If you want to have your heart break, I mean really break into a million jagged pieces, read WaPo’s hideous piece on parents who forget their kids in cars where they die horribly while Mom types 200 feet away.
Think it could never happen to you? Before I had kids, I would have been quite sure my answer would be not just no, but HELL no! But pizza chefs have done it. Rocket scientists have done it. People who spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on foreign adoptions have done it. Two kids later, I have to admit—yeah, it cudda happened to me. Thank god they’re too big and too noisy now for that particular mistake. But God knows which other mistakes could easily befall even the best of us. So why are bloodthirsty DAs going after parents?
We’re not talking here about parents who intentionally leave kids in cars so they can get their hair done and shop unencumbered. They are criminals and deserve punishment. We’re talking about people who, almost entirely, had some change in the routines of their over-stressed lives and simply, honestly, forget their child was in the car. The piece is extremely well done and well researched, so check it out and resolve to look into every back seat you pass this summer. But prosecuting these folks for murder? It’s not like there’s any deterrent factor at play here. Good thing juries are composed of humans and not ambitious lawyers trying to make names for themselves.
Here’s all it took for one jury to do the right thing. The attorney didn’t put the mom on the stand because she refused to grovel and whimper in public. He played the 911 tape instead.
The tape is unendurable. Mostly, you hear a woman’s voice, tense but precise, explaining to a police dispatcher what she is seeing. Initially, there’s nothing in the background. Then Balfour howls at the top of her lungs, “OH, MY GOD, NOOOO!”
Then, for a few seconds, nothing.
Then a deafening shriek: “NO, NO, PLEASE, NO!!!”
Three more seconds, then:
“PLEASE, GOD, NO, PLEASE!!!”
What is happening is that Balfour [the mom] is administering CPR. At that moment, she recalls, she felt like two people occupying one body: Lyn, the crisply efficient certified combat lifesaver, and Lyn, the incompetent mother who would never again know happiness. Breathe, compress, breathe, compress. Each time that she came up for air, she lost it. Then, back to the patient.
After hearing this tape, the jury deliberated for all of 90 minutes, including time for lunch. The not-guilty verdict was unanimous.
These parents have suffered enough.
