This is such an over reaction. The poor woman has 4 kids to keep up with and managed to forget the baby in a shopping cart. Not exactly the crime of the century and these pricks want to prosecute her for it? WTH?
This isn’t unusual. I’ve seen several reports of parents stopping at a highway rest stop and leaving somebody behind. They get a few miles down the road and circle back to pick them up. A little blip on life’s highway. Nothing to prosecute over.
#Istandwithcherish is the hash tag. getting quite a bit of support.
The baby was in no danger. Certainly not for the short time mom was gone. She was in a very public area, safe in her basket. I think mom deserves a pass on this first mistake. Every mom gets a bit overwhelmed at times. Especially at a store. Each kid is tugging at you wanting to buy something. They get cranky. Things get hectic and it’s easy to make a mistake. It’s happened to me many times and I only had two daughters. Kids will wear you out.
I think the worst that happened to me was losing my car keys. I’d been distracted correcting my oldest daughter’s tantrum and laid them on the car roof. I searched the parking lot, the store, and even called my wife to bring her set. Before finding those keys. :smack: All that drama because I wouldn’t buy a twinkie for my daughter and she threw one heck of a tantrum.
Kids do that to parents every single day. There’s never a dull moment. I’d certainly give this stressed out mom a break for one mistake.
Yeah, the overreaction to stuff like this is pretty ridiculous- I blame the internet, which allows anyone to overreact to anything, at any time. My mom once left me at her office; it was just a funny incident, certainly not worth prosecution.
I read an article once about parents who’ve forgotten that they’d left a child in a car, and how their lives were pretty much destroyed. First, they’ve lost a child, something they’ll have to live with for the rest of their lives… then, for some reason, society feels like they need to be punished even more, as if they’d done it on purpose.
I admit I totally don’t get why people want to have 3 or 4 children, anyway - they always look frazzled and exhausted. But now that you’ve had them, well these things happen. I guess our parents are glad they didn’t raise us in the days of social media, either, considering every one of our mistakes are advertised.
Where I live we have a rather notorious Child Services department that has been at least partially responsible for a half-dozen preventable child abuse deaths in the last couple of years. What disturbs me is that they would be all over a one-time thing like this, but will drop the ball in cases where a child is repeatedly hospitalized for suspicious ‘accidents’ with the ‘excuse’ that they were never able to reach the custodial parent when they called.
Our governmental authorities at all levels need to get their heads out of their posteriors and approach these events with some common sense.
Discretion should be used here. If she’s otherwise a responsible mother there’s no sense in prosecuting her. I can give the police the benefit of the doubt because they have to cover their own asses in case she turns out not to be such a great mom after all. We are creating a monster by blaming the government for not stopping child neglect and abuse, the government is merely responding to that.
There’s always a chance the prosecutor will show some decency and humanity. Drop the charges. There’s some room for discretion and common sense with charges like this. The intent of the mother and the circumstances makes a big difference.
I think she’ll be a lot more careful in the future. CPS has a lot bigger and more important cases to focus on then a forgetful mom.
She’s being charged with a misdemeanor. That’s not a big thing- in the grand scheme of things- to worry about. Leaving her baby unattended for 40 or whatever minutes is a big thing to worry about. So sorry about the misdemeanor charges, but I’ll bet she never does that again.
+1000
It’s fucking HOT here. That 108f or whatever you see reported in the weather is an “official” temperature in the shade away from radiating bodies. In a blacktop parking lot? Forget about it. 120f+. And 40 minutes? How do you lose a newborn for 40 minutes? Heat or not, that’s a long time to leave anything laying around in a parking lot, much less a human being.
I’m sure she won’t get prosecuted. It disgusts me that being a White and Delightsome® Gilbert Mormon mom with a jillion Facebook followers puts her above the law.
Directly in front of a Supercuts and Grocery? A stream of people walking by? It was a given that someone would take the baby inside. Especially if it began crying.
It’s not an ideal situation and the mom should have been more attentive to her baby. But mistakes happen. People switch into autopilot and sometimes that means overlooking stuff.
I could see prosecuting her if this had happened before. Hopefully she’s learned a lesson the hard way.
It’s a misdemeanor. It’s not like they would put her in prison for 50 years for that or give her the death penalty or some other draconian punishment. Maybe the misdemeanor is “learning her lesson the hard way,” but also not in such a way that her life will be destroyed or she will lose her kids.
What kind of punishment would be given if a babysitter or nanny had accidentally left a 2-month-old in a cart in a parking lot for 40 minutes under the same circumstances as this mother? What kind of punishment would the public call for? Something tells me it would be harsher.
I do understand, somewhat, when a parent leaves a kid in the car because they’re on autopilot and they think they dropped the kid off at daycare. But where did Cherish think her kid was?
A parent absentmindedly leaves their child in the car. There’s no evidence they did it on purpose- they’ve been, in all other ways, exemplary parents. What purpose does prosecution serve?