It was heartbreaking enough for Kalynn Moore that her child died. But now, she can’t even give him a proper funeral.
Moore gave birth to Bashere Davon Moyd Jr. on Dec. 21 at Christ Hospital in Jersey City. She and the hospital disagree whether the five-pound baby, delivered a month early, was born dead or alive.
Whatever the case, when a funeral home came to pick up the remains and prepare for the memorial service, little Bashere’s body could not be found. Moore was given the news on Jan. 2. Police are now searching garbage dumps all over New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
“It’s like they treated my son like he’s nothing,” said Moore, 26, in an Associated Press story. “It hurts so bad.”
A spokeswoman for the hospital said that employees are praying for the family.
As of 12:01 a.m. Saturday, parents face criminal charges if they abandon any child older than 30 days in Nebraska. Previously, it had been the only state in the country with a safe-haven law that lacked an age limit. Lawmakers made the change today.
Since July, 35 children — most of them teenagers, five from out of state — were dropped off in Nebraska. “These kids are old enough to know they’re being dropped off and that’s not good,” Sen. Kent Rogert told the Associated Press.
Safe haven laws were originally intended to prevent mothers from throwing away or killing unwanted newborns. Some child safety advocates say that the government needs to do more to protect teenagers and expand programs to help them.
One mother told the AP that she sympathized with parents who dropped off their kids as a last resort. Therese Guy of Papillion, Neb., said that it had taken her nine months to get her foster child’s mental problems diagnosed because of the backlog in social services. Kids dropped off under the safe-haven law got help immediately.
“Don’t change the safe-haven law until you have other changes in place, because it’s helping the kids now,” she said.
Parents have been racing to abandon their kids in Nebraska as the state prepares to change its safe-haven law. The legislature is meeting today in a special session, but because of procedures, at least another week could pass before it becomes illegal for parents to drop off any child older than a a few days old.
Earlier this week, a 14-year-old boy and his 17-year-old sister were abandoned at an Omaha hospital, but the girl ran away after she was left. At a different hospital, a mom relinquished her 5-year-old son. A father flew in from Miami to dump his teenage son.
“Think of what you are saying,” Gov. Dave Heineman said in an open plea on CNN. “You are saying you no longer support them. You no longer love them.” He and other authorities urged parents and guardians to seek help among family and friends and with social services programs
A total of 34 kids have been abandoned since September; most are teenagers. In other states, parents can only relinquish newborns. Tysheema Brown, who drove from Georgia to drop off her teenager, told CNN that people should not judge her as a parent because her son has behavioral problems. “I love my son and my son knows that,” Brown said. “There is just no help. There hasn’t been any help.”
In several cases, children from outside Nebraska have been sent back to their home states in the custody of social services there. Nebraska officials have compiled information about 30 of the 34 kids. Twenty-seven of the children have received mental health treatment previous; 28 come from single-parent homes; and 22 have a parent who has been in jail before. Child advocates say they hope the Nebraska crisis spurs more action to improve services for troubled kids.
The next time Junior resists getting out of bed, you might want to check that impulse to dump a bucket of water on his head. Well-rested kids are less likely to become obese adults.
That’s the conclusion of a new longterm study done at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and reported in the journal Pediatrics. Researchers followed a thousand people from birth to age 32, and found those who got more rest when young had smaller body-mass indexes as adults. This was true even after controlling for such factors as childhood weight and TV habits.
“Inadequate sleep in childhood appears to have long-lasting consequences,” Dr. Robert John Hancox, the study’s senior author, told Reuters. It’s unclear exactly why, but one theory is that sleep deprivation alters the balance of appetite-stimulating and appetite-suppressing hormones.
Children under the age of 12 should get about 11 hours of sleep a night. Teenagers should have a minimum of about nine hours.
Photo by Husin Sani
Joshua Lee Phillips, 16, probably didn’t hear the train that hit and killed him on Monday afternoon, police said.
The teen was struck by a Norfolk Southern train in Cramerton, N.C., as he was walking home from school, the Charlotte Observer reported. Train crew members told officials that they sounded the horn, but Joshua did not seem to hear them.
Earlier this fall, the case of a Florida boy also showed that walking while using technology can be fatal. Fourteen-year-old Christopher Cepeda died in September when he walked in front of a car while texting on his cell phone.
Some of the bottles of Mylicon dye-free drops could contain metal fragments. About 12,000 bottles of the over-the-counter drug are being recalled by Johnson & Johnson-Merck Consumer Pharmaceuticals Co.
The item, sold in 1-ounce plastic bottles, is used to relieve the discomfort of infant gas caused by air swallowing of certain baby formulas or food. The affected bottles, distributed after Oct. 5, may have metal fragments generated during the manufacturing process.
The company says the potential for serious injury is low, but consumers should stop using the recalled drops. The recalled bottles are from lots SMF007 and SMF008; the numbers are printed on the bottom of the box and on the lower-left side of the sticker on each bottle.
For information on how to dispose of the drops and obtain a refund or replacement, call (800) 222-9435 or visit http://www.mylicon.com.
The Arizona boy shot his father and another man at least four times each, using a .22-caliber rife that had to be reloaded after each shot, prosecutors told the New York Times.
Officials still don’t have any possible motive for the killings. No evidence of physical or sexual abuse has been uncovered. Nor were there any reports that the child had disciplinary problems at school. The boy, who appeared in handcuffs at a court hearing on Monday, is being held at a juvenile detention center. A judge ordered that he undergo a psychological evaluation.
There have been 62 cases in the United States in which a 7 or 8 year old child has been arrested on murder charges from 1976 to 2005, according to the Times story. Just two of those cases involved a kid killing a parent.
Prosecutors told the Times that during a police interview, the child confessed to the murders of his father, 29-year-old Vincent Romero, and a man who rented a room in the house, Timothy Romans, 39. The boy is not being publicly named because of his age.
Romero had recently remarried and maintained full custody of the child. (The boy’s mother lives in Mississippi.) An avid hunter, Romero taught his son how to handle weapons and shoot prairie dogs. Police said that the father was shot first, as he was coming down the staircase.
About 600 people in the town of 4,000 attended Romero’s funeral on Monday. Several people told the Associated Press that Romero was a caring father who tried to raise a respectful son.
The Boston-area woman pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in a jail for giving booze to children ages 12 and 13.
Heidy Jordon, 44, pleaded guilty Wednesday to charges of reckless endangerment of a child and procuring alcohol for a minor, the Boston Globe reported.
Jordon told authorities that she went to the liquor store on June 8, 2007 because her 13-year-old daughter requested it. The alcohol was then passed out to six kids who gathered at the home. As if once wasn’t enough, she did it again two weeks later.
One girl at the tween drink fest passed out, and another kid became so sick that he had to be taken to the hospital.
Kids are rivaling their grandparents when it comes to taking drugs. A new study says that children are increasingly taking medication for chronic illnesses such as type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol, usually the afflictions of older people.
The number of kids taking meds for type 2 diabetes jumped by 103 percent between 2002 and 2005, according to a research published in this month’s Pediatrics journal. Prescriptions for cholesterol treatment increased by 15 percent, according to the news release.
Blame it on bad diets. “Our findings show that childhood obesity not only has long-term health implications, but also impacts children’s immediate health,” said Dr. Donna R. Halloran, a pediatrics professor at St. Louis University School of Medicine, which worked on the study with the Kansas Health Institute.
Researchers culled the statistics from a database of 3.5 million kids ages 5 to 19 enrolled in Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefit manager. Notable among the numbers was a 46.5 percent rise in prescriptions for asthma and a 40.4 percent jump for treatment of attention deficit disorder.
One unexplainable surprise was why girls are taking more meds than boys for diabetes. The number of girls on the drugs jumped 147 percent, compared to boys, with a 39 percent increase. Researchers say that this pattern does not match the rate of obesity among boys and girls. But they did speculate that girls might be better screened or visiting the doctor more often.
Girls are also taking more antidepressants. Teen girls taking the drugs increased by 6.8 percent whereas researchers saw a slight decline in boys on the meds.
The Swiss foods company is withdrawing Farinha Lactea cereal after Connecticut authorities found pesticides in the product.
Nestle said in a news release that traces of the pesticide pirimphos-methyl, a fumigant for grains, are within the required levels in Brazil, where the product is manufactured. However, the pestidcide is not used on wheat products in the United States, and no standards for its presence in cereal is available.
The cereal is sold primarily in Brazilian immigrant communities in the United States. Last week, officials in Connecticut told consumers to stop eating the cereal. Inspectors had tested the product after seeing it mislabeled at a grocery in Danbury.
Nestle said it had not received any reports of illness. Customers can return the cereal to the store it was bought for a full refund. Anyone with questions should contact Nestle Consumer Services at (800) 628-7679.
