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Strollerderby
Would you leave your baby outside a restaurant alone?
You might recall that back in 1997, a Danish mom was arrested in New York City for leaving her baby in a stroller outside a restaurant while she went inside to have a drink. She claimed false arrest and received over $60,000 in damages. Fast forward 14 years and the same thing happened again in Amherst, Massachusetts.
A mom left a baby outside in a stroller while she went in the Bueno Y Sano eatery to order food, and police were called to the scene. While this woman (whose name has been withheld) was not arrested, Amherst police contacted the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families to file a report of potential abuse or neglect.
The story is awful: every parent’s nightmare. And of course, the reaction is a mix of horror and fear that something like that could happen to one of our own children. If…we aren’t protective enough. If…we don’t watch them well enough. If…we let them out of our sight, for one single, solitary second.
But life is risky, and who’s to say little Leiby would have been less a target if he were 10, 13, or 15? How do we really protect our kids from something as random (and rare) as a stranger abduction? (They happen in locked homes, too, you know.) Do we eliminate all risky behavior (driving in cars, taking baths) because they sometimes (a lot more often with the baths and cars than the kids walking alone, actually) turn out badly? Where do we draw the line between making our kids “safe enough” and keeping them from exploring, enjoying life and learning to be independent human beings…which is, of course, the ultimate goal?
I believe the answer is more, not fewer, kids running free. Continue reading »
Leiby Kletzky would have turned 9 next week.
Today’s tragic news in Brooklyn is too much for most mothers to handle. Just two days ago, an eight-year-old boy, Leiby Kletzky, was reported missing from his Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn. Just days before, he begged his family to allow him to walk home alone from his day camp, seven blocks away. The family agreed to let him walk half way and his mother would meet him in the middle. So just three and a half blocks he was to walk on Monday, the first day he was allowed to do so.
What might have been a tragic Mother's Day turned into a joyous one for a young California mom
What might have been a Mother’s Day spent in mourning and panic for one California woman turned into one in which she’s counting her blessings.
A 16-year-old mom and her 2-month old baby were separated on Wednesday after a terrifying ordeal in which a woman posing as a daycare center worker snatched the infant and fled.
Talia Gone, 31, befriended the young mom as she was out for a walk with the baby near San Diego City College, telling her about a program for young moms at the college.
A baby photo of Carlina White
The woman who was taken from a New York hospital when she was just days old in 1987 is prepared to defend the woman responsible for the crime.
Carlina White, 23, met her real parents in January, but agreed to appeal for leniency nonetheless on behalf of her fake mom, Ann Pettway, if she is convicted. Pettway reportedly abused White, and has been charged with her kidnapping.
Pettway snatched White from a hospital in Harlem when she was 19 days old and suffering from a high fever and took her to Bridgeport, Conn. She renamed the baby Njedra Nance and told people she had been given the baby by a drug-addicted woman.
Jaycee Dugard is another kidnapping victim whose story ended as well as it could
From the Lindbergh baby to Adam Walsh and Amber Hagerman, child abductions don’t often have happy endings. The headlines are heartbreaking, and even parents with no connection to the cases feel their hearts break, as they inevitably imagine what would happen if someone snatched their child.
Carlina White, sick with a fever, was taken from the maternity wing of a New York hospital when she was just nine days old in 1987. A mystery woman who had been hanging around the hospital for weeks disguised as a nurse was ultimately believed to be responsible for snatching the newborn. A reward was offered for the baby’s safe return, but it never came to pass.
As it turns out, Carlina was taken to Connecticut and then Atlanta, where she was given a new name — Nejdra — and raised by a new family. Nejdra always suspected she wasn’t who her family said she was, and had never seen her birth certificate or social security card, which meant she was unable to obtain a driver’s license. So she started looking on websites for missing children, and found some that looked like her. And after a few phone calls and a DNA test, Carlina was reunited with her biological family last weekend.
Carlina White as an infant.
Carlina White has excellent instincts. The 23-year-old recently solved the mystery of her own kidnapping and was reunited with her birth mother, Joy White. Carlina was born in Harlem Hospital on August 4, 1987 and stolen from the maternity ward. It’s unclear who actually abducted Carlina, but she was raised by a woman named Cassandra Pettway, who now lives in Georgia. Carlina was reared in Connecticut under the alias Nejdra Nance. Understandably, Carlina feels no sympathy for her “bogus” mother, as The New York Daily News describes her. She told reporters, “I want her to suffer. I want her to do some time, like I suffered for 23 years.”
What is most remarkable about Carlina’s story is that her own doubts about her identity led her to solve her cold case. According to the Daily News, “she began questioning whether she was really Pettway’s kin after her 16th birthday.” Carlina’s suspicions were confirmed when she became pregnant at age 19 and “asked her fake mom for some paperwork on her background.” Carlina says that was when “That lady told me she wasn’t my mother.” Continue reading »
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