Guilty, social workers claimed.
Guilty, police claimed.
Of child abuse, child neglect, contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
All for letting her 5-year-old son walk half a mile down the street to a pond inside their gated community.
It is Reason that has documented the travesty of justice delivered to Karyann Parkinson days ago, including a six-month suspended jail sentence from authorities in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Reason documents:
She and her then-youngest, Sam, went for a bike ride, as they often do. They stopped for her son’s favorite activity: collecting goose feathers from the path near their community pond. When they got home, he asked if he could walk back and get some more.
Parkinson said yes. It’s a short walk, along a sidewalk separated from the street by 10 feet of grass. Sam would have to cross two streets with crosswalks, which she’d seen him do safely hundreds of times—including six times that morning, she says. Off he went while she made lunch.
A passerby saw Sam and alerted security. One of the community’s security guards escorted the boy back and gave Parkinson an earful. Pretty soon there were three cop cars, just as many cops, a security vehicle, and two Child Protective Services (CPS) workers at Parkinson’s door.
Cops accused her, CPS accused her and said their allegations were “substantiated.”
Then a judge joined the persecutors, determining she was guilty of delinquency.
The report said Parkinson wasn’t new to the abilities of children.
“She graduated Brigham Young University in 2012 with a degree in family science. She then became a family life educator and spent three years as a live-in behavioral specialist at a residential treatment center. There, she and her husband, a marriage and family therapist, oversaw the care of 35 girls,” the report said.
In Virginia she interned at Institute for Justice and worked in the law office of former Virginia state Sen. Jill Vogel, a Republican, the report said.
Vogel’s work included sponsoring the reasonable childhood independence law in the state, which specifies neglect is only when a child is put in serious, obvious danger.
Parkinson explained the agenda that was delivered to her: The security guard who brought Sam back told the boy his mom had done wrong and “bad people” would want to take him, scaring him.
The dispute turned verbal and the cops said it was illegal and CPS said a 5-year-old “can never be unsupervised.”
She was focused on the fact her son could handle a short walk in a secured community with 24-hour guards and such.
Cops and CPS workers lined up to testify against her in court, while Parkinson’s friend confirmed Sam’s maturity and ability to walk to the pond.
Reason opined, “Of course, a host of horrible things can happen at home or in a car or anywhere. We don’t arrest moms for driving their kids to the store, even though they could be hit by someone running a stop sign. Hypothetical dangers are not reason enough to condemn a person. And neither is hypothetical immaturity. No one proved that the boy was incapable of walking a few blocks safely by himself. After all, that would have been difficult to do, seeing as he had already done it without issue.”
