooner fly half way around the world to snap up a little white Russian baby than take on a child of colour. Worse still if your child is not a baby but a few months or a few years old.

And no, contraception is not always available,especially if you have any allergies (ever met someone who is allergic to all of the materials condoms are made of? I have.). It especially isn’t available in poor neighborhoods, and it especially isn’t available in deeply religious areas. Many drug stores refuse to sell it.

In short, Dolly, not everyone in the world, or even the country, is living in the same circumstances you are. There are problems for other people that would never crop up for you. That’s what privilege is. It’s not a bad thing to have, but it is a very, very bad thing to ignore if you want to be a decent person.

This blog has provoked much discussion within my household and at the kindy (childcare for preschoolers) my son goes to.

Buses here have stroller spots. There are also wheelchair spots. The buses have stops that are accessible to zebra crossings (not sure if this is a term used in the US) or, if they are on quiet streets, they are well marked so drivers know there is a bus stop there. Granted we don’t have the same amount of traffic as in the US and we aren’t perfect here by any means but at least we are giving it a go when it comes to being child friendly.

At kindy today, a child ran onto the road without holding their parent’s hand. And the poor parents ran across the road and grabbed them and told them off. No one rang the authorities, no one blamed the parents. Everyone felt for those parents because we have all been there. No blame, just empathy.

The fact this poor mother was black doesn’t surprise me. The rest of the Western world is waiting for the US to catch up with the fact that colour should not determine your place in the world. That mother was convicted because she is black and poor. That disgusts me.

And my WTH moment? You need HEALTH INSURANCE to get contraception?! WHY? I really don’t understand the US medical system at all.

This poor mother and her children need someone to advocate for them. Someone who knows legal stuff and can help get this family back together. And that drunk driver needs to be punished way harsher.

I am beginning to understand the need for this movement. The US has some messed up laws. While I’m still struggling with some of the ideas, please keep fighting for some justice in your country. Or move here. Your kids can run free with the kids that are still running about on the street at 6pm. And no one will call the cops 🙂

Also, nzmum, didn’t you hear that empathy is unAmerican too? People who practice empathy are part of what’s wrong with our country and we need to get them out of our government.

No, seriously.

Here’s a whole bunch of links about it.

http://cultureofempathy.com/References/Articles-Conservatives-Empathy.htm

Instead of empathy, it’s BOOTSTRAPS! and PUNISH! Preferably quickly, so the whole thing can be wrapped up in time for the next news cycle!

NZmum, quite agree, sounds like we are very lucky!

Very much sympathise with this poor mum. I remember being in Malaysia with 3 preschoolers and no car. In JB at the time, anyway, there were effectively no road rules – cars made as many lanes as possible during rush hour, i.e. 2 lanes became 5. Crossing the road required heaps of prayer! (Or, seriously, waiting until the Malays, who make up a lot of the population, and are generally very devout Muslims, stopped for their prayers!) It was good luck and the grace of God rather than good management that none of the kids were killed while we lived there.

And expecting kids to walk half a mile in heat to a crossing? I can remember vividly one day when the taxi dropped us by mistake half a mile down the road from the bus stop (yes, I was very lucky in that I could afford taxis sometimes, and we were 4 miles from the closest busstop). The 2 and 3 year olds, who had to walk because we couldn’t take pushchairs on the bus, walked 100m in the 35degree heat (sorry, no idea what that is in Fahrenheit, but b- hot, and 100% humidity), just sat down on the roadside – no footpaths- and refused to move. After about 20 minutes cajoling, arguing, bribing, begging, and crying (me, not the kids:-) ), I rang up hubby and told him if he didn’t drop everything and come and b#$* pick us up I was taking the next plane home!

This poor, poor woman – I would have done just the same thing, if my apartment had been across the road!

Oh, and as to why a 3-year-old would be in a pushchair, it was just that she was very small for her age, developmental delays etc…..

The fact is that some people choose to procreate knowing that they will use government help. Whole communities have done this for generations. It’s woven into the fabric of our society. I hate the attitude, but it does NOT make the resulting children less valuable than any other children.

I like how Lenore generally does a good job of keeping politics out of this blog. So I’m not gonna bite on some of the controversial comments above, though it is tempting.

Valerie it could be because you mentioned the Ten Commandments, churches and God?

Just a thought

What happened to having some compassion for a mother who just lost her child? Whether she made a good or bad decision to have that child doesn’t matter at this point. That woman is feeling bad enough without certain posters here saying: that she should have used birth control, had an abortion, or put her baby up for adoption, that she shouldn’t be having children if she’s poor, that she should have driven a car instead of taking the bus, or that she should have crossed the street with 3 kids at a different location. You can condemn her all you want, but she still lost a child. On top of that tragic loss, she’s going to jail for it. Like Lieby Kletzky’s mother, this mother also deserves our condolences and sympathy and not condemnation and judgement.

I agree Steff, we have no right to judge. Some people do need to take a walk in other’s shoes.

And yes, many of us have had the same experience or the close encounter. I was fortunate with my son at 2yrs and after this experience i always had him on a ‘leash’, even if it meant being abused by a woman in a wheel chair (he’s not a dog’) and frowned upon by others, for keeping him safe while out and bout.
He, at least, could feel free, not having to hold my hand or sit in a pusher when the world around him was saying ‘explore’. He’s now made it to 26.

But most importantly- My heart goes out to this very unfortunate family. I hope that somehow their hearts will heal.

“He deserved a safe way to travel either in a car if it is not a pedestrian friendly area”

Leaving aside the argument over whether cars area always safer, do you really believe every human being “deserves” to travel in a car if it is the safest way to go?

Look, Dolly, life is just not like that for vast numbers of people in this world. Your and my middle class life is not the template by which everyone should be judged. The fact that not everyone can afford certain amenities is not single person’s fault (and certainly not of the person who can’t afford it, unless they’re gambling or drinking away the money), although I don’t deny that it would be better if everyone could (if they so chose.) That is the way the world is and always has been. Not every kid gets to get chauffeured, and not every parent in circumstances that precludes chauffeuring their kids has “failed” in some way. We don’t know this woman’s circumstances, but NOT knowing them, there is no reason to assume she is not doing the best she can (and conversely, no reason to assume she is, except for the benefit of the doubt, which charitable people give.)

I live in Atlanta and the writer is correct. Our commissioners give no thought to walkers or cyclists in this city! It is a city created for multi-car families. Makes me nuts!! My heart goes out to this woman and her children.

OK, I saw that about the misdemeanor, but no other charges were mentioned and when I looked at the penalties for the law and saw the three years, I didn’t realize there were other charges. In my book though that makes it even more ridiculous. Frankly it makes me sick to even think about. Sick at heart, but mentally as well because well again, there but for the grace…. I cannot fathom the pain this poor mother must be going through and it offends me that so many are judging based on this event. It is difficult to think how one would act in a given situation, particularly one that is very foreign to the way we live.

Donna, can you explain?

“She’s facing a 3 year MAXIMUM…. She is not going to prison. I don’t think she should have been prosecuted but let’s keep the facts straight.”

Can you explain what it means that she’s facing a 3 year maximum but she’s definitely not going to prison?

On a separate point, I’m not really arguing because I don’t know the actual facts, but I’ve heard that the Atlanta suburbs have “browned” significantly in the last decade. Is Cobb County the exception?

Last night my son (now almost 11) and I recalled the time our car had a flat while we were rushing to get medical help to tend to his injured finger. I had to change the tire on the shoulder, on the traffic side, concerned for my own safety but also terrified that my son (only 3 at the time) would get out of the car and wander into speeding traffic.

I was shaking, almost crying, at one point since I couldn’t see him, and I called out, “Where are you?” Calmly, from the other side of the car (but outside it!), he replied, “I’m right here, Dad; I’m OK. I’m right here.” Stressed (to say the least), but immersed in my task, I repeatedly asked/told/begged him to stay put, to NOT come to where I was — and he (repeatedly) said he understood and would stay put. He did so, even telling me not to rush, not to worry. All while his finger was throbbing. Pretty good for a 3-year-old.

In retrospect, I myself might have handled the situation differently. Still, last night I told my son how proud I was of him (both then and now), and how we both handled a tight spot as best we could as it occurred. We were fortunate — the tire got changed, my son kept himself safe, and in the end his finger wasn’t even badly damaged (though it hurt a lot). And there was no drunk driver or other negative influence outside of our joint control.But I’ve always known it could have ended up very differently, as the situation did for this poor woman in Atlanta.

So for those who cannot afford cars, let them eat cake!

I see parents scuttling their kids across the street during rush hour and not at the designated crossing almost everyday, and it pains me. Especially when the lights is literally a few meters away (30 sec walk). THAT’S stupid. This mothers situation, totally different. I don’t think ANYONE, and I mean ANYONE, in her position would not walk almost half a mile (that’s about 4 big blocks) to the closest crossing and back again, when they’re home is literally right across the street from them. This is a tragic mishap on the side of the mother and children. If it were only the one child, I’m very sure the mother would have been able to nab him as he squirmed away (which children do most often). But with 2 other kids in tow, that split second it takes for a child to dart away from you is almost impossible to avoid. Just like all those parents who’ve unintentionally dropped their kids, tripped them, stumbled over them, bumped their heads. And there have been countless numbers of those parents. Should they all be charged with assault, reckless endangerment, neglect? Crap happens. It’s not like this mother pushed her child on to the road.

This is a classic case of people getting caught up in their emotions and fears. That they NEED to lay the blame on someone, and when the only obvious person to blame (drunk driver) isn’t enough. It’s been known for a very longtime that the law is flawed. This is just another case of that. The modern day lynch mob. Did these people ever stop to think how their irrational judgement would affect the other two children? One child is lost, a mother is gone, now they can add two more children going into the system if they cannot find relatives to take care of them. And we all know what happens to most low-middle class children going into foster care. Not all, but many. And all for the sake of satisfying the angry masses looking for vindication. Sounds pretty selfish to me. I surely hope that her case can be repealed. How can someone be charged for vehicular homicide, when they weren’t even driving. This should have never been brought to court in the first place. I’m curious too, what did the drunk driver get other than a hit and run. Seems to me that he should have been hit with the vehicular homicide charge.

Dolly- what are CHILD gates? Do you mean baby gates or are there gates specifically marketed for kids now?

I’m tired of tragic accidents being turned into opportunities for bizarre prosecution. Real life should not mimic an episode of “Law and Order” where half the time, they can’t even “prove” the case, they just somehow get the “criminal” to emotionally break down and confess. How hard would it be to get a heartbroken mother to admit that it was “all my fault.”

The fact that no one on that jury had ever even taken the bus in that city should be enough for an appeal. Talk about class warfare…

No, I don’t, Dolly. Your statement was stupid. So what if you foster two or three or ten or twenty kids? That does not mean that the system works for all the other children in it. For you to claim it does, and that it’s a great option for every woman about to give birth to a kid she may not be able to afford, simply because you considered adopting once and may do so in the future is… bizarre, to say the least.

(Not to mention, even if it worked perfectly for the amount of children born and given up for adoption now, that’s no promise that it’d continue to work if everybody said “Yup, that’s what I’ll do” on your say-so.)

So here’s a question: there were other pedestrians crossing in the same place, why didn’t one or more of them offer to help the mother? Either carry some groceries for her, or hold a child’s hand?

Sadly, I probably already know the answer to that one. The other people wouldn’t offer because, a) they’re too self-absorbed, or b) they’re afraid people will think they’re trying to molest the children. And the mother likely wouldn’t ask because society has been telling her since she was a child that strangers are not trustworthy.

It says volumes about the kind of society we live in.

@Lollipoplover, on July 19, 2011 at 23:16 said:
But if any of these moments ended in tragedy, I now live in fear of being charged?

*****
Only if you’re not white or poor. If you’re Brenda Nesselroad Slaby or Jodie Edwards (upper middle class white women) you can leave your kid in a hot car all day to bake to death and never get charged, let alone have a trial because you have been “punished enough”.

And I know some of you are going to swear up and down that this woman being black had nothing to do with an all white jury convicting her, so please, save yourself the trouble of arguing back with me. Very few white people recognize racism for when they see it and I have no patience with those who turn a blind eye to the obvious.

I know! That mom hasn’t already suffered enough, watching her child killed right in front of her by a drunk driver, so let’s BLAMESTORM!

Ugh. I feel sick just thinking about it.

It sounds as though, since she was crossing at an intersection and yielding to traffic by waiting on the median, she didn’t even do anything even technically illegal. But even if she had, she did not kill her child. The repeat offender behind the wheel of the car did that. Knowing that the crossing took place at an intersection, even if not a designated crosswalk (and WTH, the bus stop is a KILOMETRE from the crosswalk? Why??), I’m not sure I’m even willing to concede an error in judgement. Walking a kilometre up to the crosswalk and a kilometre back down on the other side of the streetbusy highway with 3 little kids is not necessarily any safer than crossing at an intersection. But more to the point, the moment an impaired driver enters the equation, there’s no way for anyone else to ensure their own safety. The reason we have laws against driving while impaired is exactly that: an impaired driver is inherently unpredictable, and, because s/he is wielding a ton or so of metal moving at high velocity, therefore inherently dangerous to everyone in the vicinity. That driver could have mounted the median and killed the child (or the whole family). He could have run the red light and killed them in the middle of the crosswalk. Both of these things have happened in the city where I live — which is orders of magnitude more pedestrian friendly than suburban Atlanta. Sometimes stuff happens because pedestrians engage in stupid jaywalking behaviour. But more often it happens because people in cars engaged in stupid/careless/distracted driving behaviour.

Dolly, if you do decide to foster, I hope you get some education so that you will not be judgmental of “imperfect families” in front of your foster children, who will most definitely identify with those “imperfect parents.”

Oh, and Dolly, I sure hope you never say in front of your foster kids that you think they should have just been aborted at the outset – which is what you said about my children.

SKL – I’m sure the attorneys asked the jury that question. In this area, it would not be surprising that nobody had ridden a city bus. Outside of the fact that some city buses go around the university campus so I occasionally got on one to get from class to class, I’ve never been on a city bus. I haven’t stepped on a bus since I graduated college in 1992. I’ve ridden subways, trolleys, and maybe even buses in other cities and countries, but never my city bus in any city I’ve lived in.

I’m disgusted that the topic of birth control was even brought up here. As if this accident should have been prevented by not allowing the child to be born.

That’s a new all time low for the tsk tsk’ers of the world from where I’m sitting.

Dolly, the fact that you listed “got a car” as something the bereaved mother “should have done” suggests that you may benefit from this link:

http://brown-betty.livejournal.com/305643.html

If it pisses you off–GOOD. We who could “just” get a car, or even a babysitter, need a kick in the assumptions when it comes to tragedies like this.

Oh, one more thing, in Phoenix in the 60’s the kids played outside in the summers after the sun went down about 8:00 PM. Doesn’t mean we didn’t play in the sun, but the residential areas saw a lot of kids out once the sun went down.

The cagers knew it and drove accordingly. Woe be onto them if they didn’t.

The real guilty party here is the driver. By admission (he sped up for G*dsakes).

I agree that the city officials, highway designers, etc need to accept some of the responsibility for this. While it may have been a bad decision on the part of the mom, she may have had a very good reason for her decision. I have a physical disability. I am unable to walk more than a tenth of a mile without stopping to rest. I am also a mom to three young kids, who I sometimes have to take shopping. I am fortunate to have access to a car that will fit my family, and that I can drive with hand controls, but if I didn’t I would have no choice but to take a bus. If I lived where this woman does, I would have no choice but to cross at the bus stop. They need to either make that stop closer to the crosswalk, or put one in at the stop. It will help minimize accidents such as these.

“When we prosecute parents who are trying their hardest, who make mistakes, or who misjudge a situation, we are prosecuting them for being what parents have always been: human. Not superheroes with super strength, judgment, fortitude and foresight.
A human parent is what I am and what we all are. Let’s not make that a crime. — Lenore”

Great words, Lenore. Thank god someone can stand up for people even when they make mistakes.

(from Dolly) LOL Steff. Or instead of being a military widow she could be a total welfare mother who got knocked up on one night stands and refuses to use birth control. Either scenario are just as likely. Actually if you want to do the numbers mine is probably statistically more likely but I am not going to split hairs on that issue.

(my reply) Is your scenario about the mother being a welfare mom who got knocked up on one night stands more likely because she’s poor and Black? If she was White and affluent, would you say the same thing? I doubt it. By the way, even the best birth control is not 100% effective.

(from Dolly) I know nothing about this mother or her circumstances so I pretty much have zero judgment of her except that if she can’t hold all the kids hands tightly enough I think she should have used leashes, strollers, crossed elsewhere, had her groceries delivered, got a car, had a babysitter etc so that maybe this might not have happened and at least won’t happen with another one of her children. That is not judging her. That is trying to solve a problem.

(my reply) Dolly, you are judging her. By saying, “She should have…” you are automatically judging her by your standards. In your perfect world the mother would be able to afford a babysitter, car, and grocery delivery. All of those things cost money that this woman probably didn’t have, which is probably why she took her 3 kids on the bus with her to shop. Leashes and strollers also cost money and strollers are very difficult to bring on a bus. It is also impossible to hold 3 kids’ hands and bags of groceries at the same time. Walk a mile (or take the bus 5 miles with a transfer) in that woman’s shoes and then see what you think about using strollers, leashes, and growing extra arms to carry groceries and hold children’s hands.

Dolly, in your ideal world, the only people who would be allowed to reproduce are the affluent. According to your logic, about 98% of the world’s population should not be allowed to reproduce. Unfortunately for you, we don’t live in a perfect world. Maybe you need to get out into the imperfect world a little more often and see what reality is for many people. Believe it or not, poor people all over the world love their children and want what’s best for them.

As I said before, that woman lost a child and deserves our sympathy. She doesn’t need judgement and “she should have done…”

It’s pretty amazing to me what the human mind is capable of rationalising. An unforeseen event happens, involving a street, some kids, and a DRUNK driver. In any other generation, this would have been the headline: Drunk Driver Kills Child. Mother Grieves. And somehow, now, when we are so safe, so healthy, so educated, that practically all non-self-inflicted dangers are gone from our lives, we rationalise every accident.

The presumption of perfect safety guarantees that somebody must be at fault for every single accident. “No accident is unpreventable”, say some. No reasonable person would think that. Sure, in hindsight, we’d ALL avoid every accident we ever had, knowing what would happen. That’s normal. Turning that daydream of timetravelling what-if-ness into a reasonable expectation of OTHER PEOPLE is not. I notice that nobody who blames this poor mother is willing to say that every single accident they themselves have ever had was an unforgivable, damnable offence. Or is it only when children are involved that we have a right to such castigation? I meet a lot of parents in my job, and I can say that it is a rare and pleasant surprise when they are able to be somewhat rational on the subject of their children.

Children aren’t angels; they’re human like their parents. We love them, but they are fallible, and so are we. The child mortality rate in the U.K. fell this century from 14% in 1900 to 0.5% in 1997. Since 1970 in America, the death rate fell in the U.S. by 2/3. We’re doing awfully well, BUT WE WILL NEVER HAVE ZERO PERCENT death among children. It’s so rare for a child to die now (if you don’t live in a developing country, that is…I notice that nobody here is rationalising those kids’ deaths, which still stand at something like twenty or more times the rate we have here. If you want to cast blame for children’s deaths, how come you don’t shoulder the blame for the unconscionable conditions our lifestyle imposes on other nations? Just saying…..mote and beam…..) Every child death in the West is an unusual event, and as such triggers certain reactions in the brains of those who hear about them. I guess it’s a sign that we’re doing so well that people are ABLE to have such pissy reactions to tragedy. I just don’t understand who it is people think they’re helping when they say awful things about other people who have lost kids. Try to imagine, for a minute, being in that situation. Do it without justifying your perfection, as if it couldn’t happen to you. How would it feel? Now imagine that other people have the same feelings as you, despite how different they seem. If we spent more time using our imaginations to strengthen compassion, rather than blunt it, we’d all be better off.

In an attempt to show my students that we all rationalise our own behaviour and emotions, I gave them a multiple choice survey. One of the questions presented the scenario (a given) wherein they were involved in a car accident that was technically their fault. When asked what the REASON for that accident might have been, only very few admitted that they could conceivably have been distracted or aggressive in their driving. Most, when given the opportunity to choose an option where it was actually out of their control, took it. Remember that the scenario presented it as a given that they were at fault. When the same scenario was presented with one of their peers in the same situation, they were much more likely to admit that their peer was really at fault. We all have this cognitive bias, but there is no way that it should be enforced by law.

The chain of rationalisation around this event starts with the presumption, for some reason, that a drunk driver is just like a force of nature, a part of the natural environment. Same with what sounds like an almost unlivable urban street design. Can nobody see how sick that is? Drunkenness in drivers is not like the laws of physics, inevitable and immutable. Cars themselves are the single most dangerous thing we humans in the West have to deal with on a daily basis, if you don’t count diabetes, etc. The design of cities to favour cars instead of humans, who use feet to get around, is not inevitable. We’re just embedded in them, so it’s hard to remember that those were choices people made. Bad ones.

Then the chain goes backwards: The kid squirmed away, as kids sometimes do. This must be the mother’s fault. A leash, say. The intersection was busy. This is also her fault. An extra mile of walking with groceries would have saved her kid. The job she had didn’t give her enough money to have a safer place to live. Her fault. She CHOSE that job, didn’t she? Wait: why did she have kids AT ALL? This is like a moment of inspiration for rationalisers. If the kid NEVER EXISTED, then he couldn’t die. Wow. It’s only a matter of time until somebody realises that if the mother’s primal ancestor had never left the trees, this could all have been avoided.

Maybe this rationalisation is like a kind of wish fulfillment: We’d all love to imagine a perfect world, where stuff like this didn’t happen. But we need to learn to draw the line between fantasy and reality. Your fantasies of perfection do not get to trump other people’s realities. Your version of what should have happened will not change what did happen. Let’s just feel sorry for this poor family.

(from Dolly) I know nothing about this mother or her circumstances so I pretty much have zero judgment of her except that if she can’t hold all the kids hands tightly enough I think she should have used leashes, strollers, crossed elsewhere, had her groceries delivered, got a car, had a babysitter etc so that maybe this might not have happened and at least won’t happen with another one of her children. That is not judging her. That is trying to solve a problem.

It is judging! What I am telling you is that if you think it couldnt happen to you you are wrong. I have been taking care of kids for almost 30 years now, as a babysitter, then as a nanny during the 90s and have 3 sons of my own now ages 8, 7, and 2. I am a strong person and a strict parent, I have a neice who is also 7 and is often with us. I have been stopped and admonished by others for holding their hands too tightly(its abusive) swatting their rear end for misbehavior, Even for making them hold the door open for me or for others. I respond that that is my job. To teach them manners and behavior so that they might grow up and be happy well adjusted productive members of society, but I can assure you every one of them and the 8 y/o most often has given me several heart attack moments. And that had the situation happened and it was me and not the black woman NOONE would have thought of charging me with manslaughter. It is a race issue and a class issue and a COMPASSION issue. common courtesy like common sense is often a thing of the past.
I am often a lone parent. My husband works out of state sometimes for 6 months at a time. I live in a state of harried exhaustion while he is gone. I don’t have the option of delivery for groceries and would assume that it is expensive, I don’t trust very many people with my children especially when you consider the stories you hear….but I do have a car and have on occasion had to drag all three kids shopping. Let me tell you the thought of walking an extra half mile on anything resembling a street is enough to give me a heart attack without even thinking about the tired, hot, 2-3 hour commute+grocery trip….And I can assure you even though my older kids are able to and would likely be holding a grocery bag or two themselves, I would be panicked to stand there with my 2 y/o because there are accidents and they do happen, but I would do it because it has to be done. Sometimes there are not other options. Not every mom has all the answers like you, hell I would even go so far as to say very few of us do, and so we do the best we can with the resources we have available in the situation we are in, We as MOMS in particular need to try to support each other in all of our choices and abilities instead of seizing on something like this and persecuting each other for not being perfect.

Psst Dolly –

“Helpful suggestions” to and “problem solving” for people who didn’t ask your opinion or want your advice is being JUDGMENTAL.

Thank You Sgt. Mom.

That being said, unfortunately people share Dolly’s view point which is why the mother is in jail.

Dolly, I don’t know about this woman, but here, grocery delivery doesn’t exist. Thanks to my spinal cord injury, two years ago (that, btw, was caused by an infection I didn’t even know I had, and couldn’t have been prevented), our financial situation is very tight. I cannot afford a baby sitter. My mom would take the kids, but since she also cares for my grandmother, they would need to go there. I am fortunate to have access to a car that has hand controls to use. If that breaks down and I need to go to the store, the exact accident could happen en route to my mother’s house or back, if I were to use a bus. I can’t afford taxi service. I can’t afford a new car if something happens to the one I’ve got (and it’s old). Strollers are very hard to manage on a bus or train, and if I had a kid leashed and they bolted, they could easily pull me down. And have you ever tried holding on to three children’s hands plus groceries?

But before you go telling me that I shouldn’t have had children if I couldn’t handle them, let me also mention that my children are 10, 7, and 5. My injury was only 2 years ago, so… they were already here. Not much I could do about that. Oh, and my oldest child has autism. Yet, if the worst happens, and I have no access to a car, but someone needs a doctor’s appt, or we need groceries, etc, I would have no choice but to take the bus. As I mentioned in a previous comment, there is no way I can walk 6/10 of a mile without stopping to rest. I also walk so slowly, that that 6/10 mile would take me an hour. If I were faced with walking that with my personal situation, with my three tired and hungry children, and a load of groceries, and just crossing the road to the apartments directly across, I can tell you I would cross the street. I wouldn’t have much choice. This is why bus stops need to be placed closer to pedestrian crossings. But, anyway, if this same accident were to happen to me, would you place the same punishment on me? For doing something I didn’t have any other choice in doing? For living life and raising my children the best I could?

Why would you have three children when you can’t afford a car to transport them in an area unfriendly to pedestrians?

Well, because sometimes life is really unfair. How do you know that she COULDN’T afford those things when she had those children? How do you know that she didn’t lose her job (lay offs are happening right and left these days), and had to resort to low paying work and sell her car and her house and move into low income housing just to make sure her kids were fed and clothed? How do you know that she, or someone else in the family did not get sick and racked up gigantic medical bills? YOU DON’T KNOW!

Or why is your assumption that she unemployed and on welfare? Because she’s black? It could be that she works and supports her family completely on her income. Maybe she doesn’t own a car because she refuses welfare and it takes all her income to support her family. Maybe, like me, she chooses to work at a low income job in order to help people instead of focusing on her own material wants.

Why is your assumption that she doesn’t have a car? Maybe it’s in the shop. Kids still have to eat. Cabs/babysitters may not be affordable with the upcoming repair bill. Maybe her husband – yes, Dolly, low income black people do marry – had to have the car for work.

And her reason for living in the pedestrian-unfriendly burbs is probably the same as yours – a better environment for the children you think she should have aborted. Should low income people only be allowed to live in the gang-infested, crime-ridden inner cities because that’s where the good public transportation is ( and where Dolly can’t see them)? They are not allowed to seek a better life for their children?

And what about people like me – highly educated people who CHOOSE to work in public interest jobs at a low income? I have a car but certainly can’t afford a babysitter just to go shopping or food delivery. If my car was in the shop and I couldn’t find a ride, I’d have to take a bus to get food with kid in tow. And I’m not married to boot. I guess I should have aborted my child as well.

“Maybe her husband — yes, Dolly, low income black people do marry — had to have the car for work.”

Oh, My. Goodness. All this time I was assuming that people wouldn’t be describing her as a single mother unless the news reports said she was — and at least, in the article Lenore linked to, it doesn’t say.

So now there’s just an ASSUMPTION that’s she’s a single mother because she’s black and low income? A strong enough assumption that not only can it be assumed, but then we can go on to say that it’s “more likely” that she’s never married than that her husband left her either voluntarily or involuntarily (death, military service, etc.)?

Wow. Sure, it’s not unlikely that she is a single mom, because there are a lot of those in the world. But to just leap to that assumption and then make it a further basis to look down on her….ick.

And someone said that the jury was made up of people like me and that was why she was found guilty. Except I stated NUMEROUS times that I would not have convicted her!!!!! So you owe me an apology. If I was on that jury it would have turned out differently. I would have voted not guilty to those charges but would have asked the judge if they can get her some counseling and/or parenting classes and some counseling for the siblings. Oh nos! I suggested counseling, string me up folks, I must be a monster!

Nobody owes you an apology, Dolly. Your contempt of and sense of superiority over low income people (and just about everyone else that isn’t Dolly) is repugnant, regardless of whether you would have convicted this particular woman or not. You put your opinion out there. You don’t get to demand an apology after we tell you your opinion is objectionable to us.

If you mean counseling because her baby was killed right before her eyes, then I support you. If you mean counseling because not crossing at a cross walk somehow makes her a bad mother (and I’m assuming you do because otherwise, why on earth would she need parenting classes?)… I don’t even know how to respond to that. I don’t know about anyone else, but if jaywalking with her kids is the worst parenting decision she’s ever made, I certainly don’t think we need her to be taking up space in our already overly populated prisons. Her daughters who have been left to grieve for their brother would be further traumatized, and would be forced to go into the also overly populated foster care system. Not to mention the fact that this mom has already suffered enough in having to witness what she did. And since this particular story is really all we know about this mom, we have no choice but to assume that this is the worst parenting decision she’s ever made.

Oooh, forgot to close a tag there. Well, Dolly knows which part is hers.

Putting words in my mouth YET again and ignoring what I wrote. I said several times above that they all could use counseling to deal with the fact that they saw their family member killed right in front of them. I know it makes you happy to make me out to be a monster, but you are outright lying to yourself when you claim I meant something or said something when I didn’t. She could also benefit with some coping skills and better ways to deal with her circumstances which counseling can also provide. I am sure the woman is very stressed because I would be stressed taking three kids out on a bus for groceries and coping skills/relaxation skills would help her with that.

There is a BIG difference in having a child for 2 years and then becoming poor and keeping the child and I am pregnant and broke but I am going to keep this baby anyway. In one circumstance you were okay when you first had the baby and in the other circumstance you were NEVER okay to care for it on your own yet you kept it anyway and that is nothing but selfishness.

Well since the chances of me becoming pregnant and actually carrying the baby to term on my own are pretty slim I am not too worried about accidental pregnancies yet because we are smart and responsible,. we put in the IUD as a backup just in case. See if we can handle backing ourselves up I don’t know why everyone else can’t handle it. One form of birth control is usually not enough if you are super fertile. We also use pull out a lot since you want to get personal. So yet another backup plan to prevent it.

If I did get pregnant and was able to carry, then we would probably keep the baby but we would have to scale back on nice things for our current kids to afford a new kid and that is something I don’t think is fair to our current kids. No more fancy birthday parties or zoo memberships or museum memberships, etc. We are not that well off now, like lower middle class but we live cheaply so we can afford luxuries for our kids. If we could not afford to pay for the child period, then we would choose adoption. I had always said if I got pregnant before I was married and had money, finished college, etc I would happily choose adoption.

Dolly, it sounds to me like if anyone should be giving coping classes, it’s this unfortunate woman herself. The mother was dealing with pressures that many people, including, most likely people running parenting classes, could barely conceive of. For all we know, she was coping well with her situation.

However something went wrong, as things tend to do. Depending on your perspective: her child was hit by a drunk driver/she made a bad decision that day/there was an accident. Parenting classes couldn’t prevent any of the above and I hate the way they have become a panacea.

Re Dolly’s request for an apology. YOU brought up how “responsible” you are about avoiding an unwanted pregnancy. You can’t complain if others then make reference to your personal fertility. Frankly, hearing that you are infertile-ish reduces your credibility, because you really can’t know for sure whether you might have an unintended pregnancy if you were Fertile Myrtle.

As for giving the baby up for adoption just because of finances – very poor arguments. You should travel to a developing country, where the vast majority of kids have less than our poorest here in the USA. They are SMILING all the time. Know why? Because they know the love of their family and the wonder of discovery, and everything else pales in comparison. And if you give them ONE shiny little trinket, they will feel rich! Our kids in the USA are missing out on true joy because they are so spoiled. Less is more, I say.

You should understand that if a baby is separated from his birth mother, that is a big loss for the child on many levels – even if the separation occurs at birth. The losses are baggage for the child for his whole life, though some deal with it better than others. Some adoptions end up so stormy that they are disrupted, with the child ending up in “the system.” As an adoptive mom, perhaps I have a heightened sense of awareness in this regard, but it really bugs me when people talk so flippantly about adoption. Of course it is better than abortion, but if the mother wants the child and the child will be safe and have basic needs met, it is wrong to disrupt the family. There are plenty of other policies that could be changed to alleviate the tax burden of poor families having kids. After all, adding one child to an existing family does not need to cost much.

@Donna; since it seems that posts with more than one link have to go through moderation and that takes some time, I was wondering if you could follow up on one of your posts.

While researching this on ajc.com I saw the original description of the arrest of Guy following the hit and run, it says that he was charged not only with the hit and run, but with 1st degree vehicular homicide, cruelty to children and other charges. Obviously, they didn’t have enough to make any other charges stick, and since his blood alcohol would have been of no use. He did admit to using alcohol and painkillers, but obviously it is impossible to tell his level of impairment at the time. What would have been necessary to make the argument for 1st degree vehicular homicide? Especially in light of the fact that the mother was not only charged with but convicted of, 2nd degree vehicular homicide.

In general, following up on this story (more information in other issues of the ajc) has made it even more tragic from my personal point of view. The woman was celebrating her birthday the next day, so took the kids out for pizza, then stopped and bought groceries and a birthday cake, and apparently a goldfish that the little boy ,A. J. was carrying in a bag in one hand.

They missed the connecting bus, and that’s when things really started to go wrong. They got home later than anticipated, and it was getting (or had become) dark. Multiple people exited the bus at her stop, directly across from the apartments but with no sidewalks or crosswalks. While standing on the median, another bus rider decided to run across the road. A.J. took the cue to start moving as well. This finally makes some sense of the report that the driver then flashed his light and sped up. I never could understand how anyone would aim directly at a 4 year old. If he indeed, did these things – I can only expect that he was trying to annoy and throw a scare into the adult (or teen) crossing the road unwisely. He didn’t anticipate actually hitting her, but it easy to see that if he was paying attention to her, he may very well not have seen the slower moving and shorter child.

Then to add insult to injury, the mother panicked – as anyone in their right mind would. She called to the boy to stop, then realizing the driver was not going to slow down, yelled at him to go. A second’s hesitation that may have cost him his life and which she will replay in endless loops for years. Trying one last thing to save her son she ran into the road. In Hollywood movies, she would have been hit and her child would have survived, but this wasn’t Hollywood She and her 2 year old daughter, whom she was probably still clutching, suffered only minor injuries but the boy died.

To Dolly, I also want to add that giving a child a sibling may be better than giving him a lot of “things.” Many believe that the more siblings a child has, the better prepared he is for life with fellow humans. The development of multiple, varied, unbreakable connections between a group of humans is very important. Many of us believe that spending limited time segments with other kids (e.g., daycare, cousins) does not do as much good as having siblings who are part of their lives 24/7, through thick and thin, good times and bad.

So one more reason why the thought that babies should be eliminated for the benefit of would-be siblings is completely alien to me.

Rich, I think the problem is that the standard of “unavoidability” is too high for calling something an accident.

Or to put it another way, what does “avoidability” mean? Is it avoidable if, given everyone acting perfectly immediately preceding and during the crisis, it could have been avoided? Or does it makes more sense (and I think it does) to recognize that ordinary, flawed people, acting in a non-negligent and legal fashion, may (and probably will) fail to do everything right, thus resulting in an accident which *may have been* avoidable, but in the real world really was not?

If you can only call an accident something like a bolt out of the blue, that just puts way too much responsibility on people to act perfectly, when both common sense and the law recognize that people cannot be held to that standard. But I do agree it’s wrong to call something an “accident” if people were knowingly engaged in genuinely negligent or dangerous behavior, such as intoxication, extreme speed, misuse of dangerous equipment, etc. There does have to be some distinction between what a reasonable person should know better than to do given adequate time to think about it, and a bolt out of the blue.

Ok, I haven’t read all the comments, but has no one else noticed that the MOTHER was hit by the car, too? along with the siblings? The 4yo ran out into the street, following another pedestrian, the mother yelled for him to stop, then to keep going, then ALL of them were hit by the car (didn’t the driver admit he had been drinking/taken pill that could have impaired his judgement earlier? But they probably couldn’t prove DUI since he flad the scene and it seems by the time they caught up to him whatever he had in his system would have been gone). That means the car hit not only the kid in the roadway, but the 3 other people who were IN THE MEDIAN. By the link someone else posted earlier outlining the laws concerning crossing the street in GA, only the 4yo was at fault (the rest of them, including the mother, waited in the median as they should).

“That means the car hit not only the kid in the roadway, but the 3 other people who were IN THE MEDIAN. By the link someone else posted earlier outlining the laws concerning crossing the street in GA, only the 4yo was at fault (the rest of them, including the mother, waited in the median as they should).”

I don’t necessarily think that is true. The boy darted off the median after another pedestrian. The mother may very well have stepped off the median to chase her son after he fled. She was holding the toddler. Also the driver could have lost control of the vehicle in a vain attempt to not hit the boy. There is no indication that the driver swerved onto the median and hit the mother and the other children because he was drunk. The mother and other child suffered minor injuries so it is not as though he mowed them down too.

“It seems to me that hit-and-run ought to be treated as a more serious crime.”

I agree, particularly in the case of someone hitting a pedestrian. I’m not interested in throwing the book at someone who hits a parked car and leaves but hitting a pedestrian and fleeing should probably be a felony.

@pentamom

Bringing my heart into this- I’m a cyclist. And although getting hit from behind by a passing motor vehicle is statistically very rare, very often the cyclist is well lit and riding legally in their own lane, and for some reason the motor vehicle ends up in the bike lane, and the cyclist ends up dead. And it’s just a tragic accident since obviously the driver didn’t intend to kill the cyclist. Sometimes there’s a slap on the wrist charge. And a great deal of sympathy for the driver “who has suffered enough”. And I get the logic behind “shit happens” and there’s no point in essentially getting revenge. You can’t bring that the dead.

But I also think too many get behind the wheel and don’t take their responsibility seriously enough. If I were the dictator, drinking or talking on a cell phone while driving would be punished severely enough that they would be exceedingly rare.

I don’t think we should punish drunk drivers for being unlucky enough to have a four year old run out in front of them. We should punish drunk drivers for driving drunk, and potentially killing someone. For me, the punishment should fit the part you have control over (driving drunk) not the outcome (someone happened to die). But, the punishment SHOULD fit the POTENTIAL outcome. Driving drunk, you’re more likely to kill someone, so driving drunk, you should be punished for the extra risk that you are putting on everyone else.

Good thing I don’t make the rules, because I know they’re not practical. But this is my heart talking.

(re-reading this I guess I’m also saying that drifting into the bike lane and near missing a cyclist should be punished as if you had hit the cyclist. And that one, sadly enough, is sometimes fully intentional)

I was going to post the link to the petition supporting the mother, but that’s already been done.

While I’m here, I just have to comment on Dolly’s “I am not going to get accidentally pregnant. I have an IUD which is extremely effective” statement. My good friend had a very effective IUD – so effective, she thought, that she went ahead and scheduled a tummy tuck, knowing that three kids was more than enough for her.

Now she has four, and a not-so-tight tummy. She loves that fourth, but still shudders and thinks evil thoughts when she sees the IUD commercials on TV touting how effective they are. Having a fourth was NOT on the order of business in her life.

If God REALLY wants you to have a baby, you’re going to have that baby. My husband had a vasectomy, and both of us still say “barring God’s sense of humor and a really bad doctor, we’re done” – you never know.

FWIW – it’s a jury full of people like Dolly that got the mother in this situation in the first place.

Regarding cyclists:
In my state the bike lanes end before the intersection, the obvious meaning is the cyclist must merge left into the right lane. This also means they have to observe and honor the right turn of the vehicle in front of them when they have to merge. Do you have any idea of how many times I have had to slam on my brakes to avoid a cyclist going past me on the right? Even though I, not they, have the right-of-way?

I ride as a cyclist, a motorcyclist, and drive a cage. The most egregiously stupid and arrogant are the first two; the most dangerous, inattentive, and arrogant to the first two is the last. Fault all around.

Pedestrians can be as bad. I drive my children to school and pick them up. I was taught as I child, in the late 50s, that I had to be aware and careful on the streets. I could count on my fingers and toes, as well yours, how many kids have crossed in front of me without looking whatsoever, as well give me the “look” or the finger because I almost hit them (the finger ones hear from me). My HS daughter says that too many of her friends think it’s the driver’s responsibility, after all they can sue if they get hit because it isn’t their fault. Hate to tell them they can lose by their own negligence, not to mention that money doesn’t compensate for loss of use of limbs or brain damage. Free range kids know better, so I can only assume her friends are products of helicopters.

Again, I must say since so much of this has to do with crosswalks, every intersection has a crosswalk whether marked or not. It is pretty much standard across the US unless your state specifically calls a crosswalk “marked only”, and I haven’t found one yet so please enlighten me.

IIRC, the driver sped up before hitting the child, as well did a hit-and-run. The mother isn’t to blame here. Maybe the driver isn’t either, as the 4 yo did the run, but aren’t we as drivers, and riders, supposed to slow and become cautious in such a situation?

“Cyclist Abe runs a red light, and a car swerves to miss him, NEARLY but not ACTUALLY hitting Abe or any other cars. Cyclist Ben runs a red light, and a car swerving to miss him ACTUALLY hits another car killing the other driver. Abe and Ben did the same thing. Should their punishment be the same?”

Initially, yes, they both failed to obey a traffic control device. Ben may be charged with more because of the death that ACTUALLY happened. You cannot punish Abe for a crime that he did not commit.

“How about Ryan gets his blood alcohol up to .196%, then drives his Porche at 132 MPH but is pulled over before he kills anyone.
Or
John Doe gets drives with a BAC of .10, runs a stop sign and kills a pedestrian.
Was John’s crime worse than Ryan’s?”

Yes and no. They both drove drunk and disobeyed traffic control devices. Ryan didn’t kill anyone, so he should not be punished for it.

According to your argument, merely driving a car is grounds for being locked up for vehicular manslaughter. Every second a car is on the road there is the potential for running stop signs and red lights and speeding. Should every person caught driving a car then just pre-emptively get a traffic ticket for crimes they MIGHT commit while driving? Of course not! Your logic makes no sense to me in this case.

“According to your argument, merely driving a car is grounds for being locked up for vehicular manslaughter.”

No, that’s not my argument. Running a red light is illegal. Driving a car is not. I’m talking about penalty for actually breaking the law. I’m not talking about creating new laws.

“Yesterday I ran a stop sign. I wasn’t drunk but I was doing something for my kid and didn’t see it until it was too late (it was a dumb stop sign).”

Good point. I guess I’m really more bothered by pre-meditated law breaking. And I know that invalidates my own drift into the bike lane point, since people don’t generally intend to drift out of their own lane. And yes, I know there are a lot more cyclists who decide to run stop signs. I’m equal opportunity 🙂

“An increased penalty is unlikely to change the odds analysis in their minds. Increased arrests might.”

True. As I keep saying, I didn’t say my gut was logical on this.

“Yes, because the result was dramatically different.”

What I’m getting at is the penalty being related to the choice you made, not the choice you didn’t make. As it is, your penalty is largely dictated by things outside your control.

Back to our poor mother, she chose to cross the road at that point, but a) that was legal and b) I think considering how often it happens, and how rare it is that people get killed doing it, it could be considered a safe decision. The mother is being penalized for the dramatically different result, not what a reasonable person would expect as the result.

A large part of a drunk driver’s penalty is based on the actual result of their action, not on the reasonable prediction of the result of their action. And I’d say the same is even more dramatic for cell phones. Even texting while driving is a minor slap on the wrist, unless you kill someone.

But can you say that someone dying is a “reasonable prediction” for drunk driving when the vast majority of people who drive drunk don’t kill anyone? Isn’t the “reasonable prediction” that you will make it home without a tragedy because that is, in fact, what happens most of the time? If we punish every DUI as if someone died, we are punishing every one based on the worst and rarest result.

ok, last post from me, because we’re getting nowhere. This conversation has made me re-think and change (somewhat) my position, but I think we’ve arrived at the agree to disagree point. At least for me.

I think the penalty should be based more on the part you have control over, and less the part you don’t. Maybe not 100:0, but much more towards the choice part than it is.

If drunk driving is really all that safe, then maybe people who do happen to kill someone while driving drunk should not be punished so severely. Mostly I don’t like the amount that luck plays into it. In fact, from my rough completely unscientific survey, your penalty also seems to depend on who you kill. For example, hitting a mom or a veteran will get you more time than hitting a homeless person. And if you happen to be a hot-shot investment banker who’s 7 figure income depends on having no felony convictions, you can get off without even being charged (ok, that one wasn’t DUI, it was asleep at the wheel hit and run)

And in this case, what role did her choice come into play (she chose to cross the road, along with the other passengers, and thousands of people every day across America) and what part was beyond her control (the drunk driver and other passenger darting out). I think that she was even charged means she’s penalized for the part she didn’t have control over, or else at the very least, everyone else who crossed the road with her would have been charged.

Bottom line, the penalty should be more for the choices we make, not our bad (or good) fortune.

Dolly, None of us here have a reading comprehension problem. The “people like Dolly” is a reference to your complete lack of empathy for and hatred of poor people and your belief that they should not even be allowed to reproduce as expressed in several different threads on this blog and not just this one; not what you say you would do specifically in this case. Further, you don’t truly think she was not guilty. You think she did something to deserve parenting classes, therefore has some degree of guilt.

Yes, Dolly and you do that by CHOICE because you enjoy it and, apparently, have money to spend on classes and books and a way to get to said classes. Being ORDERED into parenting classes that you have no money to pay for, no transportation to and no money for babysitters for your remaining children, as you would have liked this woman to be, is punishment. It being suggested that you NEED parenting classes is insulting.

Dolly – Not that I accept your excuse – but just humoring you for the moment: even if you believe that parenting courses are the best thing that ever happened to you, YOU don’t get to decide that OTHERS need to take them. Regardless of what their socioeconomic status is.

I had to take classes as part of qualifying to be an adoptive or foster parent. Some of them were good food for thought, while others were designed for people who had never cared for a child before – “this is how you change a diaper” – pretty lame for many attendees. Thing is, it was MY choice to go down that path.

And usually from what I gather, “parenting classes” which parents are forced by the courts to take focus on how not to abuse and neglect your kid. So yeah, sending her to such a class is equal to saying she was a shitty mother. Can we agree there is no need to add insult to injury here?

And to turn it around, has anyone on this site ever apologized to me or admitted they were wrong when it came to me? I will give Uly credit for agreeing with me and sticking up for me yesterday. But let’s just say everyone who has got into it with me has not all had such a moment.

“Maybe nobody here has “admitted they were wrong””

Good point. Finding out that you’re wrong can be painful, but very valuable. I have a goal of discovering I’m wrong more often. Unfortunately, I also have a bad case of SIWOTI syndrome. But knowing I have a problem is the first step.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/kathryn_schulz_on_being_wrong.html

Dolly,
There is a thing called hubris. I’m glad you’ve read “all” the parenting books, but have you and your husband showered naked with your children? That was a “Dr. Spock” recommendation back in the 50s and 60s. He was the authority on the subject of “child-rearing”, and my wife’s parents followed his recommendations. Sadly, my wife still compares me to her father.

Reading books on parenting only means you’ve read books on parenting and a lot of them are really, really bad. Went through it 17 and 15 years ago and they were wrong, stupid, and damaging, and we are still dealing with the fall-out of “experts”. The Japanese view that you should “run (or walk) on flowing water” is superior to that of the experts.

Shawn
I also meet to add that this drunk driver that killed her so, my godson. This is his 2nd drunk driving hit & run & under a perscription drug. Who was silly enough to let this man go a 2nd time? Why is he not in jail this is what alot of people don’t know. His excuse was he thought he hit a tree. Hitting a tree is wrong also. He got off on a 2nd hit & run. What judge lets this type of thing happen. Is the judge a friend of the drunk driver or did he/she just start off bad that morning? What is it I know alot of people would like to know how this charge ended up on a mom that has always made sure she did right every day of her life. Thanks again.

Thanks for finally writing about > Free Range Kids » UPDATE!
! Outrage of the Week: Mom Convicted in Death of Her Son (Who Ran Across the Street) < Liked it!

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