Who was watching the children? Adults should never leave a three-year-old and a two-year-old alone.
“’Caleb is a train person,’ Denise Benson, the children’s step-grandmother, told the Times of Northwest Indiana. ‘And, of course, little Ellie follows Caleb everywhere.’ “
No, Caleb was a baby who drew very bad parents in the Mommy & Daddy Lottery, and it appears that Caleb’s step-grandmother is not the shiniest doublewide in the trailer park.
Very tragic!
These people look like the stereotypical “trailer park trash”. What, they couldn’t securely fasten a piece of radiator cover or board over their door? This was a preventable tragedy had any of the adults had an IQ above their shoe size.
Save a thought and prayer for the train engineer. He will have to live the rest of his life with this.
My parents love me to the moon and back and took very good care of me. They are amazing people... I crawled over the backyard fence when I was four to go see my friend across the street. I got hit by a car driven by a high school girl. Knocked me 20’ out of my cowboy boots and split my forehead open. My mom was in the yard with me and only stepped inside to answer the phone. She took her eyes off me for no more than three minutes. This is an unfortunate situation. A heart wrenching one, but let’s not be too quick to judge the parents please.
Knowing how fast kids can move, I’d like to give the parents the benefit of the doubt, but after looking at the pictures of the dwelling they were living in, I can’t.
Oh my, terrible. I used to scare my Mom to death. I’d ride my trike up to the railroad tracks to watch the trains (there were a LOT of tracks - just visited there 4 years ago).
But I made sure to stay back about 5-10 feet. It was a slow-moving yard so there would be no high-speed derailment.
Prayers up for all involved here.
And may God comfort the engineer - what a dreadful thing to have to live with, and not his fault at all.
The family tells me that when I was three, I got out of the house and wandered along a country road with two big dogs on either side of me, protecting me. A neighbor down the road saw me and loaded me in the car and drove me and the dogs home. My mother apparently thought someone else in the family was watching me while she did some chores.
I've watched several of Jordan Peterson's videos and find myself adjusting my expectations about the general population.
Peterson points out that approximately ten percent of the population has an IQ of less than 83. Studies have shown that such people are not allowed in the military because there is no job they can do which has a net positive effect, despite training, coaching, supervision, or any other forms of reward, punishment, or guidance.
If you apply that knowledge to the task of raising children, I think you can only conclude that it is almost a miracle that trains aren't running over children every single day.
The change in my thinking that this fact has brought about is that there are going to be some problems in our society which simply CAN'T be solved, short of some sort of Orwellian sorting or filtering. Given the reality of some people's cognitive shortcomings, I think we are doing amazingly well.
Peterson points out that success in life is highly correlated to IQ and conscientiousness. Perhaps this sad case is not a lack of IQ but a lack of conscientiousness. Either way, there is probably little we can do to eliminate such tragedies.
This is so sad! I’m sure the adults frequently said,
“DON’T play around the trains/tracks”
TheSarce (freeper who passed away a few years ago) said NEVER use the word DON’T!
People take the word DON’T and throw it away and then only hear what comes after i.e. PLAY AROUND THE TRAINS/TRACKS.
This comes from something called NLP. When they would say this in training all attendees had stories where they had used the word DON’T and then (one of the stories was...) the kid played on the train tracks.
I trained myself to say DO NOT, or REMEMBER TO STAY AWAY FROM...
However, politically I used it at election time. I tell Democrats... “DON’T forget to vote.” They hear...”FORGET TO VOTE”
I tell republicans to REMEMBER TO VOTE!
Sometimes I go back and check on the dem and they will say, I didn’t vote and you told me to vote!
ehh, not exactly LOL