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  • From: "Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>
  • To: "Homestead mailing list" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] if you don't care, don't read
  • Date: Fri, 19 Nov 2004 12:35:21 -0800

OK - here it is - first, I am in no way excusing behavior so monstrous it
makes me wish "aliens maybe ?" But no, these are shaped like humans and
blend in .



Second, this doesn't happen in a vacuum.



These 'alien parents/single mothers' are living in a patriarchal society
where women have little value and children even less - where an unborn child
has more 'rights' than the body carrying it just because the infant contains
an infinitesmal sperm, and more support from gawwdammned hypocritical
pro-life anti-abortion holier-than-thou *other aliens* who are nowhere to be
found *after* the foetus has taken breath, hungers, suffers, is abused and
murdered in various delightful ways, but they sleep very well promoting laws
that sentence those same babies *after they are born* to *life without
parole* in *their* moral/ethical/religious ever-so-caring hellish "society".



Friday, November 19, 2004

Neglected kids need us to see, hear and butt in

By SUSAN PAYNTER<mailto:susanpaynter AT seattlepi.com>
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

I said it before, seven years ago this month, when 14-month-old Damon Jump
was found in an Auburn apartment filthy, starving and blank-eyed but
blessedly alive.

His mom, LaDawn (I'd call her something else entirely), had periodically
tossed him a few crusts of peanut butter sandwich and left him in a loaded
diaper for as many as five days at a stretch while she went chasing after a
boyfriend -- a guy she didn't want to scare off by letting him know she had a
child.

People cat-sit more conscientiously than Jump mothered her skin-and-bones son.

Maybe because Damon's weakening cries were drowned out by a blaring radio, he
was only found accidentally by firefighters battling a blaze in a nearby
apartment.

In foster care, the sores on his stick-figure frame eventually healed but
questions lingered about how well his brain and psyche would rebound from
such overt neglect.

What I said at the time is that the children of this unaccountable world need
a lot more buttinskis in their fragile lives. They need more nosy, busybody
neighbors, friends and family who respond to the radar we all have that
signals something's just not right.

What I said was that we need more people who are willing to risk
embarrassment and possible anger by invading someone's "space" to ask, "Is
everything all right?"

Now I'll say it again. Seven years later, the harrowing scene in Marie
Robinson's Kent apartment last Sunday surely will haunt police even longer
than what those Auburn firefighters saw.

What officers saw was this so-called mom dead drunk in bed with two baby boys
dead for real and a third one near starvation. The two smallest boys --
6-week-old Raiden and the ironically named 16-month-old Justice -- surely did
not die quietly of dehydration and chronic malnutrition while their mother
systematically drained 307 cans of beer. Hungry babies and toddlers tend to
cry loud and long when their tummies run on empty.

Surely the barely surviving 2 1/2-year-old must have peeped out windows and
made something of a racket as he cried and foraged for scraps among the boxes
and cans in Robinson's cabinets while she drank, passed out and reawakened
for days at a time.

Just out of jail, the boys' father told reporters he had been worried for a
week when unable to reach Robinson by phone.

Christopher Bone and his mother -- the boys' grandmother -- could hear the
little boy inside the apartment when they went there on Sunday, and alerted
police when they couldn't get inside.

Had they held off one day longer, that child, too, might have been lost.

True, the apartment complex where Robinson lived is enormous, impersonal and
sprawling. But she had to go in and out occasionally if only to return the
food she bought with food stamps in order to get money for more beer.

In all the time that it took two boys to die, did no one hear or see anything
alarming?

Now, once again, DSHS is "scrambling" for answers as to why case workers'
contacts with Robinson did not bring intervention and rescue. At least four
complaints about Robinson's possible child neglect were lodged with Child
Protective Services over the past two years.

That's another sorry story.

The cries of children did bring help to a house in Stanwood this week. On
Wednesday, an 8-month-old baby and a 2 1/2-year-old toddler were discovered
home alone after a thankfully nosy neighbor or passer-by reported hearing a
child screaming for hours.

Deputies saw curtains moving and forced open a dead-bolted door. The parents
could not be found.

As for Marie Robinson, King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng has made a bold and
commendable move. Calling her degree of neglect "unfathomable," he charged
her on Wednesday with murder for starving her sons while 11 unopened cans of
baby formula sat on the shelf.

For coming this close to killing her son, LaDawn Jump was charged only with
second-degree abandonment.

What the rest of us are charged with is the responsibility to simply butt in.

Susan Paynter's column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Call her at
206-448-8392 or send e-mail to
susanpaynter AT seattlepi.com<mailto:susanpaynter AT seattlepi.com>.





  • [Homestead] if you don't care, don't read, Toni Hawryluk, 11/19/2004

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