Woman tried to break, eat baby's armLOS ANGELES, July 27 (UPI) -- A 36-year-old woman in Los Angeles allegedly grabbed an infant from his stroller, beat him against a truck and told police she wanted to eat his arm. ...
Adriana Miranda, 29, told police she was pushing her 4-month-old son in a stroller when Hubbard unbelted him, swung him overhead and hit him against the rail of truck.
Um...
What caliber for deranged lunatic?
Actually, strike that. I don't think I would have shot her for that. I think that at the moment she started unbuckling my child, the hindbrain would have kicked in, turned me into something resembling "The Hulk" on a bad day, and would have resulted in Hubbard resembling something out of a Clive Barker movie when I was finished.
Every parent is different, I understand that. I'm just floored that this person was able to get close enough to unbuckle the kid from the stroller before the mother could stop her. In my case, the urge to protect my kids was rather strong, leading to my mother getting worried the day my son was baptized, because when the priest doused him with water he started shrieking - and my mom said "I swear to G-d I thought you were gonna hit Father C."
Letting a stranger get that close to your kid, and spend enough time to get your kid out of a buckled harness, does not register with me. Even now, with my kids well into elementary school (and TheBoy is a lot closer to middle school than Kindergarten...) I rarely let them get out of my line of sight, and in busy areas I will not hesitate to grab their hands. Yes, I am Overprotective Dad. My job is to make sure they make it to adulthood - and I take it very seriously.
And it's always good to remember that there are some bugnuts motherf**kers out there...
That is all.
10 comments:
YGBSM.
Yeah, Hulk sounds right. Or maybe the Tasmanian Devil. Either way, there will be no grabbing of my infant child. There won't even be contact with my infant child.
tweaker
"My job is to make sure they make it to adulthood..."
That's job #1. Job #2:
They don't grade fathers but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. -- Chris Rock
Quickest way to become intimately familiar with my sidearm: Threaten my kids. Here's hoping it never happens.
Speaking of innocuous things that can get a parent riled up at the worst time. I had to physically restrain my wife when the doctor took our first child to the corner of the room to weigh right after she delivered him.
When Sweet Daughter was born, there I was in the OR, terrified due to the fact that they were carving on my wife and I had no way to protect her from the danger, and afraid that if that when the nurse handed my our daughter, I'd drop her slippery little butt with my shaking hands.
When the nurse chucked her on the butcher's scale and SD started wailing (and not the "hunger" or "hug me" cries I recognized from my baby sister), my immediate instinct was, "Baby cry -- BABY IN DANGER! Og smash danger!"
Chuckling with a wry grin, I explained the instinctive reaction. . . one (male) doc gave a quick grin, ALL of the female nurses in the room stared at me as if I'd sprouteed wings and started reciting the Tridentine Mass in Latin backwards.
I'm guessing the one doc has a daughter. . .
{chuckle}
Seriously -- if someone tried to grab my infant in her stroller, would I even recall I had a gun and knife? If I remembered the gun, would I recall it's not an impact weapon?
Grab my kid, and it's entirely likely that even a combat vet corpsman turned EMT who responds will get queasy at what he finds.
At that, I'm still liekly to be preferrable to letting Nancy get to the perp. I was a trained professional who is going to flip your switch from "Combatant" to "Casualty" as quickly and easily as I can think to do. . .
On the gripping hand, Nancy will hurt you, it will hurt the whole time it takes you to die -- and being a detail precision person, she'll take her time to make sure your pain is perfect.
You know, if the P.C. crowd hadn't insisted that placing those poor people who suffer from Mental Illness into Asylums "Violated their Constitutional Rights", a lot of these people would be off the streets. Yes, I know most were run like a Horror Show, but that was due to Corrupt Politicians siphoning off the Tax Dollars to run them. Proper Oversight prevents that kind of Abuse from occurring, which is a Legitimate Role of Government.
Having said that, in this case, just like in Norway, one Determined Citizen with a J-Frame stops the Madness.
As the father of a young lady going off to college in 23 days, 15 hours and 47 minutes, I share your protective instincts.
However, for the sanity of your child, train them to recognize safety and to recognize danger, to protect themselves in commonly dangerous situations, to run like hell in uncommonly dangerous ones, and to call you for help sooner rather than later if a problem is persistent.
My daughter has told me every day for about a year now that she is going away to college, slowly conditioning me for the event. Now all we have to do is work on her mom intensely for the next few weeks, because we both thought I'd be the one all broken up over her leaving home.
And take pictures - the next 18 years pass in a blur.
I found that taking the kids out in public was a good way to practice situational awareness. Noting who was close enough to make a grab for a kid or my wife's purse, who was inbound and outbound, likely escape routes for a snatch & dash. I wasn't afraid (or if I was, I'd suggest we "go look at that over there") but if anything was going to happen I wanted to get in the way first.
I got pretty good at accidentally stepping in front of people. My wife accused me of not paying attention. But we went home with all our kids.
I keep picturing holding up the head, with spinal cord still attached and dripping, and that's ALL....
Yeah, don't threaten my kids.
"Letting a stranger get that close to your kid, and spend enough time to get your kid out of a buckled harness, does not register with me"
I can speak to this having lived in LA for a while.
We are dealing with several separate issues, some of which conflict but put your doublespeak glasses on and go with me here:
- First, LA is in California where everything is bubble wrapped and no one can ever come to harm because the big old loving government is their for you. This is even more true in LA and San Francisco than the rest of the state.
- Second, LA has been refereed to as "the land of fruit's, nuts, and flakes" for a reason. We have a lot of very "special" people who can't understand reality. These people wait on tables, while just knowing they will be a star one day, or go to congress and can't balance a budget.
- Third, LA's has a way higher percentage of homeless than the rest of the country except for hawaii. This has something to do with easy money being given away, a lack of snow, and a lack of humidity. With hawaii you at least have to get a plane ticket, but to get to LA you can hitch hike, or just get on a greyhound. Of those homeless many are very nice people who just like an easy mark or a better climate, but a large number are bug nuts insane.
- Fourth, folks are frequently walking up and asking for money, telling you the world will ending, asking you to sigh a petition to impeach bush, or to official deify the big O, or to tell you that you smell purple. Reacting to the approach is often the worst thing you can do, since it sets the crazies off, and you can only kill or seriously maim so many people on your way to work each day before the police want to have some strong words with you.
This put's you in a hard position: if you react in a safe and sane way to being surrounded by insane and dangerous people you get put in jail or shot a whole bunch by the nice LAPD. Thus we get an ingrained habit of "let me wait to see what happens before I react".
- Lastly, you can't predict crazy. This lady is the only person this happened to. It's not common in LA, let alone the world so it's unreasonable to expect her to expect it to occur. It was far more reasonable to expect that the person unbuckling her child was a perpetually stoned flower child who wants to honor the new eco savior than that she wanted to knosh on the kid's arm.
Thus ingrained passivity + unlikely event + frank disbelief + super sized dose of crazzy = what happened.
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