Kisha Young, the Crowley mother charged after kids hurt while riding on car.
I can’t wait for the upcoming headline: Parents sue automaker for injury to children riding on hood, trunk of car.
In Crowley on Tuesday, Kisha Young, 39, and another mother took their six children to the Creekside community pool. The kids got wet, as they tend to do when you take them to watery places. So, rather than have them mess up the interior of Young’s car, the two mothers came up with this brilliant idea: Kids, sit on top of the hood and trunk of the car.
Much to everyone’s amazement, the children fell off and were injured. One was injured so seriously that the 12-year-old had to be flown to a hospital by helicopter. Young was charged with intoxication assault. But given the trend these days, we probably haven’t heard the last of this. Surely, there’s someone else to blame for what happened.
Two Balch Springs parents on Wednesday decided to sue the city for wrongful deathbecause their 10-year-old daughter drowned while swimming in a retention pond at Walter E. Luedeke Park. They claim the city was at fault for not having posted No Swimming signs, which I truly wonder if the child would have read if they had been posted.
But more to the point: Where were the parents when their 10-year-old wandered off into the lake? Were they paying attention? Did they attempt to rescue their drowning daughter? Did they exercise any parental responsibility at all? Their loss must truly be the most devastating experience they’ve ever had, but somehow, blaming the city and perhaps rake in a little cash off their daughter’s death doesn’t quite seem an appropriate way to grieve.
Similarly, there’s the mother of Troy Causey Jr., the basketball player at Wilmer-Hutchins High School who was slain by his basketball-star housemate while the two were sharing a southern Dallas house and attending schools that improperly recruited them. His mother, Tammy Simpson, lashed out at DISD officials and coaches for treating her son like a commodity. Again, I can imagine his death is the most devastating, awful experience of her life. But there’s no excuse for blaming others, instead of first asking whether she as a parent bore any responsibility for what happened to her son.
“I just can’t begin to tell you how much this has hurt our family,” Simpson stated, adopting the victim’s refrain. “My fear is that my son’s story will be that death was his destination because of his childhood. He wasn’t running with gangs or breaking into cars. He was smoking weed, but that’s nothing to a lot of people. My son didn’t deserve to die.”
No, he didn’t deserve to die. He deserved a better life with attentive and involved parents. And it might be that his two parents tried hard to keep an eye on him and raise him correctly, but that he got away from them and fell in with the wrong crowd. It happens a lot. In this case, however, the Simpsons went into this situation with eyes wide open. Both are basketball officials for the University Interscholastic League and know fully well that it was a violation of the rules for their son to move away to southern Dallas so he could play basketball for a school to which he didn’t belong.
I will at least give Tammy Simpson some credit for initially stepping back and looking inward after her son’s death. “I hold myself accountable for knowing that what was going on was illegal, as far as the recruiting,” she said on May 22. “But as I told the coach then and what I tell people now, it was better for my son to be in that situation at the time.” But, somehow, that early acknowledgement of the parent’s responsibility eventually morphed into the same ol’ blame game.
Parents say all kinds of things when they’re grieving because they’re justifiably heartbroken, angry, confused, and having to grapple with a lot of emotions and upheaval all at once. But it’s particularly tragic when the deaths of their children could have been avoided by the parents taking greater responsibility in the first place. Parenting is not a part-time job.
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