TheAgitator.com
You’ll Weep
Sunday, March 8th, 2009This Gene Weingarten piece from today’s Washington Post is one of the most moving, heartbreaking stories I’ve ever read.
Weingarten is an incredible writer, and this is just a devastatingly sad story.
Thanks to Lou W. in the comments section for the link.
I had to stop reading. Heartbreaking.
Only cops are allowed to make mistakes resulting in death. And even then it isn’t called a mistake. It’s called “appropriate procedure”.
Everyone else is expected to be the epitome of Christ-like perfection (as judged by cops and prosecutors).
I could not read it all. I am very absent minded and a professional! That is real scary. At least my kids are grown, in spite of me!
Wow. I started off the article sympathetic, but still feeling like they should be charged with negligence. By the end, I definitely realized how it could happen to anybody and there’s no sense in prosecuting these people.
Holy crap, why did I read that. My son was just born two weeks ago, and I can’t even imagine how I could begin to deal with something like that.
Yeah, I pretty much followed the same thought process as #4. Predictably, many of the Post commenters did not
Even though I dealt with infant deaths as a paramedic, I never had one that died from being inadvertently left in a car.
I can easily see how this can happen.
We live in such a fast-paced society that it’s hard to keep up with routine events.
I have to write copious notes/reminders constantly.
Having been childless myself for many many years, I can truly empathize and sympathize with Mr. Harrison and others like him. Then to have this tragedy strike is horrendous.
My heart goes out to all of the people mentioned in the article.
Nothing good is served by prosecuting these parents. Prison cannot possibly punish them worse than the life sentence they already serve. Only their families –spouses and other children, who didn’t do it– are punished by prosecution and/or conviction.
This happens. Even my wife and daughter, who both dote on my son, once forgot him in the car seat while they made a quick trip into the store. Luckily it was a cool day and there was no harm, but both were shaken to their very core, because in Texas an infant can die in a car almost year-round.
The local school district left two children on the same bus in the same day last week, even though the driver “checked” after his route, even though one grandparent at the bus stop insisted the child must be on the bus, and even after they found one of the children, they left the other asleep on the bus for another two hours.
There won’t even be workplace discipline in this case, merely “additional training for all drivers”, because “mistakes happen no matter how hard we try”.
(registration required):
http://www.texarkanagazette.com/news/localnews/2009/03/04/elementary-student-left-on-school-bus-98.php
#4 and #6, I understand the thought that their must be some culpability on the part of the parent, however, I do believe that NO COURT in the land could ever punish these people as much as they’ve punished themselves and will for the rest of their lives.
Great writing. Awful story.
An easy and cheap item that can help new parents is a small convex mirror that attaches to your existing rear-view mirror. They also have some that attach to your windshield with a suction cup. You can get them at Babies R Us. With the mirror facing backward, your little one is always in your view when you are looking forward.
It’s also helpful just to see what they are up to.
When a baby is young and in a rear-facing seat, you can use an additional mirror that attaches to the back seat so that you can still see your little one’s reflection using two mirrors.
Important gift item for new parents. Buy two for next baby shower you attend!
Great article, thanks for bringing it to our attention, Radley.
The thought I had when reading this was the law of unintended consequences. I recall having my infant son in the front seat sometimes back before the laws were passed. It’s quite likely none of these kids would be dead if they’d been in the front seat. I also wonder how many would have been in the front seat if not for laws requiring them to be in the back. I’m sure many kids have been saved by the “back seat” laws, but it’s not all good news. This aspect of the story should be put in front of every lawmaker. Your safety laws, no matter how well intended, are going to kill or hurt someone.
It reminds me of the airbag laws. People who would have been fine otherwise in an accident have been injured or killed by airbags. Much of it is because laws required powerful airbags to cover “worst case” situations (large people with no seat belts) with no alternatives allowed.
It’s clear these people shouldn’t have been prosecuted, but shouldn’t we at least question having government make laws like this that can have such negative consequences?
I welled up at the first paragraph. I cannot even bear thinking about these stories.
I know that it is a tough article to read all the through, but you should. There is a pay off at the end.
So many times in my life, I’ve gone on “autopilot”, and thought, how did I get here? I just left for work and I’m already here? I can see how this could happen. I hope it never happens to me.
One of the reasons I hate local news is because if a child (God forbid) should die from a similar tragic lapse in memory, the story is branded with a big fat “ABUSE” tag line and then they get reaction from the DA, from self-righteous people on the street and the mug shot of the parents. They spend 40 or 50 seconds covering the story and, after successfully convicting the parents in the court of public opinion, move on to the next salacious news item.
This was a masterful article. I was so heartened to see a sympathetic voice and a profound research effort backing up every story. I will be thinking about the “Swiss Cheese Model” for the rest of my Sunday now, wondering where the biggest gaps in my defensive mechanisms are and how I can avoid them. My autopilot is scary good, I sometimes feel like I’m waking up after I park the car. I read some of the stories from the article and think “there but for the grace of God go I.” It could happen to anyone.
Shame on the feckless thugs who prosecute these grieving parents to score points with future voters. Damn their self-serving efforts and camera-grubbing pompousness.
What an unbearably sad set of cirumstances. In most cases these folks don’t need prison. They will, however, need psychological help. Words fail.
When Samuel was only a couple of months old, I climbed out of the passenger side of the car as my husband stepped from the driver’s seat at the grocery store. I made it to the back of the car before I remembered the baby. My heart leapt into my throat and continued to pound for minutes afterward as I clutched him to my chest, wishing I could tuck him back inside myself, where I knew I couldn’t lose him. The very thought of what could have happened was enough to throw me into a panic.
That was brought on by the exhaustion of new-motherhood, compounded by the difficulties of nursing and a mind-numbing case of post-partum depression that had kept me and the baby in bed for two weeks.
As I brace against the stress of a second child, my mother’s cancer, my job, my husband’s ridiculous schedule that leaves me acting as a single mother more often than not… it takes a massive force of effort to keep my head clear at times when I’m accustomed to allowing my autopilot to take over.
It can happen to anyone, and I am ever frightful that it may happen to us.
So are those sensors really unavailable? I’d buy them in a heartbeat if they could be had.
Color me cold, but I feel nothing for these parents. Just excuses they make to justify why they forgot their child and left them to die. Or why a parent forgets to watch their child and the child drowns in the pool. etc etc etc. It comes down to those parents are not doing their job. We are all busy. Every single one of us. Parents more so. You don’t get a pass on killing your child cause you were busy or distracted due to life.
Anyone catch Earle Mobley being quoted in the article? I assume he’ll be up for “prosecutor of the year” in a good way.
Angie (#19) you obviously didn’t read the article where memory experts explain how this happens.
In the Post comments, a wise person wrote
this article is like a rorschach test that determines a person’s potential for compassion and empathy. Those that scream for vengeance betray their own inability to feel or comprehend another’s pain.
Predictably, some commenters didn’t even read the article and still feel qualified to blame the parents for all sorts of imaginary failings. Self-righteousness seems to be roughly proportional to stupidity and/or willful ignorance.
SusanK – I read the article. I also have read many articles when these cases happen. As a parent of two boys, I know how busy a person gets. That is no excuse. It’s a cop-out. What’s next? We excuse abusive parents cause they were stressed out over life’s issues as well?
Another disturbing aspect of the article – our terribly broken tort system. A technical solution is found but it doesn’t make it to the market becaue our tort system renders such an item unfeasible due to the inherent (thanks to our flawed product liability laws)lawsuit issues. And the Democratic Party is a partially owned subsidiary of the Trial Lawyers Association (the Teacher Union shares ownership). So don’t hold your breathe for an improvement.
I had a brief moment like this many years ago I can totally undertand how it would happen and demonstrated to me how to have nothing but pity for these poor individuals.
Normally my wife would take the kid to daycare for whatever reason this day I took her. Driving down the road with the kid properly in her carrier in the back seat just as I passed the turn off to the daycare I remembered her in the back seat. It “HOLY CRAP I’VE GOT THE KID!”. From that day forward I understand.
FYI, don’t feed the Angie-troll.
God, what a heart-rending story, especially because we’ve all had those “oh crap!” moments where we forgot something for hours. When I lived in Texas, I was constantly paranoid that I’d forgotten the baby.
I would just kill myself. Preferably in the same manner if possible. Maybe that sounds trollish, but I seriously could not live knowing I had done this to my child. I’m not sure I could live knowing I had done this to my worst enemy.
That said, I just don’t know if I’m comfortable with no criminal punishment in most cases. At the very least, it’s negligence.
Boy, am I blessed that I have never had anything remotely that bad happen to me in almost 60 years.
One thing I can’t understand are those hateful sounding people publicly condemning others without even a trace of compassion deliberately adding to their hurt. No sense of decency!
And Angie, what makes you think you are able to judge these situations? Do you know these people? Have you been present to gauge the sincerety of their reactions and actions? If not then don’t claim it’s all a cop-out. You appear to be totally result-oriented. Even though grievous harm was caused, the actions leading to it lack important elements of culpability: Intent, inaction due to laziness or indifference to name some.
Can’t you imagine yourself forgetting to put the car in park and it rolls off ten minutes later ….? Or are you one of those people who accept things only after personal experience? That makes for slow learning.
The part that made me weep is the knowledge that not all prosecutors share Commonwealth Attorney Earle Mobley’s view that “A prosecutor’s responsibility, … is to achieve justice, not to settle some sort of score.”
We excuse abusive parents cause they were stressed out over life’s issues as well?
This proves Angie’s trollhood, I think. And if she’s not a troll, she’s seriously inhibited in the Logic Department.
The matter at hand is about an unconscious lapse in judgment, not a consciously made decision.
I remember reading about a woman who left her child in the car while she went inside to play video poker for 7 hours. That’s very very different from the cases the article is addressing.
BIG difference.
To begin with, “troll” is now a stupid shibboleth. Morons are warned, but they’re morons, so it won’t matter.
I read the whole article, so shut up, already. I’m with Angie. I see no reason to prosecute these people, but I have no sympathy for them. And to my thinking, this is a signal stupidity of our times. People simply are not thinking about what they’re doing, and I never have patience with that. Never.
I remember reading about a woman who left her child in the car while she went inside to play video poker for 7 hours. That’s very very different from the cases the article is addressing.
Why is that different? Because she did something not worthwhile, something frivolous? Something that lacks societal endorsement?
Is her playing poker evidence that she didn’t experience the same process of forgetting as in the other cases?
Billy Beck,
The sympathy is not just with the people. They are obviously paying the price. It is sympathy for the human condition and the realisation that all of us humans are subjet to it. No exceptions.
You know, There for the grace of god ….
You can check for yourself how often people push policies intended to change humans and their condition disregarding the great collateral damage and how often those policies succeed. Pretty much anything called a “War On …” qualifies.
I’ve got three children, and it left tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. There but the grace of G-d go I.
I try to use checklists and mnemonics. (There are three things I have to do when I leave work for the day, there are seven pills I have to take each evening…) and I still managed to leave out one medication for a few weeks, even after I noticed my blood sugar wasn’t in control.
Is there any better training that could prevent this? More little ditties like “Back to Sleep” (is that still the anti-SIDS recommendation) or “Never Shake a Baby”?
Is there any reason to prosecute? Before we can answer that we have to know why we prosecute at all. No parent intentionally leaves a baby to die in the car, but if walking 20 miles can raise awareness for a chic disease, maybe a trial can do the same. Does it harm our sense of justice? Is there any form of unintentional harm that should be prosecutable? I don’t know.
“No parent intentionally leaves a baby to die in the car,”
How do we know that? Parents killing their children intentionally isn’t exactly unknown, albeit fairly rare. You’d have to be a sick, sick person to do so, but we know those people are out there. And here you have a ready made defense, and a gaggle of people willing to say that you will no doubt “punish yourself” for the rest of your life.
Angie,
I’m glad you aren’t my mother.
Fuck this guy. Heartless prick of the year. Total inability to empathize.
Probably why he’s a prosecutor.
This article could be used to support legislation to make the safety devices desribed in the article mandatory on all new vehicles within a couple of years.
The question then is whether force should be used in this case, is the use of force justifiable in an economic sense.
If there are 20 million children aged 0-3 in the US (guesstimate) and these children are shuttled in car seats an average of once per day every day in a year (reasonable?), then that is 7.3 billion times a child is put in potential harm in a carseat for some duration.
According to the article, a child being left to die in a carseat occurs about 25 times per year. This puts the odds of a catastrophic outcome in the US at 292 million to 1 per trip (give or take at most one order of magnitude based on my estimates).
Is there actually legislation on the books that attempts to thwart similar extremely rare occurrences? What level of economic sense has to be met before every conceivable negative outcome is insured against by force of law? Shall we brick up backyard pools too?
Another heartrending, tragic example of economic costs being too great to prevent every single death. Sadly, the parents in these cases are victims of life’s negative lottery, reminders to us all of just how imperfect we all are.
No, Martin, the difference has nothing to do with what she was doing while her child was baking in the car. The difference was, the woman in that case purposefully left her child in the car. Hers was a case of deliberate abuse.
It doesn’t matter that she chose to play video poker for 7 hours. She could have been handing candy out to inpatients at the local children’s hospital for 7 hours and it wouldn’t make a difference.
The difference is that she (and some others) made the deliberate decision to use her car as a daycare.
That difference should have been obvious to you, but perhaps I was unclear.
Jaysus, Radley! It really fucks up my carefully cultivated tough guy image to read such a thing. Guess it’s a good thing nobody is here in my room with me.
But it sure gives me hope for the future to read of such paragons of virtue and perfection as Angie and Billy Beck.
Feh!
All of which was simply to point out the fallacy of Angie’s attempt to equate the unintentional (the cases discussed in the article) with the intentional (child abuse).
Now, the difference between these is often (but not always) made clear by the parents’ reaction upon discovery of the child.
The woman who played video poker, for example, showed no remorse. Others who have substituted parking lots for child care while they attended meetings, went shopping, or visited the spa have shown similar “but I was only gone for…” or “but the babysitter was sick…” or “but it was cheaper…” or “but it was only X degrees outside…” or “she was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake her” or “but I parked it in the shade” responses.
“You know, There for the grace of god ….”
Bullshit. It was not by the grace of God that my parents never did this to me or my three brothers and sister. I look back at their generation and the one before them, and none of them ever did anything like this. There was no “grace of God” about it: they simply kept their minds on what they were doing.
Hard tale, Radley.
Billy Beck,
How do you know that “none of them ever did anything like this”?
Do you think there were no children killed due to parents’ unintended mistakes? Like the kid wanting to pet the horse in the stable and getting kicked or getting away and falling into the well. Different times, different causes. Should really be obvious. My parents never did anything with bad consequences either, but they probably took some unintended risks. Yours didn’t? Yhey were never distracted? Ever? You know, only the ones arrogant enough to think they are have no understanding for those that aren’t.
I’m with #24. When I was four pages through the article I started seriously considering what it would take to set up a business selling a product designed to help eliminate these tragedies. Then I read the last page. Argh. I’d shell out $100 for something to prevent this in a heartbeat. The idea that several such products have been developed and they are all considered unmarketable is very sad.
Lyn Balfour is awesome.
I just remembered an instance 7 or so years ago. I pulled in to the grocery store parking lot next to a car in which three children were locked. Two were in their car seats, one was bouncing around the car.
The temperature was in the 50s and it was cloudy, so I just stood by the car and waited until the kids’ father came back. It was about 15 minutes. Much longer and I would have called police (*spits*). If the kids had shown any signs of distress – or if weather conditions had been different, I’d have been breaking into the car.
I was so angry. It’s awkward and inconvenient to tote multiple kids through the grocery store when you only want to pick up a couple of things, but … well, tough. Having kids is not at all about convenience. Sure, the kids like as not would have been fine whether I’d stood guard by them or not, but why take the chance?
I just don’t understand people who do that sort of thing on purpose.
Maybe I’m just a buttinsky, I dunno.
Thank you, Bronwyn.
Heh. The look their father shot me when he came back and saw me standing there didn’t indicate gratitude :)
All I said was, “oh good, you’re back! I can go inside now. Excuse me.”
Sol, because no one believes themselves capable of being negligent enough to let their child die in a carseat, no one will voluntarily purchase any product designed to thwart that situation. It’s pure economics. The only way the problem can be eliminated is by force.
My opinion is that if one needs to resort to force, perhaps one should accept reality as it is.
Lawrence Gonzales book Everyday Survival which I do
not have with me, gives statistics on the pre-airbag and
post-airbag deaths by inadvertant hypothermia. The difference
is striking.
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