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.
“Rather than properly returning K.J. immediately to day care, the worker made numerous personal errands with K.J. buckled in a car seat in the back of her car,” French told CNN.
wtf
Toss the perpetrator in a dumpster in Death Valley and lock the top.
I am so fucking angry. Fuck Alabama.
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.
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.
For…several…HOURS
I know it’s horrifying. This isn’t a momentary lapse there’s no defence for it. It’s so bad I’m wondering if it’s deliberate
Yeah when it’s the parent who does it, it’s usually because they’re completely exhausted from trying to tend to the baby and… Tragic.
But this is a person in the clock…?
I mean idk I’d like to know more about this person’s general wellbeing/state. Are they working 3 jobs? Dealing with loss or something? Or was this just a day at work?
If you have ever met an actual cps worker you would know. They don’t take that job for the money. They are asked to work in often horrible circumstances, with thier hands essentially tied behind thier backs. Just imagine taking a child to visit a parent who isn’t allowed to be alone with thier own kid. That often is going to be heartbreaking and insanely stressful.
Mistakes happen. If the state/community really cared, there would always be at least two workers with a child in custody at any time. And they would be paid better so that the hiring manager could be more choosy about who they hired. Google spends more on redundancy alone to ensure you can always read your email. So don’t blame the person, blame the system the put them in over thier head.I don’t care how “tied” your hands are. A child in a hotbox for HOURS is on you. Unless they had been awake for 36 hours straight or something there’s no excuse and even that excuse is weak. You don’t just FORGET that you put a child in a fucking car for hours. Not unless there’s a severe cognitive issue like drug use or exhaustion.
well, what you are saying is just not true. Someone in these comments posted a link to some science providing evidence to the same.
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Yep or they’re just abusive/neglectful parents. Surely the staff member must have told colleagues they’d collected the kids? You don’t just do it on a whim, there’s procedures, laws and policies in place so managers must have known. And NONE of them realised the child was in the car?
This is fucking infuriating. Pure rage.
I remember being in a car too long around the age of 5/6. I’m middle aged, I still remember due to the mild trauma.
Fuck. This poor kid died suffering, crying, screaming. Until he probably passed out due to exhaustion and dehydration.
FUCK.
Those involved deserve prison. Long sentences.
This is one of those cases where I wish we had old time “punishment fits the crime” laws.
Don’t get me wrong. If we’re gonna have a systemic and capital punishment conversation I am absolutely for systems that rehabilitate and work towards reintegrating criminals into society. Failures like this are systemic failures that should really not be only blamed on the individual idiot that did this. We shouldn’t have a system that can literally lose a kid for hours. There should be no way for this to even happen. Even IF the person that did this specifically meant to kill the kid (which I hope not).
Having said that. My monkey brain wants the person that did this to have to sit in a hot car until they die.
yea ideally not just the contracted worker, anyone involved in setting up such a soulless shit piece of a system
Let’s not forget that this was after he had his entire concept of safety and security shattered due to being taken away from his family.
This involved have never deserved the air they breathe.
Wow. CPS takes your kid away, and promptly proves that they aren’t capable of being a safe guardian either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child
Raised by wolves
Hessian wolf-children[19]: 15–7 [20] (1304, 1341 and 1344) lived with the Eurasian wolf in the forests of Hesse:
- The first boy (1304) was taken by wolves at age 3 and found when 7 or 8 by Benedictine monks, the wolves having cared for him by “surrounding him in cold weather, and fed him the best meat from the hunt.” He was later sent to the court of Prince Henry, and became accustomed to human society but said he preferred the wolves.[21]
Frankly, Alabama, I think that you need to up your child-rearing game to at least wolf-level.
Workers contracted? Independent contractors are allowed to have custody of children? That’s psychotic.
Privatizing everything possible so the maximum number of shitbags enjoy the grift is a repugger wet dream.
Alabama…
You’ve got the rest of the union to help you along … What’s going wrong?
State’s rights?
Sounds like that should be illegal. You would at least hope it is but we will sub contract anything.
So the family managed to at least keep him alive for 3 years, the state takes him and he’s dead after a few hours. This isn’t going to go well for anybody. Poor kid.
The whole domain of foster care, CPS/CYF offices, and adoptions is a huge and tragic world that exists all around us but is invisible to most people.
Almost anybody who works in that world is in the same situation as jobs like teachers and game developers where passionate people are aggressively exploited by the business drones. But they have to deal with sadder higher stakes while getting even worse pay and nowhere near the resources they need. So then they become victims of the system too.
And we all know that here in the US at least, our population does not give a fuuuuuuck about living children breathing air outside wombs. And when they are poor and “urban?” Forget about it.
I can hear conservative distant relatives now: “Sounds like his baby mama should have taken better care of him!” (Of course with the term “baby mama” shoehorned in where it doesn’t fit in order to make sure the sentence ends with an air of racism and dehumanization of an innocent child)
Oklahoma DHS let a Cherokee girl die just last week. THREE WEEKS MISSING, no report, the just found her body.
The fact CPS is part of the Department of Human Resources seems about on par for Alabama
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I thought that might be the case so I googled a handful of states and they were all Departments of Human Services
Yeah, I deleted my comment right after I sent it because I had realized I’d misremembered it being Resources instead of Services. Didn’t think anyone would’ve seen it that quickly, haha
Haha. There might be a lag in federation between instances.
According to the article the woman picked him up from daycare, went to a supervised visit with the father, then ran errands with K.J. still in the backseat for an hour instead of bringing him back to daycare, then went home and left him for 5 hours still strapped in the backseat and was only made aware he was still there when the daycare called to see why he hadn’t been returned.
How the hell do you forget you have child in a car? That has to be a drug situation or some kind of mental impairment.
How the hell do you forgot you have child in a car?
This situation aside, quite easily. Especially if not your own, you don’t drive kids places often, are exhausted or feeling unwell, have too much other stuff getting overwhelming, and of course the kid being nice and quiet. Possibly also just leaving the kid there for a short time at first, and then forgetting, which would be the irresponsible way under these conditions (heat, closed windows, no escape).
It can happen to anyone, according to research. I can’t fathom the guilt someone must feel over such a horrific accident.
Several hours? Unbelievable! JFC!
If I lived in Alabama and CPS tried to take my child away, I would rather die protecting him.
Exactly. Even if the parents are unsafe for the kid, the government’s just proved that it’s even worse. Good luck trying to get people to give up their kids voluntarily.
It’s not just Alabama.
Georgia has repeatedly failed my kids by not preventing them from being abused (obviously not by me)
This country has repeatedly proven itself to just not care about people, especially kids and the elderly. It’s depressing and horrifying and monstrous. Guess we can add that to the pile of depravity.
Our tech is amazing though! Meta Ray-Bans! Social media is fun!
Being abused while in CPS custody, though?
Reconstruction 2: This time we finish the job
Give us a minute and we’ll have the deets. I’ll bring the cole slaw.
Remember to take your antibiotics to the end of the course, people.
