This monster beat a 2 year old for not being potty trained? Who the fuck expects a two year old to be perfectly potty trained?
That’s like beating an adult for not being able to get something off of a 20 foot high shelf.
That child is damaged for life, and her siblings will need lots of therapy. The beater got off easy.
How old was she when she first became pregnant?
Were these kids all planned? Same father?
Any societal support, supervision, oversight or concern for the children of young incompetent mothers like her? Or is it just crack, smack and glue and we will jump in when you have done obvious serious permanent damage?
How the fuck wasn’t that family flagged as at risk?
Guess it is easier to rant, rave, recreational outrage and finally bang the bitch up in jail for for nearly killing her kid rather than building a safety system to prevent teenage breeding machines squeeze so many sprogs out that the stress drives her to maim her own flesh and blood.
Can’t have a social security net in the US, that’s socialism.
This. You have to read beyond the headlines to find out why the 99 years isn’t all that excessive.
Of course it’s easier to rant on the Internet than to fix the social safety net infrastructure in this country. Are you surprised by this?
Yes, we have a problem with social services in this country. It is not perfect. People fall through the cracks. Shit like this happens. However, the way you have phrased your statement makes it sound like this person simply had no choice but to go crazy and start beating her child. Lots of people get stressed out, lots of people have too many kids, and lots of people need more help than they are getting. That’s a real problem and one we need to address as a country. But most of those people also somehow manage to refrain from beating their children into comas. I’m cool with someone getting jail time for that.
She could have received anything from parole to life in prison. Why did she get 99 years?
-she turned down a 45-year plea deal.
-She refused to take full responsibility her actions, even when confronted. From the courtroom:
No, it’s not.
30 to 99 years for “child abuse” sounds like a lot. 30 to 99 years for nearly beating a child to death doesn’t.
When I was in fifth grade, around 1980 or 81, there was a girl in my class who was getting the crap beat out of her father on a fairly regular basis. I’m talking regular, visible bruises, black eyes, at least one broken wrist that I knew of. There may have been sexual abuse going on as well; I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back on it as an adult, I realized that was a likely contributor to her sexual … precocity.
Nobody did shit. Her father didn’t beat her to death, but I’d say he deserved at least three decades in prison.
It would seem that I am a strange one here. The mother has five kids and is pregnant with a sixth. She has no husband or father figure to help her out. She started having those kids while she was still a kid. She never had a chance to grow up.
She lost it. Yeah, she lost it for a long time (long enough to glue the kid to the wall) but she snapped. The woman needs some serious help. She should have had that help long ago but no one intervened.
It sickens me that you Yanks would rather incarcerate your problems after they happen rather than prevent them. Scorn isn’t going to help you. Locking people up doesn’t help the situation. You need to start looking after each other.
I really hope that whatever prison they send her to can give her the mental help she needs so that she can get out in 30 years and be a productive member of society.
I really hope she slips in the shower, caving in her skull. It’s a YMMV kinda thing.
That’s an enormous oversimplification, of course, because locking her up will prevent her from hurting her children again and that’s the most urgent issue here. Are there a lot of other social safety net issues at work here? Yes. Did those problems cause her to almost kill her child? No. It’s very likely they contributed to a bad situation, but it’s not one or the other and better social programs don’t guarantee that stupid people or sick people won’t have children and mistreat them.
You’re right. Programs don’t guarantee that. However, if she was abusing the children and had been brought to the attention of children’s services, she would have at least had the help she needed or she would have had the children removed.
In this case, I strongly believe that if intervention had occurred, the situation would not have happened.
The fact that all five children were still in her care suggests that no intervention had occurred. The woman had five kids. I would go nuts if I had five kids and no help, wouldn’t you? Granted, I have a support system (my husband, parents, friends, services) so my ‘going nuts’ would be more like me calling someone saying that I needed help now and them coming. If I were really angry or upset, I would lock myself in the bathroom and stay there until help came.
Your children have a direct line to how to make you crazy and they know exactly when and how to strike to get the most attention. It’s a survival instinct. It’s not like they try to do it. But then can make you very angry. Responsible adults either contain themselves or walk away. A kid who has five kids, she probably doesn’t have the coping mechanisms.
I may be the only one who thinks this but becoming a drug addict or having five (6) children that you can’t handle with no support system are purposeful choices. This isn’t someone who was fine and then snapped, she’s been making bad choices for a long time now and just finally got caught. Services ARE available if you want to stop using or become a better parent or not have so many children in the first place. Did she even attempt to connect with any help?
Maybe your’e not aware of it up in Canada, but yes, we do in fact have programs like that here in the US. Anyone who is aware of child abuse can phone the police, and they will investigate, with the result that the children may be removed from the home.
But before that can happen, the authorities have to be notified of the problem.
And before the authorities can be notified, someone has to be aware of the problem. I have not heard that anyone in the Escalona case was aware of the abuse until the current incident came to light.
It just boggles the mind that no one could have known what was going on and that no one contacted children’s services. I wish we had more details here.
Yeah, she made really shitty choices. Yeah, she shouldn’t have been in charge of those kids.
Why the hell weren’t there any services involved? Heck, why didn’t the grandmother call them? Hell, why didn’t the grandmother come and scoop up the kids before this happened.
In my crazy dreaming mind, I would hope that the bottom line we get from this is to help each other and watch out for children’s best interest since they can’t do that themselves.
Locking up the mom doesn’t help the kid with brain damage. Preventing these types of situations in the future could help some other poor kid.
The gang activity and prior death threat against her mother may have had some small influence there.
Agreed, but my point is that we in the US aren’t exactly in the dark ages; it’s not like programs to protect children don’t exist.
It’s not that I think the programs don’t exist but there is an attitude of ‘not my problem’ that seems to exist. Maybe I have just been hearing too much republican campaign advertising of late but it seems backward to me.
Children in our society are everyone’s problem. They can’t protect themselves or vote or take care of themselves. We should be looking out for them.
ETA: While programs exist here, too, there are still children who fall through the cracks.
This. If people will complain about worse criminals who have received lesser sentences-that is the problem not the sentence for this woman.
Many states had laws decreeing death for rapists in the past. Not to mention the purely practical consideration that a criminal would have nothing to lose to murder a victim after raping or abuse them.