A Boy, A Dad, A Tragedy and A Big Question

I suppose pain is more bearable when there is someone to blame. Or rather, we can distance ourselves and pretend it could never happen to us because someone else is at “fault”. In this case, the father needs a hug rather than a pointer finger.

It seems we must always find someone or something to blame….. perhaps it takes the community’s mind off the tragedy of a child’s death to vilify the father…. or maybe it makes us think that an accident couldn’t happen to our own child because we would never do something so foolish. Unfortunately, blame doesn’t actually make anything any better.

We live in a society that does not believe in accidents any more

I’d have to say I disagree with that. Not in this case in particular, but look at how the media refers to every car collision as ‘an accident’ before all (or hardly any) of the facts are in. If the collision included some behavior that reliably increases the chance of a collision, then it is not ‘an accident’. There are two parts to ‘accident’: unintended and unpredictable. Although the only car collisions that are intended are insurance fraud and demolition derbies, many that are reasonably predictable are still referred to as ‘just an accident’. I’m talking about DUI, and driving with cellphone in particular.

Every parent’s worst nightmare. These things usually happen when the parent is not right there, but that doesn’t mean that the parent’s being there makes it a crime.

I agree with you – the parents in that community should be rallying behind that dad and demanding that charges be dropped (assuming there isn’t more to the story). Really, who hasn’t had a moment where their little one strayed in the wrong direction while the parent’s back was turned? Come on, people.

This is what I mean when I say that all our trends toward imposed “sensitivity” (AKA political correctness) do nothing to actually make people more caring toward each other. If anything, people nowadays have less ability to actually feel compassion from their hearts.

If people really wanted to blame someone, why not the person wielding the lethal weapon? The driver was never charged with anything. Why? Because in our society, we’d rather charge a grieving father with murder than admit that driving is dangerous? The driver could have been speeding and texting, but because they stopped and took the kid to the hospital, all’s forgiven?

That is horrific.

I have a 5yo. We go to the park. We have friends across the road. That could be me or my husband. Except that we no longer live in the USA, and I would hope that the authorities in Australia would understand that “Just stay here, I’m going to talk to so-and-so for a moment,” when said to a 5yo, might actually not be obeyed, through no fault of the parents.

No Words.
My prayers are with the family.

Addendum: It is out of respect for the life of the child that the man is being held for bail. His sorrow is nothing compared to the tragic loss and pain suffered by the dear child. I imagine he is not complaining a bit but is grief stricken and in shock, enough so that if he is humbled by this due process, it will reveal his true nature and whether he is a worthy father. How tragic a test.

@Suzanne. I am sorry, but your mentality is the very hogwash–and I can think of more harsh words, but I’ll restrain myself–that is driving this very level of insanity.

Have you even read Lenore Skenazy’s book? Do you even know what Free Range parenting is? I doubt it. I am sorry if my post is inflammatory & bad form–after all, we’re supposed to be able to debate topics without tearing each other up–but your post, frankly, was so offensive on so many levels I hardly know where to begin.

How about the sexism?

Yes, the blatant sexism. To hear you speak, fathers are incompetent. Fathers are stupid. Fathers don’t know, don’t care, don’t give a damn, and sure as hell can’t be trusted. Anytime something goes wrong, anytime there’s any goof-up, you can blame the meat-head men of the world for all of it.

Yes, you are asserting as much with what you said. I know many wives & mothers–not just fathers & husbands–who would take total offense at what you said, and for good reason.

How dare you! You are so out-of-line, I don’t think there’s a yardstick long enough to measure the outrage I feel reading it.

And then there’s the whole “being held accountable for actions and lack of attention to detail.”

This is the whole mentality which Free Range preaches against, and rightly so–the amount of “attention to detail” you seem to think we ought to have to perform in our parenting lives. It’s ridiculous and outrageous what you people expect of us. How the hell are any of us supposed to go to the bathroom, much less catch-up with adults over a cup of coffee, say, once a week–with those expectations? They are blatantly out of balance, and I’m sick of it frankly.

If it were up to you, my parents would be in jail for letting me ride on the back of an open-bed pickup truck–at 55 mph. no helmets or anything. If it were up to you, back in 1987 Jessica McClure’s parents would’ve had baby Jessica taken from them and given to perfect parents with a state-approved, total risk-free–and boring!–living situation. Someone who has a home next to a lake & their child, despite miles of fencing and tons of diligence to prevent this, suffers a tragedy when their child escapes them anyway and drowns in the lake–they would be in jail, and their child would be placed in a home miles and miles from any sort of body of water.

Thankfully, “Suzanne,” not all of society “thinks” like you do. I place “thinks” in quotation marks because, frankly, I don’t know that I consider it thinking at all. It’s the typical action plan of MORONS, frankly, and many of us here–with our children in one piece and functioning just fine, thank you–are tired of you judgmental snobs asserting such a ridiculous standard.

I surely hope your type of “thinking” (again, I feel the need for quotes) doesn’t totally overtake this country. I’m sick of it, and so are many of us here. Frankly–shove it.

LRH

I just read up more on the story: “His lawyer, Jessica Stern, called the whole thing an unfortunate situation. She said Robertson only found that he was the boy’s father two days ago.
“Mr. Robertson was there the entire time, he picked his son up in his arms. He was arrested with blood all over his shirt,” Stern said.”

As usual, I made a typo, although it could be worked-in as-is without being totally wrong.

To wit: when I mentioned “they [the parents whose child escapes their home & drowned in a nearby lake] would be in jail, and their child would be placed in a home miles and miles from any sort of body of water,” obviously–if the child had died, that would be impossible. Even so, one could say–if this couple in this scenario had other children besides the one which had died in this scenario, then THOSE children would be removed from the home.

Suzanne, my dear–no one is arguing that it was tragic that the child died. No one is suggesting that we be willy-nilly about safety. If you know anything about Lenore & her cause, you know fully well that she advocates safety precautions. She advocates bicycle helmets for children, for instance, and car safety seats–and although I think it was great how I & others used to ride in an open-bed pickup truck as children, I doubt she’d advocate that either, and that’s fine.

What is NOT fine is this: the mentality that does not accept that sometimes accidents happen, despite REASONABLE precautions undertaken by a parent. Expectations these days are way out of control. Heck, growing up–and I’m only 42–my parents had 2 guns in their bedroom, they were NOT locked up and they were at GROUND level–I even knew where they stored them. Did I ever touch them? No, I didn’t. They made it clear to me–I was NEVER EVER allowed into their bedroom, EVER, for ANY reason–PERIOD. That was the common approach to such a situation, and if I had disobeyed and wondered in there anyway and a tragedy resulted–the thinking would’ve probably been (assuming I wasn’t 2 years old or something) “well there’s only so much you can do, and children need to listen.” This would NOT have meant that people were saying that I as a child deserved what I got, but rather it was a natural consequence of my not doing as my parents told me.

Now, my parents could store those guns in the attic, locked, unloaded, buried under 200 pounds of wood boxes–and yet, despite all of that, if I somehow managed to climb into the attic, pick the locks, and shove aside 200 pounds of weight (and I’m a child, now!), AND ALSO somehow manage to get my hands on the bullets, AND figure out how to load the weapon (are you still with me!)–despite how totally far-fetched all of that is, and despite the fact that you’re obviously talking about a situation where my parents have done more than enough to ensure that nothing bad happens–STILL, there are some that would argue my parents should be prosecuted.

That thinking is absolutely OUTRAGEOUS.

And yes, this playground situation is no different.

So there are cars around. So what? I grew up playing on a road with drivers going 55 mph, at age 8–yes, age 8–I was riding a Big Wheel on the road. NOT in my driveway, but the road itself. I was taught how to watch-out, and was told strongly that I had better do so or else–and I was allowed to play.

People everywhere did it, no one for a minute considered it irresponsible.

Now, people I meet won’t allow their children to play on 25mph roads which have 1/20th of the traffic on them that road of ours did, even with their children being the same age.

Traffic hasn’t changed that much. Drivers & driving hasn’t changed that much. Kids & their abilities to judge haven’t changed that much.

Society has changed that much.

And it’s wrong.

We think that everything MUST be risk-free, even if it stifles life and makes it not worth living to start with. I’m not talking about making risks minimal & taking reasonable precautions–which no one, including Lenore–would have a problem with–no, the issue is, the expectation has become that NOTHING can EVER go wrong, EVER, or you’re a bad parent who ought to have your children taken away.

That is wrong.

And anyone that thinks this father was reckless & deserving of legal prosecution (assuming the facts of the case are as they seem to be), they are wrong. It’s not a matter of a difference of opinion, such people are just wrong and no one of any importance should be listening to them.

Such people need to wake-up, or shut-up. They’re poisoning this country, and poisoning child-hood.

LRH

Having survived 2 road accidents (one at about age 6) accidents happen the father isn’t to blame but the drivers speed needs to be checked.

The more I think about this, the more it bothers me. This could have been me if my 18 month old had gotten hit by a car when he went on his own little walkabout a year ago. I could be sitting in a cell right now for involuntary manslaughter, because the wind from an oncoming storm blew our locked front door open while I was in the can. What does that say about our society when a parent could be condemned for taking less than 5 minutes to themselves to go to the bathroom without their child tethered to them? If something had happened to him, I would have been devastated. I couldn’t imagine being charged, as the man in this case was, on top of all that grief. I am a good parent. I do try to keep him safe, but even the most diligent parent can’t protect their child from every threat at all times. Sometimes bad shit is going to happen, and we need to stop pointing the finger at others to make ourselves feel better when it does. If this behavior progresses, eventually we’ll all find ourselves behind bars for mistakes made or accidents. After all, nobody is perfect.

@Sarah at Bella Luna Toys You actually did the same thing blaming Jessica’s parents. As I remember they didn’t know the well was there or they didn’t know it had become uncovered.

Peter, bravo. That was so well said.

This is tearing at my heart, too. I can’t begin to imagine how that poor father must be feeling right now.

On a related note, I’ve been seeing a lot of blame in the blogosphere in the last year; twice, there have been incidents I know of in which a child died and people left comments/sent tweets blaming the mother. I think this phenomenon is only going to get worse.

I’m concerned about the suggestion that the driver should be charged. There are definitely cases where a driver is doing something negligent and should be held accountable for it. But hitting a child who runs out right in front of your car is a terrible, awful, accident, and it could happen to anyone. I don’t see any evidence that the driver was driving unsafely. Let’s not, in our sympathy for the father, rush to blame someone else without good cause.

This is horrible. We should stop the judgement and be grieving with him. I agree that many place blame and judgement to allow us to feel that this could never happen to our family because we would never have done this. We all make mistakes. This poor father is paying the ultimate price for a brief moment of what some will call poor judgement. I’m aching thinking of how I’d feel.

LMK, on the other hand, if he’d been with the kid for five years he’d know whether or not this five year old was able to be left alone near a street. Some are, some aren’t, and it’s easy to misjudge when you’re not used to a certain kid.

A father in Utah committed suicide after being charged and sentenced to jail for his 5 year old son’s accidental death.

I hope it makes society FEEL better this father will never allow another accident to happen again.

My 5 year old brother was killed this same way, only my MOTHER was across the street, coaching him how to cross a street properly, preparing him to walk to school in the fall.

A beloved cowboy hat he was wearing flew off his head and he suddenly turned and ran in front of an oncoming car to retrieve it.

They tried to charge the poor woman who hit him with SOMEthing – she had her own horrified children in the car wailing as she was beating her head against her car. I knew she would carry the same grief and guilt the rest of her days, as we would.

My father was called home from work. I remember him calmly talking to the police and thinking somehow Daddy was going to make everything alright. After the police and ambulance left, he picked up a kitchen towel and took my mother into their bedroom. Hearing their agonized cries through the door, I knew things would never be alright again.

Their marriage had not been the greatest, but he never once blamed my mother or faulted her in any way. He knew how much my mother loved her precious son.

It’s been almost 50 years ago, and I still grieve to this day. Tears are running down my face as I type this. I cannot imagine the damage to our family, or to my fragile mother, if she had been arrested or held at fault.

This isn’t ‘justice’. This is cruel and evil.

Thank you for your compassion. May it spread!

Suzanne, held accountable? You don’t think losing your child in that matter is consequence enough for a pure accident?

Having started walking to school at age 4, I do not believe it was “predictable” that this child would disobey his father and run into the street, unless he was known to do that regularly. Possible, yes. But at some point, we can’t control for every possibility. The human race would die out because we’d all be afraid to drive to the store to buy food.

And I’m curious about the driver, too. Maybe it was unavoidable, but when you are driving past a park, you slow down and watch for little kids. Did this driver?

The street was next to the playground so the speed limit should have been 15mph, enough so that a diligent driver had enough time to stop if a child suddenly appears. There is a reason why speed limits are lower next to schools and playgrounds! It is because children appearing in the street has for decades been viewed as the normal reality of playground and school zones. If the driver was going more than 15mph then the driver clearly should have been charged. If the driver was going less than 15mph and the child was still killed then the entire location of the playground and street needs to be reviewed. Have they foolishly allowed for shrubbery and car parking along the road beside the playground? Cars block views and children can dart out from them. The side of the road along the playground needs to be a no parking zone. If it is not, then it is city engineers who are to blame, assuming we have to have someone to blame.

“If the father had taken his son to the park 30 seconds later, the kid would not have run in front in of that car. If the driver hadn’t remembered his hat, he would have left 1 minute later. If the timing of traffic lights had been different, he would have missed the boy. If he’d stopped for a donut, he would have missed the boy. If he hadn’t stopped for a donut, he would have missed the boy. If the friend had stayed in the house to watch the football game, the father wouldn’t have seen him and the boy would be alive today. If the squirrel had come down the tree 10 seconds earlier, the boy would have been distracted by the squirrel and wouldn’t have run out in the street until after the car had passed.”

Hi Peter, this is actually an interesting cultural issue. Some years ago I was in a certain asian nation and a taxicab carrying a western tourist from hotel to airport was in an accident. The tourist was arrested and sent to jail. The reason was that if he had not taken the taxi that day, the taxi would not have been where it was to be in the accident.

Scott, my city doesn’t have special speed limits around parks, so please don’t assume it is such everywhere.

This story is heartwrenching and a terrible tragedy, but everyone else who said so is right: It was an unfortunate accident, a tragic one indeed: but no one MADE any of this happen. Peter has it right – there are too many variables.

When I was 17 I had a similar incident to one shared a few posts above me. I was driving down the road at 35mph (posted speed limit) when a girl on a bike came out a side street and smacked right into the right rear fender of my car. I stopped, checked her out, took her HOME, left my phone number, and went on to work.

HER mother called MY mother and a huge row ensued. My mom and I were being threatened with a lawsuit (so her mom said) for hitting her daughter!

Once my mom got the girl’s dad on the phone (after several phone calls of the shrieking kind) and told that dad, “LOOK! YOUR daughter hit MY daughter! YOUR daughter ran a STOP SIGN and hit the RIGHT REAR FENDER of my daughter’s car! There’s a dent! If anything, we should be suing YOU for repairs!” The dad was then heard questioning his daughter on these statements (the mother wouldn’t hear it from MY mom) and in getting confirmation, he said, “Thank you, we won’t be bothering you again.”

But there you see it – in 1985 – the same automatic “blame the driver”. The girl on the bike disobeyed the laws, but they wanted the LEGAL driver to be held responsible for something happening at the back end of her car.

So, no, I wouldn’t necessarily charge the driver unless there’s evidence the driver was speeding or didn’t even try to stop.

SHIT HAPPENS. And in this case, it’s tragic. But it’s not a felony, pre-planned, deliberate instance.

wrong, wrong, wrong.

The father could just have easily been in the playground talking to a friend and the son could have chased a ball into the street with the same result…or the father could have had both eyes on his tag playing child who was about to run into the street when said child was distracted by the fathers distraught yell, causing the child to look back instead of check for cars with the same result.

this is a tragedy…NOT a crime.

As for Suzanne, you’ve GOT to be joking…how sexist and stereotypical can you get?

OK, this is confessional time for me.

When my son was about two and a half, we were on our weekly grocery run. I started taking him to the grocery store when he was three weeks old, he was an old pro by this point in time about our routine.

Our weekly grocery shopping time was early in the morning on a weekday, when the store was emptier (and thus the weird emanations and behaviors of a toddler were likely to be less intrusive on other shoppers). I allocated plenty of time to this trip, in part to allow my son to get out of the cart and walk freely – literally free range, I suppose.

On the way out, he and I usually had a snack outside on some tables on the walkway by the store. At this particular stage, he had become interested in “free books”, the real estate and ad circulars in newspaper boxes available by the tables. He liked to take one out and look at the pictures while he had his snack.

On this particular day, he was “in the zone”, concentrating heavily on the pictures of houses and his cookie or carrots or whatever it was he was noshing on, well after I’d finished my coffee. I had a cart full of groceries that were wilting a little in the sun, and today a big bag of kitty litter and a bigger bag of dog food to schlep over that didn’t fit in the cart.

We were parked opposite the tables, and there were almost no cars in the parking lot. The entrance to the parking lot is such that it’s used almost exclusively by cars coming to shop at the grocery store; the other shops in the little strip weren’t even open yet, and any car that came in to shop would most likely want to park closer to the store entrance.

I told my son we had to get up and go, but he didn’t want to. He was not whiny about it, he said something like “me want look” or something to indicate he was happy reading his book. So I said, OK, I’m going to go right over to the car (30 feet away across the lane) and I’ll watch you the whole time. My thought at the time was, well, he’s been very good about staying in one place in general, he’s happy here, I’ll get this heavy kitty litter and dog food put away now and he can linger a little more. I told him, please stay right here, understand? And he said he would, and I believed him because he’d been pretty good about this before. He never had been a clingy or “run after” kid (my littlest one is, by much contrast) so I didn’t think much of it.

So I left him there, keeping an eye out on the entrance, which had no traffic in it, and him all the while as I dragged the heavy can of litter and bag of dog food over to the back of our car. The table he was at was next to the wall of the store, one of two sets of tables.

As I loaded the bag in and closed the back of the car, two things happened simultaneously. A car came into the lot, going very fast (aVolvo wagon, somewhat ironically) not only too fast for the lot and time of day but pretty much going at street speeds, something I’d never seen before or since in this parking lot.

And my son, for some reason of two year old logic, decided he HAD TO BE WITH ME RIGHT NOW, and as I watched him, he got up from the table and started RUNNING across the sidewalk up to the edge of the curb.

The timing was such that he just stepped off the curb right before the speeding car came to the point in the lot.

I did the only thing I could do – I YELLED, “STOP RIGHT NOW RIGHT THERE!” I am not generally a shouter, fortunately, and my son was generally a good listener. So…he stopped. Right on the curb. The car sped by a fraction of a second later.

Now, as is the case of such moments of stress, I had a severe reaction right after this incident. As soon as I had run across and scooped him up, that’s when fear and panic set in. I was filled with remorse and self-loathing that I could’ve let my little boy almost be killed by a car through negligence. I had to call my wife up as soon as he was safely strapped in his car seat (where I practically squeezed the breath out of the poor boy in triple-checking the tightness of the straps) to confess and tell her what a terrible Dad I had been. This fear-stress-reaction has stayed with me ever since: as I type this, the whole scene is still vivid (I can recount to you exactly what he was wearing) and my body feels sick, and my pulse races a bit.

What I couldn’t focus on, and what I still have to tell myself intellectually, is all the things that combined to go wrong to create this situation in the first place, and all the things that went right to prevent a real tragedy.

Did I make an error in judgement in leaving a two and a half year old by himself? Could be. I knew my child, and knew he liked the adventure of being “away” from his parents and also that he was extremely consistent about sitting and concentrating on his activity. But, the fact is, he was two, and two year olds, even the most consistent of them, often do impulsive things and change their minds extremely fast. So I accept that yes, I made a bad call here.

But parents make bad calls all the time. What I had done was make a risk-reward assessment. Is this parking lot busy at this time of day? No. Can I see where the cars come in and then cut across in front of the car, under normal conditions, if need be? Yes. Will my son freak out if I leave him here? On the contrary, he’d freak out if I took him away from his pleasant activity. Is there something in it for him? Yes, he can practice being a “big boy” and enjoy his break a little longer. Is there something in it for me? Yes, I save having to take two trips with my son unwillingly strapped into the shopping cart.

The potential accident depended on something relatively unusual, which was some idiot deciding for whatever reason to use a grocery store parking lot for practice for the Indy 500. My son had to be suddenly out of character and not pay attention to my instructions and also actually care I was on the other side of the ‘street’. And then he had to not pay attention to me when I yelled “STOP RIGHT NOW!”

But he did pay attention. My fail-safe here, as it turned out, was he was just a good listener. I knew him well enough at one level, he knew me well enough.

I’m under no illusions I wasn’t extremely lucky he didn’t take the extra few steps out into the driveway and was hit by the car. Every time I think about this I feel this unbelievable combination of I-am-so-lucky and how-could-I-have-been-so-stupid. I expect I have had some bad “Anti-Free Range” moments as a result, where I have erred on the side of caution, knowing we had had such a close call on this particular occasion.

At the same time, I’m working on it. We have a neighborhood mailbox (no individual mail delivery) and my son, now nearly seven, loves to get the mail. The mailbox is in sight from our yard about a half a block away. But it’s across the street. My son is, well, just unusually good about checking to cross the street. If he’s with an adult, he insists (not the other way around) on holding hands. He does the Check-left-check-right check-left-check-right check-left, proceed to the middle of the street check-right hurry across the street thing as second nature. Despite this, every time he does his “chore” of going to get our mail, which his mother and I have agreed is a good way for him to build some independence, I get nervous and choke up.

Now if my son had been hit, in this town in Georgia, I suppose I’d be in jail now. Or perhaps even if he hadn’t been and the whole thing had been observed by another adult. (Trust me, as a stay at home Dad, back then, I was accustomed to being second-guessed openly by what seemed like half the women I ran into in the course of the day about everything from what I was feeding him to whether he had enough clothes on to whether I was warping him by my staying at home while his mom worked. Seriously. Topic for another day.) I wouldn’t be there for him, nor would I have been for my younger son, who has some special needs and requires some pretty intensive parenting.

What is the purpose of a Justice system that doesn’t recognize things like – sometimes mistakes are made; that tragedy is a chain of events, not a single malicious act, 99 times out of 100; that even when mistakes are made, it doesn’t mean that judgments that went into making the mistake are wrong; and that maybe we have to have some risk in our lives to make ourselves strong and worthy humans.

When I was my son’s age, crossing the street to the get the mail out of our mailbox was one of my chores. I don’t remember my parents ever once watching me do it. At six, sometimes under the eye of my older sisters and sometimes not, I had the run of the neighborhood. Between school and dinner, I wandered freely from friends’ houses to the woods to the old sand pits. There was danger aplenty and I got into scrapes every now and then, but I also learned to get out of them. It’s not like I wasn’t born with an inherent sense of self-preservation or danger.

And I do remind myself that yes, my son was born with those same instincts. I give _him_ full credit for recognizing a dangerous situation at some level with that car coming up so fast, or my yelling, or that he had disobeyed my instructions, or some combination thereof. Growing up is in large part finding your own common sense. But I don’t think it’s possible to develop common sense without a bed of experience.

My son doesn’t remember this incident with the car now — too young. But I think in some ways, he’s so good with the street crossing, perhaps this and other experiences had a cumulative effect on him. I must say that now, at six, I believe he has common sense about traffic.

I’m still nervous about him crossing the street to get the mail (I am a modern parent, a victim of my own times) but I am also immensely proud that he can do this. Sometimes he asks for “company”, but often not. He has far more confidence about his skills in some ways than I do (or I wouldn’t be nervous) and the only thing I really dread is…some nosy neighbor stopping him, or one of our constables stopping him on the street and asking him why he’s there and him ending up in some County foster home while I fight for my right to have my son learn to cross the street, within sight of our front door, alone.

Thanks for your post, Matt.

I have to say, I was knocked over by a car, when I was 8, crossing the road (alone) on the way back from my best friend’s house. I fractured my skull from crown to base, and it was touch and go as to whether brain swelling would kill me for the first 24 hours. At that time (nearly 25 years ago) I can’t imagine anyone would have criticised my parents for allowing me to negotiate the roads alone, and quite rightly too. But one does wonder what would happen now. I nonetheless hope to allow my children local journeys alone or with one another at a similar age… I think I have a good story to warn them with!

As for the original post – I fail to see the point of this punishment. It won’t save any lives, and the father has already suffered the most appaling punishment of all.

The Dad made a mistake. Let’s not forget that. His mistake was that he misjudged his boy’s maturity level – on behaving near busy streets and on being left in the park while the supervising adult walks away. What is disturbing, is the crimilization of simple mistakes in judgement. I would feel comfortable that my 5 year old could stay in a park while I walked across the street (within view) but I’d never leave the park without telling him. I am a safety freak, but I don’t believe that every accident is a crime – even if the results are tragic. This would only further chase parents off the streets and sidewalks and into their backyards and basements. Kids would never have any interaction with their neighbours (as is the current trend).
Close knit communities would be replaced with closed doors and pointing fingers: “I saw Mrs Jonson’s kid go right near the street to pick up a ball, so I called Children’s Aid.”
If I were writing regulations, they’d require mandatory lessons on crossing and playing near (and on) streets: what to do when a ball or hat rolls across the road or down a sewer grate.

My heart goes out to the parents of the boy who died. I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to live with the mistakes and their tragic consequences.

omg, this is horrible. I can’t believe the father is being charged. He will have enough hell to live through the rest of his life playing what if? – he certainly didn’t do anything to justify being charged with a crime.

Forwarded link for these comments to reporter at AJC who covered the story, just so he knows. Wish I had the name of the officers who arrested him to send it to also. The legal mindset here has got to change! The real blame for this mess goes only one place – only we’re not ALLOWED to blame “THEM”.
God this whole thing makes me so mad!

Wait, wait, wait: SOMEONE ELSE hit this little boy with their car and killed him, and HIS FATHER is being charged with manslaughter?!?!

There is something very, very wrong with a world in which this could happen.

(I’m not saying the driver should necessarily be charged, either; I don’t know enough about the circumstances. Accidents do happen, that’s the whole point. I’m just saying that taking your 5-year-old to the park and crossing the street to talk to someone while the 5-year-old is playing is NOT negligence on a par with, say, failing to provide the necessities of life, nor can it rationally be stretched to fit the definition of manslaughter, involuntary or otherwise. Lord tunderin’ Jayzus, there is something wrong with us.)

I better go read the book. I knew I would be saying some stupid things since I was completely reacting and not thinking, as was pointed out to me. Most of us speak out of our own experience. Since I do not know any of you, I feel I can speak freely. But not without recoil. A mirror is a good thing and this is where we can find it in others.

My mentality is skewed against men, I think, and it may be because of my personal situations. But not until I received a verbal smack or two did I see it so clearly.

I think tragedy brings out opinions faster. It’s the way people think. I was trying to understand why in the world would they put the man in jail? And so I went on a trip down that road. I had heard of it before with the baby stroller left by the rr tracks. The parents were in the ICU with their baby and also being arraigned (or something). Can you imagine?

What I was experiencing, emotionally, when I read this was a lot of different things:
#1 My mom’s baby sister was hit by a car back in 1928 or so. This destroyed their lives and certainly scarred my mom, who had been holding her hand before she ran out… My Grandma spoke these words in the ambulance on the way to the hospital: “It’s because we’re such a quarrelsome family” meaning God did it on purpose. Second tragedy. Third, since my mom heard it. Grief is like that. People tend to respond without thinking clearly.

So it seems reactions are the second culprit in these kind of situations. Are we all doing the same thing now in reacting to me? Smash the opposition? Or try to be deeper and think Why does she say these things?

One thing on my mind when I responded initially was the recent upset I have been feeling with a local father. (this would be #2) His child is the one who crawled under their van when the cd rolled away from her. It was her favorite dvd, actually. The dad stopped the car because he thought her heard something. Her arms had tire marks on them. When they went to the ER she told the doctor she didn’t like it under the car. That was all she would say (4 y/o). They cried out of relief and thankfulness since this could easliy have turned out differently, like it has for so many others.

However, when all is said and done, the very same dad a year or two later brought his kids out to the car and said “stay here while I go back inside” to get something. Little dear who had survived the tire marks on her arm, now 6 instead of 3, got out of the car and ran back in to the building. No cars coming and no incident, but I still became upset that he would be so careless. I asked the mom if they would rather park next to the building next time, but she wanted to train the kids to listen instead. I figure it woud be better to have a living child rather than have her epitaph be “she didn’t listen”.

Am I out of touch? Am I paranoid? Or do I love more? I always end up on the “sexist” side that believes the men are less innocent. Terrible thing to say. I just want to be confident in men as our compatriots. And so far I am let down. Not always, but almost. Sorry guys. Men are just as imperfect as women, but theirs is the role of the protector (any daggers ready to fly at me now?) and I cringe at the lack of it. Like leaving your purse on the floor as you go over to the mirror at the store, it’s gone before you know it. Protect with passion like I do my kids. My purse had pictures of them in it. At the same time as this incident I realized my husband had been clearly as neglectful of his wife and she consequently felt vulnerable to being snatched away. In her heart she almost was…
Men do your job and we will do ours.

I am off to google stories of arrested parents due to accidents. The technical term is neglect. In no way do I a support the ourts doing terible things to famlies and children. Recently the news showed a man complaining his newborn daughter was stolen from the hopsital by the government (in NH). Unbelievable. Apparently the woman had been beaten and choked by the guy and her two other kids from her marriage had been hurt by him as well. They called him her “fiance”, a tip off that he was not a man of good principle but had gotten her pregnant out of wedlock (Old fashioned momma here). The child services had stepped in (and over) to remove the baby from the mother as they were trying to do with her other kids. I was thinking maybe she’s the one who tipped them off “now would be a good time to step in and help me!”

By the way, I confess to being that crazy woman driver.

Not kidding, you hit the nail on the head and it is paralyzing to think about the stupid things I have done behind the wheel.

Also, the one who said to keep the mouth shut when in an accident: He is right. Anything you say can be held against you.

Am I right?
I APOLIGIZE FOR BEING SO RANDOM AND OFFENSIVE, THAT IS AN INSIGHT THAT I HAVE BEEN PROTECTED FROM BY NOT SPEAKING AS MUCH AS I HAVE HERE. THNKS VERY MUCH

Almost that exact same thing happened to a girl in my class when we were in second grade. She and her father were crossing the road to get to a pond to ice skate. She started to cross after her father, saw a car coming and froze in the middle of the road. He, of course, had to witness her being hit by the car.

I can remember well how tragic it was, how awful for the father, how hard to comprehend for all of us, her classmates. I cannot imagine what good could possibly have come from charging the father with a crime. Nothing anyone could do to him could even come close to the pain of losing his child.

I live in Atlanta, and I came to this site thinking to post about this incident. I was hoping to find some resources on what I could to do help this father being charged with involuntary manslaughter. The only thing I can think of is to contact the DA’s office in protest and to contact the father’s attorney.

If anyone has any further suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

We have a son who turns 5 in December and a 17 month old daughter. We had been planning on letting our son go to the neighborhood park by himself next summer as part of our plan to free range him. He’s been going there since he started walking, and has known the way since before he cold talk. We’ve always been careful to drill him on how to cross streets. Often when we take him to the park, he runs ahead of us. As other posters have said, “This could have been us.”

I am sad the boy is dead and I am angry that instead of grieving with the father, the prosecutor’s office has decided to throw him into jail. There have been comments that the father only realized he was a parent two days ago, and suggestions that this somehow makes him more culpable. From my perspective, the fact he chose to take his son to the park rather than to shirk his parental responsibilities speaks well of him. He was probably across the street, saying to his friends, “Hey, can you believe it? I’m the father of a 5 year old boy…” when the accident happened.

This case is just asinine. This whole “someone has to be blamed” mentality is ruining this country. Sometimes there are just accidents.

I almost had something similar happen to me years ago. We were packing our van up for a trip and my oldest, then 3, followed me out of the house. We lived in Chicago and our van was parked across the street from the house.

My daughter came out onto the porch while I was coming out and I just assumed she would stay on the porch like every other time a similar situation happened. I crossed the street with my arms full and proceeded to load the van from the passenger side (which was facing the houses across the street.

I remember noticing a black SUV coming down the street and I got this uncontrollable urge to look up. Just as I did I heard tires screeching and came around the van in time to see my neighbor’s boyfriend grabbing my 3yo by the shoulder and yanking her out of the street and the oncoming Expidition (the front of this SUV was almost a foot taller than her).

She decided to come help me and just walked out from in front of the neighbor’s boyfriend’s big Suburban. There was no way the oncoming SUV would have seen her until it was too late. The SUV wasn’t speeding but would have crushed my daughter. Luckily the boyfriend was there, working on his car and saw her.

I was in tears and shaking so bad I could barely walk. I never would have expected her to follow me into the street without asking first because that is what we taught them and what she had always done before. I was a nervous wreck the rest of the trip and could only think, “what if Ricky hadn’t been standing right there?”

My daughter was just as traumatized as I was when she realized what had happened. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if she had been hurt or killed. Then on top of that being arrested and having my family destroyed. That’s just beyond cruel.

“Put that in your tailpipe and smoke it.” ~one of the many lovely members who refrain from using profanity.

Here is who I agree with:

Karen, on October 18, 2010 at 07:23 Said:
“@jen and @lmk—After reading some other articles about this sad story, I’m going to have to say I’m suspending judgement about whether the charges are “outrageous”. The man did not know he was the boy’s father until two days before the accident? To me that signals that there are complexities here that make this more than a “Could have happened to any of us” situation.
I agree with the comments that our culture has gone WAY overboard in terms of blaming parents for any accidental harm that comes the their child, I’m just not sure that is what’s happening in this particular incident.”

>>Bravo,Karen.

And that is it for me. This forum is not user-friendly unless you happen to be of the same mind. I am sorry to say I am more disheartened than before I arrived to find such nastiness abounding and hypocritical people in such a supposedly enlightened group. You’d think you were all old housewives, the way you cackle.
“I can’t believe they are charging the poor father! He just lost his son, how awful that they have to blame him” The poor father is a bum who might just have gotten HIS life saved by being incarcerated: momma bear is still on the loose! Good night and good riddance.

She’s gone? (Suzanne). Good riddance, if she’s going to be nasty and refuse to acknowledge that she started all the hostility which has come her way.

The poor father is a bum? Suzanne, if you’re still reading, what makes him a bum exactly? Is he a bum because he wasn’t perfect and a terrible accident occurred as as result? Were Jessica McClure’s parents bums? Were my parents bums because, at age 9 or so, I was allowed to run in the woods after dark with my cousin, and I ended up in the hospital when I ran into a bob-wired fence and it just missed my eyeball? (I still have a scar just above my left-eye to this day from that ordeal.) Was my grandaddy a bum because his grandchildren were always over on Sunday & he had a pile of junk in his yard (old refrigerators, wood planks, sheds with old fans locked up inside), and he allowed his grandchildren to play in this environment just as it was?

And no one was ever seriously injured, either?

Suzanne, by your definition, any parent that doesn’t have their child confined to the indoors 24 hours a day, or is only allowed outside if there are approximately 19 dozen state-licensed adults from the Department of Social Services on-hand to monitor every wiggle and motion even THOUGHT about, any parent that lets their child actually have a childhood–to you, apparently, ANY such parent is a “bum.”

You, Suzanne, have issues. I’m sorry that you do, but at the same time, I have a parenting job to do besides that, and I haven’t for one minute asked the likes of you what brand, quantity, and color of bubble wrap I should wrap my children in. Thank God you aren’t around to watch me allow my 3 ½ and 1 ½ year-old run up & down the sandy beach of our local lake–the entire length of it, mind you (easily 200 yards or so)–while I’m in the water merely keeping an eye on them from afar. You’d probably call me “psycho dad” and advocate social services to have my children removed from my home.

Sure, and what kind of life would they have then? They’d still be alive, sure (by the way, I just peeped into their rooms where they’re sound asleep, and you know what? they’re still alive under my care too, ha!), but what kind of life would it be? They’d probably never see a lake again. Even if they did, you’d be 2 inches away from them the entire time, and they’d not even be allowed to tip their toe in the water, much less run along the edge of it splashing in joyful glee.

Heck, they’d probably not be allowed in an 18-inch inflatable pool, not even if it were near the window of your living room where you could still watch. You’d be like that one woman I saw watching a group of 12-year olds in the pool at the apartment complex I used to live at–screaming at them to stay in the shallow end even though she herself can swim (I saw her do so numerous times), even though this is a finite-sized pool, and even though you’re talking about 12 year olds who demonstrated plenty of skill to handle themselves in the deep end.

Come to think of it, you’d probably not allow them into the pool at all to start with.

Instead, such kids would be stuck inside their entire lives, playing Nintendo Wii and watching another “Sponge Bob Square Pants” episode. They’ll be fat, overweight, and won’t know a darn thing about how to take care of themselves. Meanwhile, they’ll be sleeping in the same bed with you–just imagine what kind of sex-life that means for your husband! (dont’ come crying to us when he cheats on you)–they’ll never be allowed to flunk a test at school because you’ll always be fixing it for him (and assuming, of course, it’s the teacher’s fault that he’s a lazy-ass at home refusing to study).

Meanwhile, you will have no social life of your own. Your friends will never see you again–unless of course your son is with you (even if he’s 12 now and it’s summertime and the pool is open), and they get to go “poo poo” and “tinkle don’t stinkle” and all that sort of lame horseshit all the time, because as a friend to them on the adult level you’ve totally checked out, you’re nothing but your son’s mother now, you’re not even your own person anymore.

THIS is what you expect EVERYONE of us to do, to be that kid-absorbed, because if we’re anything but that, and 1 child out of 10,000 dies in a situation like this one, one in which every possible angle was covered on a reasonable level but yet still, despite the person’s best reasonable efforts, the worst still happened–well, that’s just not good enough for you. We have to be perfect, nothing less will do–any failure at all, no matter how remote or how unlikely and unpreventable at a reasonable level, is acceptable.

Well guess what Suzanne. If we have to be perfect to be a parent, you have no right to be one either. Because–no matter what you do, you are going to make a mistake, and I sure hope it doesn’t cost a child his or her life, but it may, and that’s just the way it goes, sad as it is.

In other words–you’re not going to be perfect, so by your own standard, you have no business being a parent either.

So there.

LRH

I always wanted to move back to the States — but, really, my husband and I would probably be in jail soon, because our kids grow up “free range”…

My youngest one fell off the swing several times — but now, with three and a half years — she climbs the highest trees, has a real good sense of balance, gets into stick fights with her brother and his friends, and is a very confident young child.

So long,
Corinna

this is really bad….never though that such things can also happen

Children have tunnel vision when it comes to roads. They do not see the cars. I am so glad I live in Australia – I have been to accidents involving children and cars. Not one of the ones I have attended have resulted in someone being charged (I would know if they did, they would come interview me and whatnot!)

Accidents happen. A child being hit by a car is a tragedy. But, if we were all charged for every accident we caused, there would be a hell of a lot of us incarcerated.

As far as Suzanne, there are many valid family arrangements. Some women are more inclined towards the “bread-winner” role, whereas some fathers are more the nurturing type. Quite frankly, it comes down to what works for your family. Try not to judge other configurations so harshly.

Suzanne – your kid is unattended while you are typing your posts. Please go pay more attention to him. You are a bad parent and if anything should happen to your poor child while you are selfishly using the computer when you should be staring at him with total focus then YOU are to blame for being such a rotten parent.

I don’t think that a felony charge is appropriate, or any really for this father I think, but I really reject this idea that we should be able to do all kinds of stupid dumb mistakes and then throw hands up and say “oh well, sh*t happens!”

BTW parents of BBQ’d children left in cars do not “suffer the consequence” of their actions -their children did :-/ And if you’re so distracted you forget an ENTIRE HUMAN in your vehicle you’re a danger on the roads.

Way back when drunk driving accidents became more prevelant, as it became more common for average people to have private vehicles, folks were appalled that anyone would consider charging a drunk with a crime after a car crash. “He feels so bad already.” “She would never have done that sober, it was just an accident.” “He can’t be blamed, he was drunk!” “She’ll have to suffer with the guilt the rest of his life, you don’t need to charge her!”

Post after post here lists incidents of, IMHO, totally inappropriate parenting and lack of supervision. Children, particularly preschoolers, simply don’t have the cognitive development to be that reliable. Sure, some feral kids do. Do you really want your child to be that self reliant as a preschooler? Really? Are you that lazy?

And no, I’m not a bubble parent. My kids take subways and trains by themselves as tweens. My elementary aged kids go to the corner store (on our busy street) alone. But I’m not going to cross a street and leave a preschooler unsupervised. And if I’m teaching my preschooler how to cross streets, an adult or older child will be with him on the other side to go through it step by step.

Being Free Range doesn’t mean abdicating your responsibility and throwing up your hands to say “Oh well!” when things foul up. On the contrary, it means a higher level of responsibility, to ensure your child can have autonomy safely.

“felony cruelty to children, reckless conduct and simple battery”

“Simple battery”? It wasn’t as if the poor guy tossed his kid out in the street in front of the car!

@wkh The thing is, the child in question was not a preschooler. I too would question the judgment of someone who crossed a street and left a 2 year old at the park, though I imagine some 2 year olds would be all right, and I’d still hesitate to charge the parent with anything. After all, what good would it do? But 5 years old is kindergarten age. Children at that age used to walk much further than across one street to school all the time in the United States. In some places they still do. Most 5 year olds can be trusted a short distance away from their parents across a street.

What if the father had been on the same side of the street as his kid, and the kid had run out chasing a ball and been hit by a car before the dad could do anything. Would the father be charged for not hovering over his 5 year old every single second? Heck, many 5 year olds are fast enough that even if you’re standing right next to them, they could run away from you chasing something and many parents couldn’t catch them. If they pulled away from you, ran into the street and got hit by a car, is that the parent’s fault? Do you have to literally tether the child to you to keep him safe? Again, I might try that with a 2 year old, but a 5 year old?

@Mommy I mean as in there are so many parents that do abuse their kids and should be prosecuted under “felony cruelty to children, reckless conduct and simple battery” , but here this poor guy is being treated as a criminal due to a tragic accident.

MommyMitzi you’re right–we need to comment on the stories at the other sites, too.

Lisa This is a bit off-topic, but I myself tire of hearing people go after cellular phone distractions with drivers. That’s the automatic reaction–‘were they using their cellular phone?” I don’t agree with that persecution. Why do they never ask “it was a teenaged male, he was near campus–was he looking at the females sunbathing in the grass?” Or “it was a single mother, was she refereeing your kids in the back seat rather than looking at the roads?”

How come people are so quick to want to make criminals out of someone who was distracted using their cellular phone, but nothing else? I think it’s a form of discrimination, a witch-hunt, even analogous to racism. Seriously.

As an example, in 1999, while I still lived in Tucson AZ, a woman was killed while jogging with her infant (the infant was in a stroller & survived) due to a driver distraction. Turns out it was a teenager fiddling with his car stereo. A cellular phone, GPS, texting etc–had NOTHING to do with it.

Do you think there were editorials in the paper or local news persecuting him? Any commentaries about “is changing the song you’re listening to THAT important? You killed someone because you just couldn’t STAND the idea of listening to ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’ as opposed to ‘Oops, I Did It Again’? I hope you’re proud of yourself!”

No, there was no such comments along those lines at all.

If this teenager had been distracted due to usage of a cellular phone, I guarantee you there would have been such a reaction. I guarantee you.

The difference between the reactions is, to me, nothing less than a form of discrimination, a witch-hunt. I don’t agree with it.

wkh I don’t think that people here, myself included, are suggesting that free-range means throwing your hands up & saying “oh well, stuff happens” with everything no matter how over-the-top it is. You will hear Lenore herself say that a parent does need to teach their child, and I think most of us here have the same thought about it also.

As for the various stories–frankly, I don’t find them appalling. I surely don’t consider that it was reckless or inappropriate parenting with the examples I mentioned–me running in the woods at night-time around age 9 or so & running into the bob-wired, my parents letting me ride in the back of an open-bed pickup truck. These things aren’t necessarily black & white, after all, it’s almost totally illegal to let your child ride in the back of an open-bed pickup truck anywhere, and I think most free-rangers would consider that going too far. (I don’t, but most others probably do, and that’s fine.)

Rather, it’s a matter of judgment, and people need to realize that there are different stances others take with regards to such matters, and to legislate too much is to stifle a parents’ right to make such judgments. Yes, there are some things we must come to an agreement on, we can’t give parents total 100% license to do whatever. I surely wouldn’t sanction someone throwing their child off a roof, for instance, or having them do horseplay on a motorcycle they’re driving themselves–at age 6.

The issue is, the line we’re drawing is getting, in many of our minds, stricter each year–and too much so, to the point of dampening any job at all in childhood. It used to be that only in extreme situations did we advocate intervention, but more & more we advocate intervention in almost every minor situations which don’t come anywhere near these extremes. When it’s to the point that someone wants to criminalize my mother’s parenting of letting me run in the woods in the dark at age 9. I’m sorry–that’s going too far.

LRH

@ wkh – The kid was 5, not preschool. And, yes, I expect that when I tell my 4 year old to stay in the yard while I walk across the street to talk to a neighbor that she’ll do exactly that. And, guess what? SHE DOES because she knows that she’ll go to time out if she doesn’t listen. Unless the child has mental delays, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect that a 5 year old told to stay in the park and play would stay in the park and play.

“BTW parents of BBQ’d children left in cars do not “suffer the consequence” of their actions -their children did :-/ And if you’re so distracted you forget an ENTIRE HUMAN in your vehicle you’re a danger on the roads.”

It’s not a matter of DISTRACTION; it’s a matter of HABIT. Humans are creatures of habit. It takes many times of doing something different to undue a habit, and many can never do it. In 99.999999999% of the cases where kids were accidently left in a car, the person who left them was undertaking a routine activity that they did every day but with the addition of taking the child who never otherwise went along. The most common time that kids are left in cars is when the parent (grandparent, babysitter) who never takes the child to daycare has to do it on their way to work one day. Having had an extremely organized (aka anal), responsible coworker who got partially to work before remembering she had a kid in the car to drop off at school (only remembering because the kid in question was not an infant and actually said “hey, you missed my school”) because she never took the kid to school, I can easily see how it happens.

This is the playground, I think, at Morgan and Boulevard.

http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=wl

Boulevard appears to be a very busy street, but Morgan does not. It is not clear, from the story I read, which one the dad crossed.

There is so much room, in this tragedy, for ugly assumption and finger-pointing. I know from personal experience that 5yo boys can be utterly unpredictable forces of nature. I also know that our cultural tolerance for that kind of chaos is critically low. There is certainly a *limit* on how much I trust my own 5yo, because I’m more aware, than anyone, of *his* personal limitations. But I’m also scared, and I don’t know which prompts what reaction.

We don’t trust our children, and no one wants to be responsible for a preventable tragedy.

Charges like this are, I guess, a comfort to everyone who desperately wants to believe that *their* child could never run into a street, because of their parenting prowess, at either discipline, supervision, or both.

But I’ll admit it. It could have been me.

@sgtmom

Your first two posts made me cry and your third made me gape in surprise. I too have been steeped in this very anti-male expectation that dads are more likely to abuse- but I’ve had to ulearn most everything I’ve ever been told, so I guess I’m not really surprised. Also, the older I get, the more i realize that cruelty and stupidity know no bounds of race, creed, gender, etc.
Anyway-
thanks for the stats- those were super interesting- and thank you for sharing A) your very personal and painful experience and B) the unbelievably sad story of that poor father.

@Suzanne
My child is born out of wedlock, and I don’t intend to change my unmarried status, since my lack of religious affiliation does not require a ceremony to officiate my love for my partner, who is a caring, unbelievably wonderful man. I think he is a better father than I am mother often. His patience and ability amaze me more every day.
I have also had bad fortune with men in the past, and until I met my son’s father I too felt like maybe all men were of low carachter, but I was happily proven wrong. It’s important to remember that a broad sweeping generalization is just that- and there are exceptions to every rule.
Anyway, I’m sorry you’ve had such lousy experiences that have colored your view of 50% of the population. It’s really hard to change one’s feelings about stuff as basic as this, but it’s important that you’re willing to do so. Good for you.
I hope you will also reconsider your views about marriage. My parents were unwed and stayed together for over twenty five years- longer than most marriages! I was and am a well adjusted person, and was not affected by this other than deciding to avoid the major expense of a wedding myself because I saw firsthand how little a piece of paper changed the way two people felt about one another.

I’m reserving my opinion about the whole situation- I don’t think there’s quite enough info to say guilty/ not guilty about anyone- and TBH, it doesn’t really matter. A child is DEAD. Fault is beside the point. It’s just a horrible situation.
My heart goes out to them.

It’s situations like this where the FRK community needs to step forth and show a solid front. Petitions, letters to government officials, the media….imagine what an impact we could have if we took this headlining case and ran in OUR direction with it??

Excellent point, Angela. This could have happened to the dad no matter what he was doing. Children are extremely fast considering how short their legs are. He could have been right there staring dead straight at his child, who could still have conceivably run into the road before the dad could catch him.

But the driver? I wish I had more details on him/her, but it seems that anyone who is driving too fast to hit the breaks while going past an area where children are playing is at least partially culpable for any children he/she kills.

For a look at an ex-law-enforcement-officer’s take on the “criminal justice” system of the US, may I recommend “Arrest-Proof Yourself” by Dale C. Carson? It’s full of advice on how to avoid acquiring a criminal record and how to keep your teenagers out of trouble. Some of the information is not relevant to retired guys who don’t smoke dope and never drink alcoholic beverages when there’s the slightest possibility of driving in the near future, but it’s still an eye-opening look at cops and courts.

I don’t believe people should be ragging on Suzanne as much as they are. She was giving her opinion and she is entitled to it. I don’t agree with everything she said but I can see a little of her point. Come on people–I don’t think a lot of father’s think as through things as mothers. Call me sexist if you want but I see it all the time with our friends and even my husband. A lot of men don’t think things are as dangerous as women do or think if they tell a child to wait or be still or “I’ll be right back” that they will just listed and abide by what they say. I am not “blaming” this man. It was a tragedy and if he had it to do over, he would have taken the child with him or not gone at all. That doesn’t make him a monster and it doesn’t make him “guilty.” But, don’t you think he MAY have been wrong in thinking the kid wouldn’t follow him across the street??? WRONG doesn’t make im GUILTY of a crime. My beef is that, in today’s world, we all want to blame someone when something bad happens. Parents want to blame teachers if their kids get in trouble at school or don’t make good grades. We want to blame doctors if anything goes worng medically. People want to blame parents if kids turn out bad or if they do something bad. Whatever happened to people being responsible and taking responsibility? A good point is that people on here now want to blame the person who was friggin driving the car down the road. Give me a break! They were in a car driving, a kid darted out in front of the and now you want to send them to jail. Heaven forbid if you should be driving and a very small kid run out in front of you and they die. Guess that means you are going to jail! First, none of us know the whole story. Second, could the man not be the least bit responsible for asking his 5 (FIVE) year old to wait while he goes across the street to “talk to some friends.?” I am not saying the man should be charged with anything, except not truly thinking through what he did. I am sure this man is in terrible pain. That doesn’t mean he should go to jail. But, we all have to quit blaming someone when something bad happens. It just does and always will.

How do you know this guy is a good parent? He had just met his kid a day before, according to the article? There may be loads of facts relevant to the DA that we don’t know from this article. We don’t know this man’s past record, etc.

I don’t think every child mishap should be prosecuted, nor that kids need to be under the watchful eye of adults 24/7 — my own kids walk to and from to school without adults. But this story — I have a lot of questions about it.

“To me, blaming the city is simply a different version of blaming the father.”

A scapegoat must be found. The city isn’t going to put themselves in jail, but they are willing to and in the process of destroying this man’s life.

But the design and placement of the park really is awful. A park for small children should not be unfenced and next to a major thoroughfare which has no speed decrease or signs alerting cars.

When an airplane crashes they do an investigation to see what contributed to the accident and then they make changes to decrease the chances of this happening. Finding the fault in a failure is not the same as finding a scapegoat to blame. Fault analysis is very important and worthwhile.

Also, figuring out what really caused the death is the only thing that is going to get this poor father from spending the next 15 years in prison on this absurd homicide charge.

Looking at the neighborhood, it is likely the father is a poor black man who can not afford a good attorney.

If this happened to a white person who could afford an attorney the case would be easy to defend. Hire any civil engineer in the US and they will testify as an expert that the design and placement of the park and street were the major factors in the death. But if you are poor and relying on a government provided attorney they will simply collude with the prosecution and have you cop a plea to a slightly reduced charge and agree to take a shorter prison term to avoid trial. But then you have a conviction and no longer qualify for student loans, housing aid, and you can’t get a job. This is part of the whole system that keeps the poor and minorities down. Charge them with BS charges knowing they can’t defend themselves. They never would have charged a well off person with these charges because they know they would never fly in court. They know these are BS charges, they are just getting their stats up. Atlanta is corrupt and does not care about the people.

“Maybe it’s silly, maybe there’s nothing more the city could have done, but it warrants a look into the area and whether it could have been made safer.”

It’s fine to look into things and see if they can reasonably be made safer — it’s good to do so. Yet ultimately, it is not “the city’s” responsibility to make sure no car hits any child anywhere near public property. To the extent that an entity like a city has any responsibility in such a situation, it is only not to actively create a hazard, not to ensure optimal safety. I think the implication that it is the city’s responsibility to make sure no accidents happen near the park, and that they’re “at fault” if ordinary actions lead to an accident, is what bothers some of us.

@pentamom – No one has said that, though (at least not that I can remember). It is the city’s responsibilty to ensure some amount of safety – for example, altering speed limits around areas with a lot of young children, elderly people with dimentia, etc. There is an acceptable risk, and no one is saying that the city should be sued or anything like that. I haven’t been using the word “responsible” in that way. Merely that the city is responsible for looking into the situation and seeing if there are ways that this situation could have been avoided (in compromise with other factors, such as flow of traffic, etc).

As someone else has pointed out, Google StreetView seems to show an area where an accident may have been likely. There was a combination of low visibility (due to trees and possibly parking), as well as a high-ish speed limit. So decreasing the speed limit, putting up signs warning cars that young children may be playing in the area, and perhaps moving the trees back a bit might be acceptable ways to reduce the chances that this would happen again. Would any of this be unreasonable?

Another consideration there is you have this park, and then a street with high enough traffic to have four lanes, and on the other side of the street, family housing. What are the chances that people in those houses are going to be interested in routinely crossing the 4 lane boulevard to get to the playground.

And yet look. No traffic light. No button to press. It’s just wait for an opening and dash across. How is that a good design? It’s not.

@Denny Li- I will be fascinated to read further information on this case, since it appeared that the reporter picked and chose what they thought was pertinant, but which leaves some clear holes that I, at least, would like filled.
Also, sorry, I’m not an Atlanta resident, but I’m very very glad you called and expressed your opinion on the matter.

“Looking at the neighborhood, it is likely the father is a poor black man who can not afford a good attorney.”

I’m a public defender outside Fulton County who knows many of the Fulton Co PDs that you are disparaging. The fact is that they are dedicated professionals who CHOOSE to do this job over other more lucrative practices of the law because they enjoy it. Personally, I left a 6 figure income with one of the most prominent law firms in the country to do public defender work (and like my current clients much better than the CEOs I used to deal with). While I count the DAs I work with as personal friends, I have never once colluded with the prosecution on any case, although that is generally in the best interest of the client because contrary to your apparent belief the vast majority of DAs offices and police are not corrupt entities looking to keep a brother down (most of my clients are actually guilty – on video, caught red-handed, confessed, etc. – and do need to take the best deal that they can get). Public defenders go to law school like everyone else. Many, like myself and my coworkers, graduated at the top of their classes. A public defenders office ONLY hires people dedicated to helping the poor – and we do exist in large numbers in the legal community.

If by “good” you mean F. Lee Bailey and the like, by all means, you would be better off with them but that’s because you also have several millions of dollars in the bank and probably are closely connected to the DA and judge anyway. However, I suspect that by “good” you mean anyone who is paid. Any idiot who graduated from law school can hang out a shingle but that doesn’t mean that you should hire them to get your dog out of the pound. Just yesterday I had a client who believes like you his public defender must be colluding with the DA to get him convicted (the fact that he had crack in his pocket when arrested for DUI and fully confessed to being drunk, driving the car and possessing the cocaine clearly had no bearing on us telling him to plea). He hired a drunk, formerly had his license suspended, attorney who frequently forgets court dates and can barely string together a sentence. So when did he have a better attorney?

I agree in principle with much of what you have to say. I wonder, after following the links, if this is the story to choose to prove your point. There are just too many oddities to this–he just met this child? What was the street, the park and the neighborhood like? Did he know the child well enough to know he was capable of being trusted on his own while he crossed the street (which he apparently was not).

I think there are 5-year olds that can walk to Kindergarten alone if it’s quite close and there are those that shouldn’t be left unsupervised. Kids are such individuals that I really don’t believe in blanket statements about when they should be meeting milestones.

I say this as a parent who was the first in my neighborhood to let my kids walk places alone, ride bikes to school and stay home alone.

Life is too scary for us to accept that sometimes horrible tragedies and ACCIDENTS happen. It makes us feel out of control to realize this, but it’s a fact of the human condition.

http://www.myfoxatlanta.com/dpp/news/mother-says-dad-punished-too-harshly

We have too many lawyers in this country.

As a mom who boiled some water, poured it into a mega mug along with a peppermint tea bag, brought it into the living room and put it down on the coffee table, then turned her back on it, and her 10-month old, and walked away to get a forgotten cup of orange juice for her older child, only to hear blood curdling screams on the way to the kitchen, then found herself on a wild ride of ambulances, emergency rooms, medevac helicopters and children’s burn hospitals, I now know that, had my child not survived–the burn was potentially deep enough to affect lung and heart function– I could have been charged with involuntary manslaughter. Not sure if I would have cared what happened to me, had she actually died, but….. Wow. Wow.

Yesterday I was waiting for a monorail train with my 3 year old. The train was coming, I couldn’t get the money to go into the machine for the ticket and in those few seconds–with my attention on the machine–I lost track of my child. It was just one moment, but a train was coming….it opened the doors…and there I was. Did my daughter board the train? Was she on the tracks somewhere? I started screaming her name. She was about a foot and a half away, behind me. My first thought was “thank god, she’s safe.” My second thougth was “if anything had happened, I could have gone to jail for that.” It was one moment…just trying to make a dollar bill fit through a token machine.

I guess you have made a few rather interesting points. Not too many people would actually think about this the way you just did. I am really impressed that there is so much about this subject that has been uncovered and you made it so nicely, with so considerably class. Outstanding one, man! Truly special things right here.