November 29, 2006
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Justice for her baby
Martin Lee Anderson’s parents should not have had to fight for almost a year to get the state to investigate and bring to trial the people who many believe killed her son. But they did and now the state has finally indicted the 7 instructors and 1 nurse that were there that day. They are all facing up to 30 years in prison for 1st degree manslaughter.
I wasn’t there that day, but living in the city where it happened means that we get every little scrap of news about it. I saw the video. It wasn’t pretty. These big men surrounding this little boy under the assumption that he is faking being ill, never stopping to consider that he really might be. They kneed him in his back, they shoved ammonia up his nose. And all this time, a nurse just stood there and watched. Everyone said that they were just doing their jobs.
I have known the parents of one of the guards for most of my life. I don’t know their son at all. He came to them during my 20 year hiatus from Church. But the parents were my youth leaders when I was a teenager, and then later one of my daughter’s youth leaders. I cannot imagine that they raised their children any differently than how they tried to ‘raise’ each of us. I will keep Pat and Roger Garrett in my prayers ever single night. I hope that others will do the same.
And I will keep Martin’s parents in my prayers. How awful to not only lose your child, but to lose him to a system that you trusted enough to send him there to straighten him out a little. And he wasn’t even a really bad kid. He had taken his grandmother’s car without permission. That’s what got him there to begin with. His parents thought it would be good to get him straightened out early, before he did fall in with the really bad kids and do something awful. How ironic.
Comments (2)
Well, you know how strongly I feel about some social and justice issues, and you also know how we sometimes don’t quite see eye-to-eye. In this case…… I am in total agreement with you. I know how entrenched the Good Ole Boy network is there, and it still stinks. It is so bad, Guy Tunnell allowed his buddies, and his connections there, to cause him a really bad case of foot-in-mouth disease, to the point of allowing his bias to supercede his duties as head of the FDLE….. and cost him that job. Too bad, really……I went to school with his sister, and they aren’t a bad family. He just made a bad choice. As for the guards, they were far too much into their authoritarian power trip, and the nurse should be hung out to dry. It was HER job to prevent just such a thing from happening.
Maybe the kid wasn’t a shining example of youth, and maybe he had a smart mouth, but he wasn’t deserving of a death sentence.
If you are interested, in today’s paper (newsherald.com) they have a list of each of the guards and their employment history. My username is joiwind and the password is my oldest dog….call me if you can’t figure that out.
You know they gave Guy a new job with the state attorneys office working on cold cases? He also attends our Church. It’s not my place to judge him, but I have no doubt that he regrets now many of the comments and decisions that he made. I’m sure there are lots of regrets going around these days.
On the news yesterday they said that most of the 15 will probably plea bargain and most of them will end up serving some jail time. That’s going to be really hard on them, but not as hard as it is for Martin’s parents. At least they will all get to come back home eventually.