Another autistic child killed by a parent. "Not surpris

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This is absolutely untrue. You know, I read the comments too. And the guy was angry at the wild underestimation of what it could mean to care for someone with severe autism. Absolutely nowhere did he say that autistic people, any autistic people, should be killed. And that's a hell of a thing to put in someone's mouth.



All right, now you're bringing in things that weren't in any of the stories or things you were pointing to. If there are people who actually rationalize the murders and are sympathetic to them, then that's a different matter -- about them. But you're insisting that people who have said no such thing, in actual words, really meant to say that. And that's going too far.



Also untrue, which is why nobody's crying out against the women's being tried for first-degree murder. Nobody seems to suggest that they should go free.

Oh, so now my own memories of actually seeing what people write and hearing what they say are false. MHMMMM.

You're a murder apologist, plain and simple.

It's extraordinary, you tell someone who's anxious to stuff words in your mouth "no, those don't belong to me", and he tries to shove them in there anyway.

Post please the words where the commenter actually says that it's cool to murder autistic children. Not "words you imagine imply that he means it's cool to murder autistic children". Actual statements.

Again, murder apologist. I didn't say anyone said it's "cool" to murder autistic children. I said they are sympathizing in such a way that they rationalize the behavior. You clearly are accusing me of somehow imagining this in my mind, yet putting words in my mouth. In dealing with people who think and speak similarly, I know you most likely will continue with what you are doing all while insulting and making accusations against me.

If you can't understand what I or Sweetleaf (in a nicer way than me) said, I will conclude you will not empathize beyond what you have shown, and you will continue to insult me as if I'm simply not "getting" the truth by using words like delusional, imagining, so on.

Bleh; We met the family that we've taken under our wings through my sons' motorcycle club [btw. I HATE motorcycles and my son has permanent injury from an accident] But, before meeting this family, I had already been in touch with a couple of autism groups who were so in need of that kind of support [ trying to get my GRASP group involved. So far not a heck of a lot of enthusiasm. Sweetleaf ,maybe you?]

So, if you were to get in touch with a few autistic groups, they would probably be thrilled. Plus, there are schools, churches, "that nice family who you run into at the park when you are walking your dog," and, yeah, motorcycle clubs.

I am not saying that murder is ever alright. I'm just saying let's help prevent them. And, for every child whose life is ended by a parent, how many thousands, or tens of thousands of our kids are affected by the stress they feel in their home because the family has no one to help make life for the entire family a little easier. Even little things like baking a pie, mowing a lawn, helping a kid make a birdhouse, begging off a gift certificate for a free pedicure or massage from a salon to pamper mom; things like these, done consistently, and especially done by large numbers of the Autistic community might GREATLY lower the frequency of our kids being killed. [not to mention raising the self-esteem of Autistics in general in so many ways, the 2 most important being the raise in esteem when people show they care, and, also, the raise in self-esteem from the knowledge you have helped others and helped in bonding Autistics together. ]

I would do things like this. I like making people feel better. I would even like to be next to the autistic children (maybe do an activity with them) while the parents can relax. So, I'm not good at asking questions like these, but I will try to contact local autistic support groups and hopefully find families.

Yes, I do think this is where community will need to get involved. I can do things like cook, yard work, so on. Maybe we can get fundraising going for the parents and buy little gift cards. I think the regional center is the place in California where there are a lot of families that have low functioning autistic people (and other disabilities). My local one never picks up the phone or returns calls, though. Should I write down these ideas and just go there in person? What if they send me away? I know another regional center that's not too far but also not my "local" one. The woman I talked to is nice. I think I will go to that location and tell her about the ideas.

I know they have limited funding, so this is where we would get the community involved. Do you think having a bake sale or selling something so the profits made go towards providing these things would help? How do I gather people to help me do small things (like making dinner one night, or helping out with chores or laundry). Since I'm only one person, I'm afraid I would be overwhelmed if I had to make too many commitments at once. Perhaps I should make a volunteer type club?

Do you have any good names I could name this charity/volunteer group if I have to somehow put this together on my own?

I have four NT kids. 24, 20, 19, 17. I think the 19yo might have some AS though, but he's not interested in finding out. I go nuts as it is, trying to do for them. If one, or all of them were very, very time intensive then I can see how the mother could be overwhelmed and would think that's the solution. I'm not saying it's ok, cause it's not. You gotta be batshit crazy to kill your kid. What I'm saying is that maybe all that work she had to do, without a break, ever, DROVE her batshit crazy. Not the kid. The work and no break. Batshit crazy + constantly time intensive kid + no changes in sight = batshit crazy. Change kid to spouse or parent if you want to. I bet it's all the same. It was the fact that she saw no hope, not that the kid was "not human" or "needed killing" or anything like that. Just, no hope. And if she thought dying was best for her, maybe she thought it was best for him too, and took her with him. It's NOT best for either one, all I'm saying is that the constant, constant, constant may have drove her shithouse rat crazy. I don't think it's right. Not at all.

I think that Medicaid needs to provide some kind of respite care. You can't take care of somebody else if you don't take care of yourself.

That is not true. There are perfectly sane as well as only mildly mentally disturbed people killing their children all the time.

I agree.

What I don't get is how group homes turned into a fate literally worse than death, or how they got perceived that way. Even a low quality group home is better than death. If I were at the end of my tether to that extreme, I would commit the crime of abandonment to force the government's hand. Abandonment is a crime but nowhere near the magnitude of murder and it forces the government to find institutional care for the child. It will not be great institutional care but that still is a fate better than death, not worse.

There's this:
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/29/us/pe ... d-son.html



I'm not saying that this should become commonplace or that it isn't a crime, but I think it is what somebody should do if they are actually considering murder. The parents got charged with abandonment and the child became a ward of the state and placed in institutional care. That is not an awesome outcome but it sure is better than murder. It must remain a crime so that it stays a last resort rather than a first resort, but it is better than murder.

Better still would be decent quality group homes and institutional care. They exist. Kingdomofrats lives in one (per earlier post) and I live near one. I am judging the one I live near as probably decent because I often see the residents hanging out on the front porch or in the yard (it is a converted single family house in a residential neighborhood) and they look in good health and always wave to me and all other passersby (so in good spirits and not abused).

For those staying at home, vickygleitz's solution is also preferable. It is a helping hand and it also solves the problem of social isolation. When my daughter was going through her troubles (which were solved by placement in a school for autistic kids and out of the stressful public school), the isolation started to really get to me. I would have loved to go to a non-judgemental place where her meltdowns wouldn't get us kicked out- or better yet there weren't meltdown triggers (meltdowns are now a thing of the past thanks to better school placement) and vickygleitz is creating that sort of safe space which relieves the pressure and derails the crazy train.

But if worst comes to worst and "better off dead" creeps into a parents' mind, I really do think abandonment in a hospital is definately the lesser of two evils and the lesser of two crimes.

Janissy, what I do not grasp is this. They had a $500 million dollar company right? Why couldn't they use that money to take care of the child? Is medical care so expensive that a multi-millionaire who is 1/2 way towards being a billionaire couldn't afford it? If it is, then why?

I tried to find an answer to that question with google but could only find other people asking the exact same question, such as this article:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/7357 ... tml?pg=all


and also this:
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2000/ja ... f-despera/


It does beg the question of why they didn't put him in institutional care in the first place. It's where he ended up anyway but it meant that the government chose the institution, not them, and they got charged. They also lost custody (of course, that's standard in abandonment). Followups of the story say they did eventually get probation and eventually after that, supervised visitation. They also had visitng nurses who came to the house from time to time but that wasn't enough. So why not put him in a private institutionin the first place? They are in the income bracket that can afford it (if anybody can) and would have gotten routine visitation and no charges. So that's a puzzler.

Yep. All that.

In some states there's now some recognition that you can't just work caregivers to death and expect happy endings all the time, so there are programs where the caregivers can be paid as nurses and can also get more respite care. But there still needs to be more. And I agree, "no hope" is where things go very wrong.

It doesn't necessarily mean that the company is his, or even that -- given what they'd already been spending on his care -- they were all that well off. I know one couple with a girl who needed multiple liver transplants, and the cost for her care ran into the millions. They blew right past the lifetime cap on expenditures on their insurance policy, had to run fundraisers at the same time they were trying to keep the girl alive and the guy was trying to hold down a job.

The other thing is that...where do you find people who both can and will do the work? I mean you're talking about multiple people doing round-the-clock care, highly skilled and willing to pay intensive attention to the boy's needs. Mostly the kind of person who'll do that is called a mother. You can wave dollars all you want, and it's still very hard to attract good, capable, conscientious nursing care. Once you've done that, you still have to supervise all these people, and chronically hire and train, because people don't stay. My guess is that part of the reason the social-work staff dread abandonments is that it's so very hard to find good care for people with severe disabilities...and there's always the risk of liability when you're involved.

ETA: I'm also reading stories in which a disability advocate's quoted as saying that help exists and it can be hard to get but it's out there, and that's just wrong. There's help for some people in some circumstances with some problems. But there's more cracks than anything else, and people fall through all the time. I remember hunting high and low for help in a county that funds services pretty well, and you've got to be in this category and that but not a third, or the funding's only available for this set of people this year, or etc. I've also served on a county board granting the social-service money, and there are programs that simply do not get funded, populations who do not get served.

I wonder if they were simply waiting-listed forever, and the woman was coming apart at the seams, so they left the boy in a place where they knew the docs would have to look after him, by law. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd researched the hospital, too, and found that there was decent CP care there. A little weird to drive all the way to Delaware.

Yeah, here we go:

http://articles.latimes.com/1999/dec/30/news/mn-49062

I think people maybe underestimate how gruelling and dangerous a job nursing can be, and why the turnover rate's so high. It's a real problem. A while back I was doing some research on bariatric hospital furniture (don't ask) and kept coming across these articles about nursing staff refusing to deal at all with bariatric patients. Fat-acceptance groups kept going on about how nurses are prejudiced against morbidly obese people, but the big problem was actually that the staff were afraid of getting hurt. You move low-mobility 500-lb patients around, your odds of getting hurt are pretty steep, and the nurses were talking about how they didn't have disability coverage and needed to work and all this. Caring for disabled people who need to be moved and toileted or diapered, or who're prone to uncontrollable violence -- it's not only taxing mentally, it's just hard on a body. And usually the pay isn't so fantastic that you'd be willing to be harmed or totally burnt out for it. So there's a lot of turnover. I have a lot of friends who've done stints working in group homes, just because there were always jobs available...they found out why there are always jobs available.

So...this is part of the problem too. It's not just about "assemble money to throw at autism care" -- you have to stop and ask who's actually available to do the care, and do it reasonably well. It's not the only industry that has this problem, either. For a long time there was a lot of talk about how we just need to pay schoolteachers better and wa-la, a corps of well-qualified teachers would appear and stay. Teacher pay's improved tremendously in a lot of places in the US, but the attrition rates are still huge.

Actually, there are a lot of nurses that are plain out rude. They refuse to lift them anyways, and the ones I knew criticized obese people because they thought it was unattractive. This may be due to being burnt out, but I still hate it. You can tell who the caring nurses are, because they will often feel bad they can't take care of their patient. Although, regardless of rudeness, you should not expect anyone to hurt themselves the way you are expected to when you have to lift someone who is obese. I was, and I swore I fractured a part of my arms. I couldn't even lift up a plate after that. The family insisted I "had" to learn how to take their 300 lb family member down an impossibly steep incline by myself. Yeah, we both almost fell and I got hurt.

There are loopholes hospitals and nursing homes use. It's horrible. They tell you you're not allowed to lift people. If you do, and get hurt, they are not liable. YET, they won't provide more than maybe 2 lifts on a whole floor.

I'm a CNA. I know of these problems. I also was in a group home when I was 18. There could be drastic improvement in all of the places you mentioned. In my group home, the people were barely trained. Now, most of the people in my home weren't very violent, but there were autistic people and mentally challenged people along with mentally ill. I had to stick up for them because the staff would call them "ret*ds" ALL of the time. One time, this guy started beating on one of them (I was there, it wasn't his fault, the guy that started it was violent) and the staff laughed. At an RTF I was at, a person with a traumatic brain injury had vastly different intellectual capabilities than the rest of us. I stuck up for her all of the time, too. She got in a fight with this one girl (verbal). The person with the TBI called her the "n" word (note: I know this is bad, but when she is upset and crying, she tries to say the one thing that hurts you because that's how she knows how to protect herself). The other girl beat on her, kicked her head in, and the staff was laughing and let it happened. They never sat them both down and explained why what she said was wrong and have her apologize, they just decided physical abuse was appropriate. I think part of the reason for this is because these places were so desperate for people to do this job that had such a high turnover, that they literally started employing anyone, regardless of how messed up they are. I notice this in mental hospitals, too.


I knew a man who took care of his elderly mother 24/7. He didn't get paid for it at all. He asked the state for help, and they were willing to send a home health aid for only 10 hours per week. Society will think you are uncaring if you send your loved one to a facility. We need to change that stigma.

I personally took care of people with severe dementia. They were extremely violent. I won't lie, it was hard. Part of the problem is the fact they need at least 2 people to properly care for them. I mean, the CNAs at these hospitals and nursing homes aren't even necessarily taking care of disabled people who can be violent, and yet, they can be seriously hurt. The family didn't want to put them in homes even though they could, and they made 1 CNA take care of a person who needed way more help than we could give. Contrast this with parents who actually BEG for help. It's messed up. I think people don't care who does the job as long as THEY aren't doing it. They want grandma to be at home, even if the CNA gets hurt, and even if it's not what grandma would have wanted.


If I remember right, Kaiser was on of the hospitals that was making nursing safety standard. They put lifts in ALL of the rooms above ALL of the beds. There was NO excuse for anyone to get hurt, baring a few accidents that do happen.

Wow, you've known some rough times, bleh12345. And yeah, I agree, a lot of places will hire anyone who passes the drug/background checks. No choice.

I've been digging around for more on that Kelso story...it's pretty awful. Apparently the kid had seizures all day long, and spent most of his life in that hospital anyway, lots of surgeries and treatments, so it wasn't like it was a strange place for him. The parents had been without nursing help for nearly a month and weren't going to be able to get a nurse in for at least another month, and they had to have a break, and this was the only way they could get it. Waited till day after Christmas. They actually came back around saying okay, the mom's better now, we'd like to take the boy home, and I don't know what happened from there. The guy lost his CEO job.

I wouldn't be surprised if the state actually let the boy go home, given that the alternative was finding state-sponsored nursing-home room for a medically fragile mostly-noncommunicative CP pre-teen with daily seizures and cognitive problems.