This young woman and her little boy just never had a real chance to make it. Read this article from the Raleigh News and Observer and weep.
Boy dies in trunk of car
More below.
Michelle Joyce Gibson, 36, of Asheville, left her 8-year-old son in the car Saturday and Sunday while she worked 16-hour shifts as a nursing assistant at a nursing home near Sylva in Jackson County. Partway through her Sunday shift, she found him dead. A co-worker called 911 and reported seeing the boy in the trunk
She was a poor, single mom with no good weekend childcare arrangements," Seago said. "She thought, choosing between all these bad options, 'He can just go with me and play around in the car.' "
He said she didn't feel comfortable leaving the child home because she was staying with friends in a public housing complex. Until recently, she had been homeless.
By all accounts, Gibson was a good mother who doted on her child and who was trying to better herself and provide a stable life for him by working as a nurse's aide.
She had, presumably, jumped through all the hoops that our benevolent government requires of poor, single mothers and still she felt she had no other recourse than to leave her son in a hot car all day while she worked for barely above minimum wage.
That she had no support system in family and friends is sad enough, but what is criminal is that there was no safety net for her and her son as she struggled to make a life for both of them.
We push people off of governent assistance and we provide them with nothing to make the transition easier for them. People like Michelle Gibson and her son, Devin are basically thrown to the wolves.
When is this government going to realize that the children that are already here, already going to bed hungry at night, already living in dangerous neighborhoods and being left unattended while their parents struggle to feed them deserve to be protected even more than a fertilized egg that may someday become a child? Right to life? My ass.
We need good quality daycare for the working poor. Beyond that, we need good quality daycare for people who are trying to become the working poor so that they can go to school or to training programs. We ask so much of them and give them so little in return.
Until we provide a safety net for these people, we have on our hands the blood of Devin and all of the children who die alone while their parent is at work.