How does this happen?

When I first saw Kristi Abrahams during this interview for the television news, I was unconvinced of her sincerity, there was something that just didn't "feel" right.  And I wanted to believe her.  I wanted to believe that no mother could ever do what it was suggested she had done.  I wanted her to be better than I felt in my heart she was.  I told myself that I couldn't judge her by her appearance, by her awkward manner. She was a woman who had just lost her child, who was I to say how she should or should not act under those terrible circumstances.

I followed the Facebook page a little obsessively, dismayed that the reaction to her was so similar to my own.  Where was our compassion? 

It took more than a year for the truth to come out, more than a year before her body was found in a shallow grave, in a suitcase.  And as more and more facts of the case are revealed, the more my heart breaks over this poor broken little girl who was betrayed by the people who should have protected her, and by a system overloaded with other heart breaking cases of neglect and abuse.  Overloaded to the point that even though they knew that Kristi Abrahams had burned her daughter with cigarettes, that she was almost constantly covered in bruises, that she was screamed at and hurt, they did nothing.

In the 4 or 5 months that she should have been in school in what was the last year of her short life, Kiesha attended 4 times.  4 days that yielded a total of 7 separate reports to DOC's.  And they left her there.  She told her case worker that Mummy made the bruises and the burns.  And they left her there.

They did take her for 18 months at one point, after Kristi bit her so badly that she had to attend an emergency department for treatment.  She bit her.  I cannot fathom what kind of deranged human being thinks that that is ok.    And DOC's gave her back.

The news articles that describe the child's ordeal are chilling, and I can hardly bear to read them, except in some way I feel like I owe it to that little girl, to know her story, to grieve for her, to care in a way that the adults in her life failed to do.  And that is so very little.