With that double / (triple?) chin, I can only assume she was feeding herself just fine with the monies of other Washingtonians.
I would have hoped someone would have had just a little compassion for a person as ill as she is. With that level of intoxication, you can bet she’s been that drunk for a long time. An occasional drinker, or even a low-level drunk, wouldn’t be able to survive that high a level. In fact, I’m surprised she appeared in court at all. Detox would take some time. If you’re that drunk when you enter a program, they will tell you to continue drinking until you arrive at the facility so you don’t die from the DTs.
It’s terrible that her children are dead, and that she is in such an advanced state of alcoholism that this happened. And that family services didn’t notice that this family was in trauma. It is an unspeakable tragedy. But geez…do none of you have a shred of any feeling for this woman?
Not in this hyena pit. Better to show the crowd how righteous you are by thumping your chest and proclaiming all the horrific punishments that should be handed out. Compassion, mercy, and empathy are best when reserved for people who haven’t done anything wrong.
None at all. Or perhaps I should amend that to the same feelings she showed her children. Not was she says…what she did. She willfully and purposefully killed these children through extraordinary neglect.
Why, actually, yes, I do.
Anger, fury, disgust, contempt, for starters.
No pity. No compassion. I save that for her defenseless children who starved to death because she was a drunk.
These two babies died hungry, scared, and neglected. Alcoholism may be a disease, but if this woman wanted to drink herself into a 24/7 stupor, she should have passed those children on to someone who was able to care for them.
And I say that from the position of someone whose own addictions weren’t beaten until after my eldest son’s birth. I was high and/or strung out for the first four months of his life and still managed to keep him from starving to death.
Nope, no sympathy here. There were plenty of options for this woman and, disease or no disease, she CHOSE to go with the one that resulted in her babies being left to starve to death and rot in their own beds. I’ll save my sympathy for them.
She could have been suffering from post partum depression or some other form of mental illness. Some junkies are able to pull themselves up; others are not. None of you know that she chose this outcome for her children. She may be so fucked up or crazy that reality doesn’t even come into play in her life. You just don’t know. Why do you automatically assume that this was a willful event?
Obviously this woman is very sick, and I hope she can get treatment. However, there is a point at which you have to take responsibility for your actions and at least get a bit of help for your children. You can only go so far down the mental illness road until you get to the point where there is no responsibility anymore.
Why didn’t anyone else in her family have contact with her? PPD is such a huge problem - plus she sounds like an alcoholic - somebody who knew her should’ve been paying attention.
In the UK they have a program where nurses visit new mothers for a period of time. It would be nice if we had the resources to do so here, particularly for women who are clearly struggling.
Because it’s more satisfying to feel self-righteous then simply sad.
I’m mostly with you, but I don’t like the “mentally ill” label much. It quickly reaches a point where it serves the same purpose as the “evil” label: the person is placed in a category so radically different from how you view yourself that you feel absolved of the need to empathise.
Unfortuantely, too many people use the “mentally ill” label to absolve themselves from responsibility for their actions.
This woman starved her children to death, but we are supposed to pity her?
Seriously?
Either she’s remorseful for what she did, or she isn’t. If she is, then she understands the gravity of what she’s done–a mother killing her children so she can persue her own self indulgences is the ultimate traitor. She’ll be living with that pain every day until she dies. Pity her because she’ll be in pain the rest of her life, and will suffer more then her children did.
If she truly can’t feel remorse for the murder of her own children, then an important part of humanity just isn’t in her–a part that’s every bit as important as the ability to correctly perceive reality. Pity her because she’s not really living.
It’s the second case that makes me desire an omnipotent God the most, because that’s probably the only thing that can make a person in the second case whole.
If it was omnipotent, then the babies wouldn’t have starved in the first place.
Woman gets no pass, remorseful or not. Her actions have spoken.
Because the first thing she did when she woke up from her stupor was head to the closet for another beer.
Look, you can feel compassion for her if you want. I’m going to save mine for her poor babies who starved to death. They were helpless innocents. She had the choice whether or not to drink, whether or not to get help, whether or not to get pregnant in the first place. She’s an adult, and as such, repsonsible for her actions.
If you want to be nitpicky, then then the above isn’t necessarily true either, because having the power to do something (i.e., save the kids) doesn’t mean you’ll actually do it. “Omnipotent” was a bad word to use without further qualifications, though. “The presence of a benevolent diety in the afterlife” or something like that would have been better.
Are you implying that having empathy and compassion for someone means giving them a pass?
Don’t blame CPS.
CPS investigators do not have a huge amount of discretion in what they’re allowed to do. Certain conditions have to directly observed before they are allowed to remove a child from a household. It’s not that they don’t care or don’t want to get kids out of situations like this but they are usually constrained bu a lot of beaurocracy and red tape.
And when they do try to be aggressive then they’re accused of being “bleeding hearts” and “crusaders” who want to break up families. They get it coming and going. They’re villified either way. It’s a difiicult and underpaid job and the people who do it do it because they want to protect children, not because they want to impose a personal morality or break up families.
They’re also not psychic. A lot of what they see may be boprderline or suspicious but unless it conforms to specific legal criteria they can’t do anything about it.
One more thing. Can we please get rid of the meme that CPS workers have the power to remove children from households or that they are the ones who make those decisions. All they can do is make a case to a judge and the judge makes that determination. If a judge did not say that these kids could be removed from this parent then CPS had absolutely no authority to do it on their own.
I’m just so sad. She’s so clearly sick in a way the rest of us can’t comprehend; it’s hard for me to want her to suffer, because I imagine she’s suffering enough already. And I wish there was a way to prevent these things from happening to children, but unfortunately, they can’t take kids away from families unless there’s a clear reason to do so. Apparently in this case there wasn’t.
Well said Excalibre!
As belladonna stated, those kids died hungry, scared, confused, and alone. They had no idea what was happening or why.
It was her responsibility to use the money she had to buy food. She used it to buy booze. Cry “addiction” and “illness” all you want. This bitch can never suffer enough to make me feel that justice was done. As I said, I hope she cries every day and night for the rest of a very long life.
Call it chest thumping. Call it feeling self righteous. Whatever makes you feel morally superior. :dubious:
Apparently the childrens father was checking in on them. That is until he was arrested and in the county jail for two and a half months. During that time she seems to have sunk into the stupor and the children died. The day he was released he went to check on her and the kids and called the police. He was a major fuckup as well, but he seems to have been the thing keeping this event from occuring. I wonder if she knew he had been arrested or if she was sitting around in a drunken stupor wondering when he was going to come by and do their shopping or see the kids.
Crap. Just crap.
Steven