Nothing is more grievous than when a parent loses a child, which is why it’s critical that when a child passes that the entire community rally around the parent (parents) to help them through their time of grief.
The only time this isn’t a truism is when the parent willfully kills their children; in that instance, the community needs to call for justice first, then compassion.
This is why the story of police charging a mother with child abuse after the child died in a freak accident is so heartbreaking and scary for all parents.
When Jiterria Lightner arrived at the Charlotte airport with her 3 children, aged 4, 3, and 2, she had no idea that it would end in tragedy.
As any parent of multiple children under the age of 5 can attest to, the 3 children were testing her very ability to function. Stressed out and exhausted from a trip down to Florida, Lightner tried her best to monitor her children while attempting to hail a ride so she and her kids could exit the airport and get on with their lives.
Content to let her children play nearby in a space next to the escalator and the stairs, Lightner had no idea that the decision to rest in that small space would spell disaster.
Though she was no less than 15 feet away when the incident took place, 3-year-old Jaiden’s natural curiosity ended up killing him.
After Jaiden grasped the moving railing of the escalator, he was pulled several feet upwards before falling back to his death.
Anyone who would have witnessed the incident would have lamented that the event was a freak accident. And that’s actually how the police initially reacted.
However, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department, who were the ones to initially responded to the accident, changed their mind and are now determined to add insult to injury by slapping Lightner with warrants for three misdemeanor charges of child abuse for not adequately supervising her children.
If the courts find her guilty and decide to sentence her to jail for 150 days (the maximum penalty), not only will it add even more hardship to this grief-stricken mother’s life, but will also compromise her surviving children’s lives as she’s removed from their presence for an extended period of time.
Her attorney argued that the charges are rather extreme. “She’s a single mother that was watching three children at an airport and I think the circumstances could have happened to a number of us,” her attorney Michael Greene said. “I don’t think they rise to the level of a crime.“
What “crime” did Lightner commit?
She took her eyes off of her son for a second, and he wandered away from her side, like millions of children do every single day.
Lightner voluntarily turned herself in to police on November 21, and the police are touting “new” video evidence that shows the unfortunate and tragic death.
But, the fact remains, this kind of accident could happen to just about anyone, and it’s safe to assume that the devastation Lightner feels is more than enough to pay for her mistake.
“To this day, she still can’t recount the story without breaking down,” Greene said. “This wasn’t an instance where she was not paying attention to her children.”
Maybe the Mecklenburg-Charlotte police would be better off tracking down real criminals in the violent torn city with a crime rate higher than the national average.