Posted on 12/05/2015 6:17:12 PM PST by Twotone
I walked alone six blocks to school when I was five and in kindergarten. One day a Great Dane stepped out from behind a fence and stood there blocking my way. He was taller than I was and didn’t look like he was going to move so I turned around and went home. Mom drove me to school and I was a little bit late. I continued to walk alone on the same route after that.
Of course it was a different time...1960...but I was born in Detroit and walked to kindergarten alone...there was a safety patrol on every block and a lot of children of all ages walked. For those who know Detroit, I was a child on West Fort Street and walked to Mayberry Elementatry. I would not let a child of mine do that today, even in the suburbs, let alone Detroit.
I walked to school (3/4 mile) when I started kindergarten at age 4 (turned 5 in November). My folks would have never made it in today’s world - I’d have grown up in a nightmare of a liberal foster home...
Certainly parents have to be aware enough of different conditions to use their own best judgment about their kids.
Point is: parental judgment. Not a blanket ruling from Our Idiotic Robed Masters On High. (Parental judgment rules: unless you've got a case of provable egregious or chronic parental negligence.)
You can’t do that any longer. Our globalist masters have imported all kinds of evil people so it is no longer safe to allow a child to walk to school alone. Just about all of our problems can be trace back to open borders.
Why do we have helicopter parents? Because cases like this scare them into hovering over kids every moment just in case.
And the far greater supervision demands put on parents today versus 50 years ago means many people don’t think they can handle more than one kid.
She also told me that if anybody ever touched me in the "under the clothes" areas or touched me in any way that bothered me, I should tell her or father right away. AND if anybody ever said or did anything and then told me it was a secret and not to tell anybody, I should tell my parents right away.
Many years later, my husband and I told our own little boys that if any grown-up ever tried to grab them, they should scream their heads off, run away fast, and, if necessary, kick him in the nuts.
We made an explicit exception for the old ladies at the Senior Center, who sometimes wanted to hug them. But even in that case, we told them that if they didn't want a hug, the should back off quickly and say "I don't want a hug."
We didn't even "make" them hug their own aunts and uncles unless they wanted to.
Boundaries. YOUR BODY BELONGS TO YOU.
As your post indicates, life is full of hazards. A moment’s lapse in attention can result in death for someone riding a bike on a road - for an adult as much as for a child. But we don’t outlaw people riding bikes on roads.
And I agree society has changed, but not really all that much. A woman I know had her child taken. She was playing outside & then was gone, never to be seen again. That was more than 30 years ago. I’d rather kids walk in groups to school, but that’s not always possible. But it is absurd to prosecute a mother for letting her child walk to school all the while we’re letting REAL CRIMINALS out of prison due to overcrowding & complaining about local budgets in crisis when this is the kind of thing they’re wasting time & money on. It truly is insane.
I feel like I’m living in the Twilight Zone.
Well, there are a lot of government-suckers out there, and they do try to make sure they weed out any intelligent, independent jurors.
Quote:
The boy lives on North Plains Highway, and his step-brother most likely the woman's actual son, who is apparently an adult or older teen] said he was home with the child left the house that morning and told Eyewitness News that nobody knew the child missed the bus.
"She's a wonderful mother. The cops could have handled it better, (the cop) wasn't the friendliest from the start," said Mackeon Dudley.
Police said they have been to the house before. Two years ago she was investigated by the Department of Children and Families, where a child in the home said she "taped him to the floor and also put tape over his mouth."
Hasankolli has an "extensive history with DCF," records said, and "Dudley is a convicted felon and has numerous arrests for assault and violation of probation." End quote
Another source reports a little more of what happened (I'll include that in a separate reply to make the posting a little easier). The boy lives on North Plains Highway. He was walking to Yalesville School, on Church Street (Route 68). He had to go from North Plains Highway, up North Plains Industrial Road, and then onto Route 68.
"The boy's route would have included about 0.7 miles on Route 68 and he would have had to cross the road's intersection with Main Street, which is typically heavily traveled, Bradley said."
I don't know about you, but the walk I had to and from school in my younger years had sidewalks the whole way. This was a small town. After moving to a suburb, I took the bus until I entered middle school. That walk was mostly on sidewalks, but part of it did include walking on the shoulder of a two-lane suburban road which was quite busy. The cars typically slowed down or veered around when they passed walkers or bicyclists (I bicycled on it, too, at times).
Now since this story gave so much information, I went to Google Maps and used streetview to look at his route (I'll also include some links to streetview shots in the other post). From what I saw, these roads, like many in the last fifty years, were built pretty exclusively for cars, not pedestrians or bicyclists. NP Road has no real shoulder, and both NPI Road and Route 68 are two-lane roads with white lines at the shoulders. No sidewalks. Route 68, judging by all the cars appearing in the streetview shots, seems quite busy. Along the boy's route, there would have been no sidewalks until he had almost reached the school.
Now consider a few other things. It wasn't CPS that decided to call police about the boy or have the mother arrested. According to the Record-Journal story, it was someone at a business on NPI Road who saw him walking along. Then, after police located the boy and took him to school, they went to the home, spoke to the mother, and arrested her. CPS was also called. That is what the R-J reports.
So why, without knowing that much, and putting aside for a second what is reported about the mother's past, should we jump to the conclusion that this is an example of overreach as well as overprotecting children, when we know that in the judgment of someone who saw the boy, and the responding police, the boy was put in a dangerous spot, and the mother was suspected of negligence? This is something the left does a lot, including with the recent Ahmed Mohamed case. It's a given to the left that both the teacher involved and the police acted on ill-motives and had no reason for suspecting the boy.
Was it unreasonable for someone seeing an eight-year-old walking alone on that road to call police?
And why did police determine that there was cause to believe that the mother was negligent? Here are some questions I have as someone reading about this story? What was going on at the home that police mentioned the prior abuse allegations, the older boy's criminal record, and that they often have gone to the home? The stepmother was upstairs asleep when the boy went to his bus stop, while the older boy was up. Was this the usual arrangement in the morning - the stepbrother actually supervised the boy and got him off to school, or the boy often did it himself perhaps? And did the boy possibly try to go on to school after missing the bus because he was afraid to return home if he did?
On the questions, I'll relate a couple things from my own life. I was afraid of missing school because of my father's anger, and after over two years of perfect attendance in high school, and just a couple of weeks beforehand chasing down my bus as it left my neighborhood after missing it, I decided when I missed it again to just stay home. That's when it dawned on me that I could afford to miss a day of school. But my father never found out that I didn't go.
And on the boy walking alone, I'll mention another incident that came to mind on this thread. I went alone with my father to a town festival while in middle school, and towards the end he went to get our car while I stayed with a small group of kids to get balloons from a clown who twisted them into the shapes of animals. He passed balloons to kids behind me, and all of a sudden I was alone with him, I realized, and he touched me inappropriately. Back at the car, I told my father, but my father had been somewhat sexually abusive, so he dismissed it. Over time, I came to realize that the clown picked up on two things: I had no adult with me, as I recall the other kids did, and I had the appearance of some neglect by my parents (in part becaues I was left by them, apparently, and part by my somewhat neglected appearance versus other kids). The clown rightly picked me out as a child he could do something to with minimal risk of being caught, and he was right. He regularly worked town functions but was never arrested so far as I know. So in my opinion, a young boy of this age walking along such roads, where there was no sidewalk, sends a message to predators, too, specifically that there's something not right in his home life. If someone had stopped and offered him a ride, do you suppose he might have accepted it, given he'd already decided to walk to school rather than go home?
On the girl who was hit on my street, she was hit when she tried running across the road. I've seen children do that and imagine you have, too. She actually didn't live on my street, but our town's little league complex was on my street, and she was hit after leaving it.
This is a shot of the road the boy lives on. It reminds me of the two-lane suburban road I mentioned:
This is from NPI Road:
Here is a shot where Route 68 passes beneath Wilbur Cross Pkwy:
And Route 68 and Main:
Correction:
“The boy lives on North Plains Highway, and his step-brother [most likely the woman’s actual son, who is apparently an adult or older teen - my note] said he was home with the child left the house that morning and told Eyewitness News that nobody knew the child missed the bus.
I agree that things like child abductions and murders have happened for decades. No doubt throughout human history in some form (think of the Hansel and Gretel story). I also knew a woman back in the 90’s who was in her fifties then, and she told me that her uncle was murdered before she was born, when he was around seven or eight years old. I believe this was back in the 20’s or 30’s. He was abducted, sexually abused and tortured, and then killed.
I do believe, though, that things have gotten worse as far as children’s safety if they were to go about alone. These days children, even the youngest, are exposed to dark ideas. Cable service back then was for people in the country who otherwise couldn’t get reception (we had it) and the only extra channel was HBO. There were no video games, apart from Space Invaders, Asteroid and PacMan, which you could only play on arcade machines or on Atari. You didn’t have cases like the Slenderman-inspired attacks of middle-school aged girls trying to stab a classmate to death, or fourth-graders plotting to kill their teacher with the hand sanitizer she’s very allergic to. There was no Family Guy and no SSRI’s. Family life wasn’t so disturbed. A local TV station just reported on how police say they are starting to deal more and more with drivers under the influence of drugs than alcohol, which makes their job much more difficult, since there are so many possible drugs or other mind-altering substances a person might take which makes determining a person is under the influence of alcohol a piece of cake by comparison, and drug impairment tends to happen throughout the day more often than with alcohol impairment. Then there’s the internet, too, with all its possible sources of problems.
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