Stock photo
I’ve written this headline too many times.
Police say a couple left their 2-year-old daughter strapped in a carseat Friday outside their home on Garden Terrace, near Forest and Audelia. They had spent the day at the park. They brought in their other children, and they all napped. Temperatures soared, and the father went out to work on the the car in the afternoon, and that’s when he found his daughter still strapped in her seat.
They rushed her to Medical City where she was pronounced dead. The parents are not speaking to the media.
In 2013, a Dallas ISD teacher reportedly, allegedly, left her child in the car to die while she went to work at a Pleasant Grove elementary school. When police found her, she asked them if her child was OK? Did something happen at day care? By all accounts Vibha Marks believed her daughter was at day care, while she actually was dying of hyperthermia in the school parking lot.
Years ago the well-known Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten nearly left his child in a hot car, he said at a lecture I attended. The experience prompted him to write the 2009 Pulitzer-winning piece Fatal Distraction, which is about parents who accidentally kill their child by leaving him or her in a hot car.
It is a tough read, so I’ll repeat the most salient points that I shared last time this happened:
1) Everyone believes this would never happen to them.
Clinical Psychologist Ed Hickling: “Humans have a fundamental need to create and maintain a narrative for their lives in which the universe is not implacable and heartless, that terrible things do not happen at random, and that catastrophe can be avoided if you are vigilant and responsible.”
The comments section following stories about the parents are full of anger and vitriol. That is because we need to assert that we are not vulnerable to this sort of thing, Hickling told Weingarten.
“We want to believe that the world is understandable and controllable and unthreatening, that if we follow the rules, we’ll be okay. So, when this kind of thing happens to other people, we need to put them in a different category from us. We don’t want to resemble them, and the fact that we might is too terrifying to deal with. So, they have to be monsters.”
2) But the truth is, it could happen to anyone.
What kind of person forgets and accidentally kills a child?
Weingarten: The wealthy do, it turns out. And the poor, and the middle class. Parents of all ages and ethnicities do it. Mothers are just as likely to do it as fathers. It happens to the chronically absent-minded and to the fanatically organized, to the college-educated and to the marginally literate. In the last 10 years [published 2009], it has happened to a dentist. A postal clerk. A social worker. A police officer. An accountant. A soldier. A paralegal. An electrician. A Protestant clergyman. A rabbinical student. A nurse. A construction worker. An assistant principal. It happened to a mental health counselor, a college professor and a pizza chef. It happened to a pediatrician. It happened to a rocket scientist.
The summer before Weingarten wrote the piece, it happened three times in one day.
Now it has happened again here in Dallas. Only by being humbly aware of our vulnerability can we make sure it does not keep happening.
[more Washington Post]Meanwhile, Dallas Police have not said what charges the parents in this most recent case will face.
