It was the kind of radio call that makes an assignment editor’s heart pump with adrenaline. An abandoned baby had been found at a house in Newark.##M:[more]## It was one of the coldest nights of the winter. If the story were true, there was a very real possibility the child might freeze to death. EMS was on its way to investigate. My photographer and I were dispatched immediately to find out more. This is a good time for me to mention that I’ve been doing occasional freelance work for a cable TV station in Edison. Just to test the waters to see what it would be like to try to get back into television news while raising three kids in suburbia.
Getting back to the breaking story in Newark: we arrived on the scene to find a heated argument unfolding on the porch of a dilapidated multi-family house on Triton Terrace. You don’t want to go barging into a potentially volatile situation like that without any information, so I asked another cameraman who had beaten us there what he knew so far. Newark police hadn’t been able to tell us anything. It’s kind of an unwritten code out in the field. Unless it’s a competitive story where you’re vying for a scoop or real information, we take care of each other. Professional courtesy.
The cameraman told me that the parents of a two-year-old girl had gone out for the evening, leaving their child in a babysitter’s care. Nothing wrong with that. However, when the parents didn’t return when they said they would, the babysitter had left, leaving the toddler alone in the house. Hearing noises inside, the landlord had let himself in, found the child, called emergency services first and news crews second. Not a story, at least, not the kind of story that’s going to make the news at 10 or 11.
But it was still a story. A story of bad judgment and irresponsibility at the center of which was a young child left alone for too long, scared and vulnerable. The kind of story that happens all too often in too many places, about bad things that happen to children at the hands of the people who are supposed to love them and take care of them. Of course the extreme example of this kind of story is the story of Nixzmary Brown, the seven-year-old in Brooklyn who was bound, beaten, starved, and sexually abused before being killed by her stepfather with a blow to the head. There is the usual outcry. There is the usual finger pointing at the family, neighbors, and officials who knew something but did nothing.
But we’ve already been there, done that. It’s the same thing that happened in the case of six-year-old Elisa Izquierdo, Time Magazine’s cover story child in December of 1995, “let down by the system, murdered by her mom,” the little girl who, according to the media, symbolized America’s failure to protect its children.
It’s the same thing that happened eight years before that, in 1987, when six-year-old Lisa Steinberg was beaten to death by her adoptive father, Joel Steinberg, while her adoptive mother, Hedda Nussbaum, also brutally abused, let her die. Now, almost 20 years later, it’s the same story and the same outrage. Only the face of the victim, the child, is different.
Nixzmary’s life was so unbelievably horrific that if one were tempted to think that way, it would be a mercy to think that she is out of her misery and in a much better place now than that squalid Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment where she was tortured and beaten to death.
But for every child like Nixzmary whose story has been revealed with a terrible finality, a child who needed to be rescued, there are countless more children behind closed doors who are being abused or neglected this very minute. The system that failed her is no closer to being fixed than it was in 1987 when the public condemned it for allowing Lisa Steinberg to die. Nor did it improve much after all the reforms that were supposed to be put in place after Elisa Izquierdo’s mother smashed her head against a concrete wall.
I once read that you needed a license to own a dog but anyone could have a child. It made an impression on me then and still does. That there are no minimum requirements of education, ethics, responsibility, personality, judgment, conscience, or morality to become a parent. Never mind considerations like financial wherewithal, a place to live, and the ability to feed, nurture and love.
And yet, when we were applying for a European au pair to live with us when our children were small, we had to have a home visit by the local representative who brought a tape measure to make sure that we had the minimum space required for her own room. And to make sure that she would have a reasonable expectation of privacy in terms of a bathroom. And that she would have host parents who would treat her with kindness and respect.
There is no such regulation overseeing the raising of children. Realistically, how could there be, and how could it be enforced? But still, it makes you think, doesn’t it?
Nixzmary Brown was only seven years old. My son William turned seven this week. My friend Janet had given me one of her most recent books, “Alex and the Wednesday Chess Club,” to give to him. I overheard him telling his friend “my mom’s friend wrote me this for my birthday.”
At first I thought, gee, that’s a fairly egocentric way of thinking. Then I thought, it absolutely makes sense. We’ve always told him for birthdays and holidays, don’t buy me anything, write me a poem or a letter or a story instead. So naturally he thought that’s what Janet had done. And what newly minted seven-year-old shouldn’t think that the world revolves around him, at least, on his birthday? He is a child who knows that his parents wished for him, that he is loved no matter what limits of naughty he might push, a child who believes that stories in picture books and fairy tales can be real and that he can be the hero. It is the kind of love and security and fantasy that every child deserves. And sadly, that Nixzmary, Elisa, Lisa, and far too many other children can’t imagine and never will.
The Suburban Mom has created a “blog” featuring some of her favorite columns that have appeared in the WW-P News. Find it at suburbanmom.typepad.com. She welcomes comments and suggestions for future column ideas.
