Posted on 09/06/2007 7:18:13 AM PDT by Froufrou
No charges will be filed against a middle school administrator whose toddler daughter died last month when she was left in the back seat of her mother's SUV during a heat wave, a prosecutor said Tuesday.
Leaving the child in the car for the work day was "a substantial lapse of due care" but did not meet the definition of reckless conduct necessary for prosecution, said Clermont County Prosecutor Don White.
Brenda Nesselroad-Slaby, 40, is assistant principal at Glen Este Middle School, about 20 miles east of Cincinnati. Authorities said she left her 2-year-old daughter, Cecilia, strapped into a car seat for about eight hours on Aug. 23 while she was at work at the school.
Temperatures outside reached about 100 degrees.
As a single dad I disagree. ;-)
Agreed.
Good post.
“How in the world can Christ ever forgive such a thing?”
If He can forgive INTENTIONAL MURDERS, He can certainly forgive accidents.
And that’s all this is. I don’t care if she was stupid, absent-minded enough to leave the kid a few times, or whatever. All signs still point to “accident”. It’s not an “intentional”.
I couldn’t come up with the right word when I posted to you before.
The word I was looking for is “posturing.” That’s what she was doing for the camera: posturing. As a “good mother” who does “everything for everyone.”
“On a side note, I do believe the possibility of these kinds of deaths are enhanced by laws that prevent car seats in the front seat, and by the fatigued family syndrome.”
I’d agree, and another thing occurred to me when reading the details (albeit written poorly, as some I didn’t understand what they were conveying).
Getting the kids in and out of these strait-jackets is a pain. I fear many just don’t bother when they just need to “run in for a minute”.
I really think the freedom of the old days was better overall for all concerned. My mother says she would HATE not being able to hold me in the (gasp) front passenger seat of the car when I was a baby. She preferred immediate, intimate access to any problems.
What I’m wondering is why the child would be so soundly asleep that time of the morning, if, indeed, she was. My 2 year old wakes in the morning and is on the move and doesn’t get tired until her noon nap time, even if we are in the car in the morning. I mean, it’s certainly possible the child was asleep, but I just find it a little odd.
You might disagree, but I still hold women to a higher standard.
That being said, God love you. I’m not one of those women that think that men are not capable of being just as good of a parent as any woman. However, I am one of those women that realize that men’s brains work differently than women’s. Men focus on the task at hand. Almost completely. My hubby is the best father a kid could ask for, but still gets focused on one thing. Many times, it was just through the grace of God that one of my daughters made it out of a situation. (my older girl nearly fell 280 ft to her death at Fall Creek Falls, TN in Daddy’s care).
I’m sure you are a great dad and would never do what this woman did. But she should be prosecuted for manslaughter. She was warned not to leave her baby in a car and still focused on her job. Perhaps it’s just me, but my mind is constantly on my children. My hubby’s is not and that’s okay because he has other tasks to do.
She has to live with this forever, but that is not enough for that poor baby that baked to death.
Taking a sincere interest in your posts, compared with mine. It’s interesting, the way our ideals have changed since we were little.
But I don’t think every woman can handle the have-it-all nature of work-and-family juggling. It may have had everything to do with this incident, in all fairness to the woman.
Thank goodness there’s a trend to stay home with the kids and home school.
We have no idea what was in her head, but I have to wonder if there was some deep-seated resentment directed toward the child, perhaps the mother felt her career was being infringed upon; there could have been some hostility with her husband, who knows. I just think there’s more to it, whether she subconsciously didn’t want the child or she’s just a stupid and irresponsible person. We think about the things that we care about, that mean something to us. That she obviously didn’t remember she had the child in the car for that long a period of time says a whole lot.
Occam’s razor states “All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one,” or alternately, “we should not assert that for which we do not have some proof.” In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities (although this is not always the same as simplicity). You’re overthinking this - it really could be as simple as she got distracted by work and believed she took the kid to the sitter.
Excellent point.
The truth is that every morning I drive a certain route through town to get to work. I don't even think about it. The "pattern" is right,right,left,left,right,right,right.
It's seared into my brain.
If I go uptown for another reason and get to thinking about the world or listening to music or radio, I will do the "pattern" until something hits me that says, "Hey, dummy, you were going to the store...not to work."
Those who say they don't get absent-minded could be constructed differently than I am, or they could be lying just to win an obscure argument on an obscure website.....which happens. :>)
Grace & Strength this day, OLR.
What Dr. Laura says is true: Women who think you can have it all can’t! You can’t have a career-family-etc. If this woman would not have been working and stayed home with her baby like she should the baby would be alive. I don’t understand having a baby and being so distracted-busy etc that you “forget” the baby is in the car????? Like the baby is a jacket or something? Makes me sick.
First of all, I have sympathy for the woman in the fact that she did something pretty damn dumb and she has lost a child - but, but, but something is not adding up
What does this mean that she went back ***FIVE*** times during the day?? Not to be gross, but after an hour or two in the sun, that child was half way to gone, if not gone and the body would have started to give off an odor of some sort.
If I were the coroner, I'd verify time of death and I wouldn't be shocked if the time of death did not coincide with the time spent in the car.
That’s my point in all of this. There but for the grace of God go I. It’s easy at some point to let something distract us from very important details and the results can sometimes, unfortunately, be catastrophic. I know of a woman who was carrying groceries in after a rain. She set her toddler down, picked up the groceries and walked into the house to put the groceries away. She thought the child was with her - she found the child had fallen face first into a puddle, breathed in the water and drowned.
Another man was on a dock with his 3 yo at a small lake. He turned around to pick something up and in that instant the kiddo jumped into the water. He was in right behind him but couldn’t find him in the murky water fast enough and the child drowned.
the way the baby in this situation died is horrific to consider. That the mom had so many opportunities to realize her mistake and didn’t is aggravating and frightening. But the prosecutor’s choice to not press charges is reasonable and, if we are to trust his judgement at all, probably merciful in a time when grief is unimaginable.
That's out of place and an unfair assessment of the situation. FYI, we had a huge profile case in Manassas, VA where a father left his child in a van and she died in the driveway of the house after being trapped for hours while the family did yard work a few yards away. That was a home-schooling familiy. It was a tragedy as this one was, but the fact that the family did not use the public school didn't save that girl. She died too, and the dad was sentenced to jail time.
Yup, I agree with you in post 274. Something isn’t adding up.
LOL I can’t tell you how many times I’ve caught myself - or been caught by my husband - driving the “wrong way” because I’m just not thinking about driving out of the neighborhood being any different from all the times I go to work, 5x a day (and worse, many or our non-work things go “right”, not left!). I have actually driven the wrong way and caught myself too late (driven a mile already, etc.). Absent-minded? Yes. Especially since I tend to think about a whole lot of things at once (especially if listening to radio talk - ggrrr!), so going on rote is easier so I can still think about other things!
I'm suggesting that when the coroner establishes time of death, it may not be during that day.
As some have pointed out, being a housewife doesn’t make you less likely to do silly things and forget. Many who don’t “work” have allowed these things to happen. And to boot, what do you say about the FATHERS who “are SUPPOSED to ‘work’” who have likewise killed their kids? Do you think they should be househusbands so they won’t forget?
Never mind the housewives who have deliberately killed their children - even older 1s who are less helpless.
We had an incident 2 years ago where a little toddler and his siblings were being watched by a young nanny. The nanny took them to the park, where there is a big playground near the lake. Next thing she knew, the toddler boy had run down the embankment and was drowned in the lake.
Not only was she blamed (damned if you’re the mother, and damned if you’re not), but our Kommie-land has made it a big issue about “safeguarding” the playground with fencing of some kind so the kids theoretically can’t go down to the lake! How angry our Kommies were that “some outsider contractor” concluded it wasn’t worth the effort to put in any fence. (It’s also funny because Kommie-land is very big on restrictions to make it “look nice” - and even the best fence is going to ruin the flavor of the surrounding park and nearby lake.) The fact is, in the 25+ years that place has been around, noone has died before. The stats just aren’t there to justify all this safety-nazi stuff.
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