The family of 3-year-old Ke’Torrius “K.J.” Starkes Jr. is remembering the little boy as a “joyful,” “brilliant” “happy boy who loved life, who would light up any room that he would enter into.”
The toddler died after he was trapped inside a hot car while in the custody of a worker contracted by the Alabama Department of Human Resources, the state’s child protective services agency, according to the Jefferson County Medical Examiner’s Office and the state Department of Human Resources. The Birmingham Police Department is investigating the death.
K.J. had been left inside a car parked outside a home in Birmingham for several hours during the middle of the day on Tuesday, the Jefferson County Medical Examiner’s Office said.
If you feel anger. Good. You should. The easiest target is the worker. But ask yourself this. Why was there only one?
The general rule for most professions that deal with kids is that adults should never be alone 1 on 1 with a kid.
This worker is probably paid the least of any profession that deals with children, and they are asked to do it alone, with no backup to help catch mistakes.
So I blame the state for not investing in the well-being of children.
Nah, fuck this opinion. Parents are required to be good parents regardless of how they’re getting paid and somebody who has been entrusted to ensure the safety of a child regardless of how they’re getting paid should do so in a way that does not ensure their death. When your entire job is child healthcare, forgetting a child in a hot car is completely inappropriate. Not only should they be blackballed from this industry, but they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
I do agree they should not work any job where they are responsible for children.
But if it was truly a mistake,I am just not sure tossing them in jail does anyone any good. It’s not like that would be a deterrent to someone who meant well making the same mistake. If anything it will drive people away from the job, which by reducing the pool of people applying will reduce the quality of the people they hire. So it could actually indirectly make it more likely to happen in the future. If it was clear gross negligence (which means more than just a mistake), then yeah, I am with you. Also, a large portion of thier job is actually paperwork. It really should be done by two people. And that would drastically reduce the chances of this happening. But the gov that funds this doesn’t actually care if this kind of thing happens.
Mistakes do happen, but when mistakes happen, we don’t let somebody off the hook. There are multiple studies that confirm that humans need some amount of retribution so that they feel something was done to address the inappropriateness of the action. This is not just a mistake, a child died because of the ineptitude of this worker.
The quality of people for this job is already significantly reduced due to the abusive situation they often have to work in, the extreme lack of benefits, and the extremely low pay. This person facing punishment isn’t going to reduce the amount of applicants for this position because those applicants aren’t applying because they like the job, they’re applying because they feel a higher call.
Just because there should have been two people doesn’t mean you let the person that negligently killed a child off the hook. I can be angry at the state for not supplying enough resources for these cps workers, but I can also be angry at this particular person for allowing a child to die in a hot car. I failed to see, by the way, how that could be anything other than gross negligence.
Furthermore, parents often have to deal with their child on a one-on-one scenario where this does happen to them, and it’s still not an excuse for that to happen, and those parents do get charged, and if they have other kids, CPS does get involved.
So to recap, this worker was put in a situation that parents face all the time and negligingly forgot a child in a hot car. Even if it was not done maliciously, that does not excuse her actions, and she should face retribution for the consequences of her actions. And then you’re defending that we shouldn’t want retribution from this person because that might put people off from working in child protective services?
I think your empathy may be blinding you here, comrade.
So a couple of things. I have said in various comments that the worker shouldn’t be off the hook, but that jail doesn’t seem like it would do anything positive. From your comment on how the job is so bad that only people feeling a higher calling apply, that would mean jailing the person would not cause someone who isn’t competent from applying. So again what is the point of jail. I mean maybe it will keep them from killing themselves, so I guess there is that. Next, parents very often do not get charged or punished… https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/07/14/parents-charged-hot-car-deaths/7771928001/ As for gross negligence, it has a legal definition. And there is no way for us to know from the facts released if it is or is not gross negligence… https://www.bellpollockinjury.com/understanding-difference-between-negligence-gross-negligence/ For parents, their life is generally filled with kid related triggers. They go in a store and think “do we need more milk for junior”. Food place, “I wonder if junior would eat that”. Thier own car probably has cheerios on the driver side floor matt to remind them of thier child. A csp worker most likely does not have any of these things to remind them of the child who is in thier back seat. In fact given how tough the job is, when they are anywhere else, they probably block it out. I will agree that humans have a desire for retribution. But a better word is revenge. Yet we need to rise above that, look for a way to support the greater good. This person, if not grossly negligent, should be allowed to attone for their mistake, which they can’t likely do from jail. Community service, and things like that seem a better fit. And obviously they should not be allowed to be responsible 1 on 1 for vunerable people again.
Revenge and retribution are not the same thing. Retribution is getting justice so the person feels made more whole. Vengeance/revenge is destroying the actor who committed the action.
We don’t have a society that rehabilitates other, we only have a system that jails people, and unfortunately for her, that is what I think should happen.
Yes, I know that gross negligence has a legal definition, and I’m using it specifically in this case because a CPS worker negligently left a child in her hot car for hours while she went on personal errands. All she had to do was look in her rearview mirror to see the child. Put a sticky note on the fucking steering wheel. She could have done a number of things differently to ensure the child’s still alive.
As for atoning for this person’s mistakes, they can atone from jail, where they can also serve out community service. Ultimately, this is for a court to decide which I think is the most appropriate as I don’t think we’ll see eye to eye on this one.
For instance this would have made a significant difference
https://www.nsc.org/newsroom/just-21-states-protect-children-hot-cars
You’re also wrong that parents aren’t often charged. According to this study, 58% of parents who leave their child in a hot car face charges after the fact.
https://journalistsresource.org/health/child-dead-left-hot-car-research/#%3A~%3Atext=Researchers+analyzed+541+cases+of
Ah yes, the ol’, “I don’t get paid enough for this shit”, defence for letting a child die while in your custody. Solid.
Well if that is how you read it… it isn’t what I said, but I can’t help your choice of interpretation. But as long as we don’t put some blame on the management and funding deciders, this kind of thing will continue.
You definitely included the employee’s low pay as context to consider. Another person likely would’ve prevented this from occurring, but the fact is that only one person was involved. The amount of pay that person received does not negate their failure to not kill a child. They could’ve been coerced into taking care of the child against their will and that would still not absolve them of guilt, in my opinion.
I did, but not as motivation. Low pay means the hiring manager usually don’t have a large pool of people from which to choose a person with the skills for the job.
If a worker had a heart attack and died in the car in a parking lot on a hot day with the kid in the back, and the kid died. Would you still nlame the worker? Or would you ask why wasn’t there some system in place to handle the possibility of an incapacitated worker. Like a checkin system when they are with a child, or a partner.
Now add on that humans making mistakes is a whole lot more likely than a sudden heart attack incapacitating someone. Yet no system or plan exists to prevent it from resulting in the death of the child. This was entirely preventable, it just wasn’t worth the cost to the policy makers.
And no, the worker shouldn’t be completely absolved from guilt. They shouldn’t be allowed to work 1:1 with vulnerable people ever again. But will jail time solve anything? If there was some evidence that it was more than just a horrible mistake, then sure. But if not, I don’t see how putting all the blame on them will prevent it from happening in the future.
Yeah but it wasn’t like the kid was left in the car for 20 minutes according to the article they were in there for multiple hours. How do you forget about a kid for hours and hours on end?
Forgetting things doesn’t get harder with time, it gets easier. That said, a parent or what not would have lots of things in their house and such that would trigger them to think about the kid and remember. This person proabably had no such triggers in thier life. And of course it is what they needed.
This looks to be a case of manslaughter, defined by state law as if one “(1) Recklessly causes the death of another person.” For criminal liability, it really is that simple. The person who did the immediate bad act is charged with the most severe crime.
It seems you want to blame the state. Great! Talking about civil liability, you can be sure the victim’s family will sue the worker, their company, and the state, and they’ll probably settle out of court because it’s a sure win for the plaintiff.
That being said, this worker should still be held criminally accountable for the death of this child. Regardless of the states culpability in not allocating enough money to hire the number of workers necessary to care for the children they supervise, this person was still criminally negligent.
that’s a tough one for me. I mean there need to be repercussions. After all, they did take the job and did know the responsibilities. But maybe they expected more support to avoid these kinds of mistakes. Or maybe they expected the hiring manager to ensure they were qualified. And likely they will have to live with this horrible pain for the rest of there lived. No way to know from here. But I am not sure it “automatically” should result in crimanal charges that I would expect jail time from.
Well, the letter of the law is clear enough. IANAL but it looks like there’s probable cause for manslaughter charges. We’ll have to see if the DA agrees. But that doesn’t mean a jury will convict. They’ll want to hear all of the details that we don’t yet know.
On a general level, though, I would say your position is soft. I believe that if you work a job with small children or other people who can’t keep themselves safe (people with Alzheimer’s, etc.), you have a moral obligation to keep them reasonably safe. If your working conditions are so bad that you can’t, then either blow the whistle or quit. If you don’t, everyone will blame you in the end. This is basic CYA for any job, of course, but it’s extra important when people’s lives are on the line.
Yeah, my laymans understanding of manslaughter fits the bill. But laws are “funny”. And I want to agree with what you said about blow the whistle or quit. But I understand how hard that is for a lot of people. Also, it’s hard to blow the whistle on something everyone already knows is bad. If people didn’t have to work to survive (health insurance, rent, food…) it would be a lot easier to quit if you felt you couldn’t safely do the job. But the system was designed to make it hard for people to quit. So I have trouble blaming people for not being able to do it.
If the state actually invested in things besides private prisons and locking people up for smoking a joint it wouldn’t be such a miserable backwards shithole but if the dirt roads leading to the redneck’s trailers out in the sticks were paved they wouldn’t have their trucks covered in mud every time they went into town and that would infringe on their cultural identity as tribal swamp people.