A Car Hit and Killed Their 7-Year-Old Son. Now They're Being Charged for Letting Him Walk to the Store.
Letting children walk alone isn’t a crime. But in North Carolina, prosecutors are treating it like one.
A mom and dad are grieving in Gastonia, North Carolina. Their 7-year-old son, Legend, was tragically killed by a car after running into the street on a walk to the store with his 10-year-old brother.
If you were tasked with determining a punishment for the parents, would you: A) arrest them for manslaughter, set bail at $1.5 million, and forbid them from attending their son's funeral, or B) decide this tragedy has been punishment enough?
Authorities in Gastonia chose option A.
Jessica Ivey and Samuele Jenkins are facing felony charges of involuntary manslaughter and child neglect, as well as a misdemeanor child neglect charge, according to The NC Beat.
The tragedy occurred on May 27. Ivey claimed it was the first time she allowed the kids to walk to the store. A witness to the accident said the older boy tried to grab his little brother from running, but he broke away.
The Gastonia Police Department issued a statement on its Facebook page, saying that while it extended its "deepest sympathies" to the parents for their "heartbreaking loss," the investigation revealed that the children were unsupervised during their walk.
As if that's a smoking gun. As if no kids have ever walked unsupervised to the store. As if every parent who lets their kids run an errand is guilty of a crime.
"In such cases, adults must be held accountable for their responsibilities to ensure a safe environment for their children," the department declared.
They must be held accountable for an unpredictable tragedy? Parents aren't prosecuted when their child chokes on dinner or slips in the bathtub—because accidents happen, even in the safest homes. How can parents ever guarantee a perfectly "safe environment"?
Do they think the parents haven't learned a lesson from this heartbreak? Who is served by this arrest? Has the Gastonia Police Department considered the impact on the surviving brother who will now believe "that his failure to save his brother resulted in sending his parents to prison?" asks David Pimentel, a law professor at the University of Idaho. "Does anyone believe that child will be better off in foster care while his parents rot in jail?"
The parents were arrested because our country has come to believe that any child who is unsupervised anywhere for almost any amount of time is automatically in danger, and therefore, that any parent who trusts their kids to do anything on their own doesn't care if they live or die.
This delusion—that any parent who doesn't hover doesn't care if their child is safe—is what allows the authorities to act as if Legend's parents deliberately did something so evil it warrants felony charges.
But in fact, it was a normal, rational, and common thing the parents did. "Ten-year-olds and 7-year-olds have been walking to and from school, unaccompanied by adults, for over 100 years," says Pimentel.
The implications of this prosecution "are very troubling for parents everywhere who can never provide a guarantee against their kids getting hit by a car, even if they were right there with them," notes Diane Redleaf, author of They Took the Kids Last Night and a legal consultant to Let Grow, the nonprofit I helm.
This isn't an isolated incident either. Across the country, parents are being criminalized for allowing their kids modest independence. These prosecutions reflect a growing distrust in parental judgment and an inflated sense of risk.
The sad truth is that often when something awful happens to a child, it's not the result of bad parenting. It's the result of bad luck. Blaming parents just means we have a scapegoat and can continue to believe that bad things only happen to the children of bad parents.
Turning tragedy into punishment doesn't make kids safer. It just makes all parents more afraid—and all families more vulnerable.
