The toddler died after he was trapped inside a hot car while in the custody of a worker contracted by the Alabama Department of Human Resources, the state’s child protective services agency
As you might expect, there are quite disturbing details in the article.
How the hell does this happen??? Especially when it’s a social worker and you have someone else’s kid in the car, I just can’t wrap my head around it. Even if you wanted to fuck off for the day you’d take the kid back to school or it’s parents???
They also left the kid in their car parked outside their home, like wtf how the Hell does this happen
Even if you bolted out the car to get inside and start hammering down drinks eventually it’s going to dawn on you oh shit the kid is still in the car?
Another detail: how did it take the daycare 5 hours to notice the kid was missing?
Yeah honestly I wouldn’t be far off betting this individual has had multiple complaints for abuses of their charges that got swept under.
according to a timeline provided by the family attorney, the employee went home at 12:30 p.m., leaving K.J. “strapped inside the vehicle, with all windows up and the car engine off.” He was left in the parked car outside the employee’s home for more than five hours
Jesus christ
Going to link to Gene Weingarten’s Pulitzer Prize winning article from 2010, like I do every time this comes up (CW: graphic descriptions of children dying; no pictures):
https://www.kidsandcars.org/news/post/fatal-distraction-forgetting-a-child-in-the-backseat-of-a-car-is-a-horrifying-mistake-is-it-a-crime (link is to a non-profit, not WaPo where it was originally published).
The high level summary is
- as usual, capitalism is the culprit. This is a problem with a known solution that isn’t profitable enough to solve. So we don’t.
- If you are capable of forgetting where you left your phone, you’re capable of leaving a child in a hot car. Mull that over while you fantasize about violently torturing people this happens to—because it can happen to you, too.
I don’t want to start a struggle session on this but I cannot get my head round a lot of this article or this point in particular
If you are capable of forgetting where you left your phone, you’re capable of leaving a child in a hot car.
I misplace my phone several times a day. I clearly remember the two times I lost track of where my daughter was when they were a toddler - both for 10 seconds as they walked around a corner while I was interacting with something. How I felt for those 10 seconds is indescribable.
There is zero comparison to be made between a phone and a child incapable of functioning or surviving by themselves for even a short period of time. Even at my lowest I couldn’t do any of the actions described in the article without being acutely aware of where they were because their wellbeing was more important than my own.
I misplace my phone several times a day. I clearly remember the two times I lost track of where my daughter was when they were a toddler - both for 10 seconds as they walked around a corner while I was interacting with something. How I felt for those 10 seconds is indescribable.
There is zero comparison to be made between a phone and a child incapable of functioning or surviving by themselves for even a short period of time. Even at my lowest I couldn’t do any of the actions described in the article without being acutely aware of where they were because their wellbeing was more important than my own.
okay but recognize you’re just saying “i’m just built different” with regards to your memory and how you function and that even if that is true for you, for other people, it is very possible to forget things even if they are extremely important
surely a child being orders of magnitude more important, demanding, and physically larger than a phone makes some difference that isn’t to do with how he’s built?
You’re both fixating on the specific example and missing the general idea: the neural pathways that let you not remember 100% of your drive home, forget your purse somewhere, go to the grocery store and forget the one thing you went for in the first place, and forgetting something is in your backseat are all the same part of your unconscious mind. If enough things go wrong at the same time, in the wrong ways, the part of your brain can take over tasks that aren’t immediately urgent in that exact moment.
The article has a few segments that describe it well. This one came to mind:
There’s a dismayingly cartoonish expression for what happened to Lyn Balfour on March 30, 2007. British psychologist James Reason coined the term the “Swiss Cheese Model” in 1990 to explain through analogy why catastrophic failures can occur in organizations despite multiple layers of defense. Reason likens the layers to slices of Swiss cheese, piled upon each other, five or six deep. The holes represent small, potentially insignificant weaknesses. Things will totally collapse only rarely, he says, but when they do, it is by coincidence – when all the holes happen to align so that there is a breach through the entire system.
On the day Balfour forgot Bryce in the car, she had been up much of the night, first babysitting for a friend who had to take her dog to an emergency vet clinic, then caring for Bryce, who was cranky with a cold. Because the baby was also tired, he uncharacteristically dozed in the car, so he made no noise. Because Balfour was planning to bring Bryce’s usual car seat to the fire station to be professionally installed, Bryce was positioned in a different car seat that day, not behind the passenger but behind the driver, and was thus not visible in the rear-view mirror. Because the family’s second car was on loan to a relative, Balfour drove her husband to work that day, meaning the diaper bag was in the back, not on the passenger seat, as usual, where she could see it. Because of a phone conversation with a young relative in trouble, and another with her boss about a crisis at work, Balfour spent most of the trip on her cell, stressed, solving other people’s problems. Because the babysitter had a new phone, it didn’t yet contain Balfour’s office phone number, only her cell number, meaning that when the sitter phoned to wonder why Balfour hadn’t dropped Bryce off that morning, it rang unheard in Balfour’s pocketbook.
The holes, all of them, aligned.
I don’t disagree with the logic here, although I would say it does not apply universally, I mostly feel the need to question the example of comparing leaving your phone to leaving a child, which I think makes light of how seriously impaired someone must be to make such a mistake and also how extreme the consequences are. I don’t think it’s helpful at all to say someone capable of one is capable of the other.
which I think makes light of how seriously impaired someone must be to make such a mistake and also how extreme the consequences are
The point is that this can happen without impairment. You don’t need to be impaired for your brain to just not fuckin work and no matter how relatively important you think remembering one thing is over another, that’s not how memory works.
I’m not “built different”, I had unmedicated ADHD for most of these years, my memory is nothing special. I have lost cars, phones, essential documents, left taps running.
I think the idea is that the “contract worker” is at work doing a job and should not to be confused with a “parent” who is more likely to have their child at the forefront of their mind at all times.
I immediately thought of the same article.
Edit: What is the known solution? Putting the child in the front seat and disabling the airbag?
Back seat sensors. They cost practically nothing compared to the cost of a car.
fuck fuck fuck FUCK reading that article dealt me psychic damage i don’t even have a kid and I’m crying
I’ll post this here too:
According to the article the woman picked him up from daycare, went to a supervised visit with the father, then ran errands with K.J. still in the backseat for an hour instead of bringing him back to daycare, then went home and left him for 5 hours still strapped in the backseat and was only made aware he was still there when the daycare called to see why he hadn’t been returned.
was only made aware he was still there when the daycare called to see why he hadn’t been returned.
[redacted]
It’s very hard not to say what I want to.
Removed by mod
I’m saying if it were my kid. Calling that fedposting is borderline anti-parent.
a contract provider.
Why is the government paying a for profit “contractor”? Why are they not naming the contrator?
Call CPS on alabama CPS.
Should never have happened but when you over work and under pay people like social workers get this is an expected outcome.
There was a Pulitzer Prize-winning story from 2009 that took a relatively compassionate perspective towards parents who make the same mistake.
It’s rough. Our system is completely incompatable with human flourishing and the blame for failing to flourish is placed on it’s victims when they fail to flourish. Which is the expected outcome in the system. I go back and forth about what the actual ethical weight in a situation like this is.
Fuck cars.
