Posted on 09/05/2010 10:52:52 AM PDT by Feline_AIDS
CHARLESTON A Charleston man is charged with unlawful neglect after deputies say one of his twin daughters walked out of their home and fell into a pond while he slept.
Authorities responded to 2903 Doncaster Drive at 6:13 p.m. Thursday and found one of the 1-year-old girls neck deep in a pond behind the house. A dog was in the water with her, preventing the girl from going under, a Charleston County Sheriffs Office incident report said.
Deputies charged Adam S. Gray, 33, with unlawful neglect by a custodian after firefighters pulled the girl from the pond and took her to a local hospital to be evaluated, the report said.
A Charleston police officer entered the house through an unlocked back door and found Gray asleep in bed. The officer was able to wake him up after several attempts, the report said.
Gray told officers he put the sleeping children inside their cribs about 5 p.m. and closed the door to their upstairs bedroom before going to his room next to it and falling asleep. He said he usually could hear the girls if they attempted to go down the stairs but didnt this time, the report said.
Police say the twins were able to push down a gate at the edge of the stairwell and then walk downstairs and out the back door, when one of them fell into the pond. A neighbor heard the girls playful voice and called police.
The mother took custody of the children.
Gray does not have any felony convictions in South Carolina, according to a State Law Enforcement Division criminal record check.
A magistrate set Grays bail at $10,000 Friday.
Pit bull?
I don’t know, do other FReepers think I am crazy?
A father puts his kids to bed, closes the door and falls asleep. The kids get out of the house (I did this as a child myself) and the father gets arrested on a 10K bond, even though he doesn’t seem to have any kind of a record.
Now granted it would have been a tragedy if something had happened, and we may not know the full story, but kids do sometimes escape.
So these girls climbed out of cribs, opened a door, took down a gate and opened another door. Either Dad’s lying or these parents are in for it!
Dachshund?
Under Obammunism, any accidents your child get into while you are asleep are a pretext to charge you with neglect.
There is no room for the actual concept of “Accident”.
There are a fair number of freepers who embrace this view.
what was his bac
Maybe all the cocaine and beer bottles on his bedroom floor made them suspicious. (kidding)
Got out of a crib
Opened the bedroom door
Went down the stairs
Opened the door of the house
Opened the gate
Went to the pond.
Exactly how much was the father supposed to do to prevent this? Tie the kid to the crib? You get in trouble for that. How about lock the kid's bedroom door from the outside? Well, you get in trouble for that too.
Meanwhile, a witness actually saw the kid neck deep in the pond -- and merely called 911. The witness knowingly left the kid in danger and waited for a professional rescue team to show up. I call that negligence.
But, hey, they decided to charge Dad for taking a nap.
You know, bad things happen -- or almost happen. We cannot arrest someone every time an unfortunate event nearly occurs.
He may have been sleeping one off
And I don't see why Dad was arrested either but in our current society it doesn't take much.
Sorry, I don’t agree with filing charges against this guy. Sometimes little kids do crazy things. Yes, you should be vigilant, and should take reasonable precautions, but you can’t spend every minute of the day and night hovering over them on the chance that they might suddenly figure out how to operate something as complex as a doorknob. Sounds like this one was a real escape artist, managing at least two closed doors, plus a toddler gate. If I were the guy, I’d go before a judge, tell him that this is the first time something like this has happened, and that given the kid’s ability there would be new deadbolts at the top of my exterior doors once I got home. Parents should be responsible, but there are some things that just can’t be easily anticipated.
The article reports a neighbor “heard” her voice; did you acquire info from another source?
Where to begin. One-year-olds can remove gate, get downstairs and out the door to the pond...? Neighbor hears a kid not even crying, but calls the police anyway? Without even looking to see if there’s a reason? Because if s/he’d looked s/he’d have taken the child out of the water, no? “Firefighters pulled the girl from the pond?” How many did it take?
Good dog! Bad journalist!
Or he may have been the exhausted father of twins under the age of two.
I’m failing to see the crime here. Unless the father was sleeping one off, and the paper would be quick to point it out if he was, there is no crime, that I can see.
I once found a child and a dog running loose in the street. The little boy was clearly told not to talk to strangers and ran home. I stayed with the dog until the mom came looking for it a few minutes latter. She was aghast to learn that the child had been out too. She had put special things on the door to keep the kid from opening them but he defeated them. All she did was go to the bathroom. Yes the result could have been tragic in that case too since there were multiple child sex offenders living in the area but as you say “kids do sometimes escape”.
I would want to know a whole lot more about this situation before forming any opinions.
'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'
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