Negligence

[Trenitay]

Over the weekend a man was left alone with his 7 month old baby. He had had 6-9 beers over the course of the day and he fell asleep with the baby in his arms outside near his fire pit. He woke up and found that his son had burned to death in the fire. He was sentenced to 2 years in prison for negligence. I dont think this is fair and he shouldn't have been sentenced for this amount of time. Mainly because my aunt and uncle had a child who drowned in a river while they were camping because they may have been a little "negligent" and the pain of losing the child is enough to me. I would like to know what everyone else thinks about this.

Edited October 7, 2008 by awsomeness

[theslug]

I just tried to look up cases involving children in cars who died and it seems like mothers get sentenced to jail time more often than men but it doesn't say how long they are incarcerated. But I mean seriously, involuntary man slaughter involving a child (I don't believe this is the way they try parents for some odd reason and instead go with child neglect or something but I wouldn't know that's where enoch needs to come in) and only 2 years, that's lenient worst case scenerio. Looking over the site, the guy probably had a past record or the court took into account the alcohol, which sure when he woke up like an hour or so later his blood alcohol level would have cleared.

[samm]

The alcohol of 3 to 4.5 litres of beer doesn't vanish that fast normally, does it?

Anyway, the man must have been dead aspleep, as I can't believe the child just burnt silently and happily to its death, so I rather think it either wasn't an accident or the man drunk himself into a coma. 2 years doesn't seem too much to me, but I'm not law savvy.

[Enoch]

Criminal negligence statutes differ a lot by jurisdiction, but the general principle is that acts committed with a "negligent" state of mind are punished with far less severity than crimes committed "purposefully" or even "recklessly" (if at all-- usually, if it falls short of homicide, negligent acts are grounds for civil suits, but are not crimes).

 

IMO, this looks like a pretty clear case of criminally negligent, and perhaps even reckless homicide. When an adult who is entrusted the care of a baby allows it to be unattended near a large open fire, there ought to be grounds for criminal action. In this type of situation, it is within the discretion of the prosecutor and jury to withhold or minimize criminal punishment if they think that a guilty conscience is punishment enough, but clearly those individuals (who know the situation and the suspect far better than anybody here) decided that jail time was appropriate. I'm not going to second-guess that.

Edited October 8, 2008 by Enoch

[Hurlshort]

I'd say he's lucky he only got two years. A 7-month old baby requires constant attention. Even when the baby is asleep in the crib, my wife and I were checking on our daughter all the time.

 

There also seems to be a gap here. Man has baby in arms - baby burns to death. Did the baby burn in his arms? How the heck did he not notice the baby slipping out of his arms?

 

He may have slept off the alcohol, but I doubt he would have been slumbering so hard if he hadn't been drinking. Also, was he alone with this child? 6-9 beers while watching your 7-month child is ridiculous. It's incredibly irresponsible.

[Gorth]

Thread pruned. Let's try and keep this sober...

[Hurlshort]

Dang...I really feel like I missed something!

[Trenitay]

I'm not sure you're missing anything. They were outside. Guy falls asleep. baby falls out of his arms and crawls over to fire pit. He definitely should have way more responsible than he was and got less jail time than he could have but i dont think i could live with myself if my child died while I was watching him. Then having a judge send me to jail for it would make me go insane.

[Volourn]

"homicide."

 

I though homicide was murder/unlawful killing. Of course, i've never looked up the technical defintion of it.

 

Anyways, this is dfeinitely horrible. Why was he such a bonehead to sit so near a fire that his baby died? Tsk, tsk.

 

Still, it might be easy for us all to condemn him; but awsomeness points out that any punishment the alw feels the need to dish out is salt to the wounds. Afterall, unless he's completely immoral, the guy is likely going to suffer the rest of his life (in jail or out) with the knowledge that he's responsible for his child's death because of extreme negilence. The fact he decided to get drunk while babysitting is enough for me to smack him one.

 

As for creative punishment, mayne he should be sented to probation, and community service in a chidlren's sick ward to see the kind of pain children go through.

 

Still, there is most definitely no easy answer here.

Edited October 8, 2008 by Volourn

[Killian Kalthorne]

Over the weekend a man was left alone with his 7 month old baby. He had had 6-9 beers over the course of the day and he fell asleep with the baby in his arms outside near his fire pit. He woke up and found that his son had burned to death in the fire. He was sentenced to 2 years in prison for negligence. I dont think this is fair and he shouldn't have been sentenced for this amount of time. Mainly because my aunt and uncle had a child who drowned in a river while they were camping because they may have been a little "negligent" and the pain of losing the child is enough to me. I would like to know what everyone else thinks about this.

 

 

He should have gotten 5 to 10 years. Downing beers while being in charge of watching a child is not a "little negligent." It is gross negligence and downright stupid.

[Guest The Architect]

**** me, what a horrible story.

[Gorgon]

My sister once dropped my year old brother while she was wrangling groceries and trying to get in the car. He got a pretty serious cut on the head and had to be taken to hospital. She blamed herself terribly.

 

This is why babies freak me out, they're so fragile. It's like walking around with a Ming dynasty vase. That said, if you get one you better learn how to take care of it. Dozing off drunk doesn't sound at all prudent.

Edited October 8, 2008 by Gorgon

[random n00b]

Last time I checked, fire hurts like a bitch. As a matter of fact, the pain starts before there's any contact with the flames. So how did the child crawl ALL the way into the firepit, or at least enough to be burned to death?

 

Anyway, this ****er got off easy, if you ask me.

[Tigranes]

Perhaps the child stumbled entirely into the fire, or jumped in after a toy or something, then what with the pain and all, couldn't control the obdy to get him/herself out.

 

Well, that's the full extent to which I'm going to speculate about that. It's way too near bedtime.

[Volourn]

"He should have gotten 5 to 10 years."

 

Why stop at 10-15 years? Why not just give me 10 life terms. Or better yet, just give him the death penalty. Death penalty by fire. That'll be sweet, sweet karmic justice.

[qt3.14159]

True confessions time... (sorry, but y'all brought it up)

 

My first child died due to my "negligence"... sort of. He was 23 months old and had a severe seizure disorder. He'd started having seizures at three days old, though we didn't recognize that that's what they were until he was around six weeks. For the next 21 months, I spent on average two days a week at the hospital, doing blood work, adjusting his meds (at one time he was taking nine different meds), seeing specialists trying to do *something * to help him. He was severely disabled and could not hold his own head up even at 23 months. He had been in the hospital numerous times and the doctors had almost killed him with his drugs twice.

 

Shortly before he died, on top of everything else he started having kidney stones. The doctor called me at home after she got the blood work back and it showed a high level of calcium in his blood and told me to go get some NuSalt (potassium chloride salt substitute) and give him so many milligrams of it with his other meds to help pick up the extra calcium ions. I did what I was supposed to do; checked (and double checked) the label on the container, and gave him three tablespoons of the nuSalt, dissolved in water and poured down his feeding tube. Unfortunately, even though I'd tried to be very careful about the dosing, it turns out I should have given him three teaspoons not tablespoons. We called poison control, they didn't really seem to worried about it, but sent us to the hospital to get some charcoal to help absorb the excess...

 

By the time we were seen in the ER, he had gone into full cardiac arrest and could not get his blood potassium levels lowered. They just kept going up, and there was nothing they could do to get his heart going again.

 

I'm relating all of this, because I know what it's like to blame yourself for your child's death. The police questioned me, went to the house to collect all of his meds, and did a full investigation of the incident. Fortunately, I think they saw just how much shock I was in and eventually filed it as an accident. However, if they hadn't... if they had decided to put me on trial for it and I wound up being sentenced to prison...

 

I probably would have welcomed it. If it wasn't for my daughter (who was five weeks old), I would have have been happy to be drug off to an institution where I didn't have to make any decisions, be very productive or really give a **** about anything. It takes two years to even begin to get out of the fog of grief like that. To have spent that two years in prison wouldn't have made much difference to me, mentally or emotionally, I don't think. Even now, over eleven years later the grief is still unbearable at times.

 

Believe me, two years is *nothing* for this man. It'll take him that long to even want to get out of bed in the morning. I only hope he doesn't go to a maximum security prison, but somewhere he can get some psychological help for the ramifications of it all.

[Gfted1]

Sad story qt.

 

Something stinks about this guys story. Unless you are passed out drunk (which he couldnt be if only drinking 6-7 beers over the course of the day) how do you not hear a baby wailing from being burned to death?

[random n00b]

I may be jumping to conclusions here, but somebody who downs 2-3 litres of beer while an infant is under his supervision is either too stupid to care, or just doesn't care to begin with.

 

Accidents happen all the time, and nobody's fully exempt. Being a complete ****wit facilitates accidents greatly, though.

[qt3.14159]

Sad story qt.

 

Something stinks about this guys story. Unless you are passed out drunk (which he couldnt be if only drinking 6-7 beers over the course of the day) how do you not hear a baby wailing from being burned to death?

 

 

Yeah, I agree that's fishy. Some people really do sleep extremely hard and might not wake up at a normal baby cry... (my ex was like that) but I'd like to think that the kind of crying a baby would be doing i that situation would wake *anyone* up... How deep was the firepit? Is it possible the baby fell in and injured himself on the way down and didn't cry? Either way, falling asleep outside with a baby is *severe* negligence. Of course, it's also possible that the baby died from some other cause and he put it in the fire and made up the story... It wouldn't surprise me either way, honestly.

[Gfted1]

One of the saddest negligence stories I ever read was about a woman who was breast feeding her baby and fell asleep in the middle. Upon waking, she found that her breast had covered the babies face and smothered it. Could you friggin imagine that?! Or those poor SOB's who back over their kid with their car because they didnt see them standing behind it? Oy, I would seriously consider eating a bullet if I ever did anything like that to my daughter.

[Hell Kitty]

One of the saddest negligence stories I ever read was about a woman who was breast feeding her baby and fell asleep in the middle. Upon waking, she found that her breast had covered the babies face and smothered it. Could you friggin imagine that?! Or those poor SOB's who back over their kid with their car because they didnt see them standing behind it? Oy, I would seriously consider eating a bullet if I ever did anything like that to my daughter.

 

I'm reminded of this.

 

Some links to the story from the original post:

 

http://www.komonews.com/news/30397234.html

http://www.kirotv.com/news/17236379/detail.html

[Enoch]

One of the saddest negligence stories I ever read was about a woman who was breast feeding her baby and fell asleep in the middle. Upon waking, she found that her breast had covered the babies face and smothered it. Could you friggin imagine that?! Or those poor SOB's who back over their kid with their car because they didnt see them standing behind it? Oy, I would seriously consider eating a bullet if I ever did anything like that to my daughter.

 

I'm reminded of this.

And I'm reminded of Joseph Heller's Something Happened.

[Hurlshort]

Just as an aside about the firepit, the child wouldn't actually need to fall into the fire to burn to death. Just being close enough to overheat can be deadly, it's why you hear about children dying in hot cars every year.

[~Di]

Well, this really happened... sadly enough. Here's the story.

 

There are plenty of loopholes in the telling of this incident. For one thing, a 7-month-old infant may have started to crawl, but most at that age just scoolt around on their little elbows, or kind of lurch and flop forward. They certainly cannot walk and jump into a firepit on their own. Next, there was a serious wound on the infant's head... but smoke inhalation and soot in his nostrils indicated he was alive while in the pit. Horrifying, utterly horrifying.

 

This guy isn't the cleanest fellow around, either. He has several arrests for drugs and dui going back a decade, and had been deported at least three times.

 

This story really gives me the creeps. A tiny infant dying such a horrible death. Yes, I believe the man responsible should do prison time. Two years really isn't enough, in my view, because there is more to this baby's death than meets the eye. At best it was negligent homicide; at worst... well, the "at best" is bad enough, I suppose.

[Volourn]

'sounds worse than it seems' is not really enough to condemn someone of full fledge homicide/murder. And, the fact that the man had runs in with the law doesn't directly lead to what you are implying - that he purposefully threw his child in the fire. I can't 100% rule that possibilty out; but I'm not going in with that extreme of an assumption either.

 

 

"Two years really isn't enough, in my view"

 

So, again, how much time is enough? 5 years? 10 year? Or just burn him in a fire? Perhaps, that will sooth your need for payback... err.. 'justice'?

 

If it was an accident, he should be order to onto probation, community service, drug/alcohol rehab, and only be allowed to have supervised visitiation with his living childuntil hge gets his life together. throwing him in prison helps nobody, doesn't send any kind of meaningful message, nor does the punishment fit the 'crime'.

 

If it was on purpose, then I say fry him.