Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

reason.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 763 posts

Re: Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

#181

Post by hobs »

kurisufag wrote: post #3

>A woman one block away had called the cops to report a boy walking outside alone. That lady had actually asked Aiden where he lived, verified that it was just down the street, and proceeded to call nonetheless. The cops picked up Aiden on his own block. this is the real problem here. who in their right mind calls the cops on a kid walking around his own neighborhood?

Had the cops called on me for wearing a hood and walking home at 7:30PM from my friends house, gun put in my face and told to get on the ground. I was 10.

Low and behold a few years later I find out that its my highschool police officer I get to see every day!

Re: Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

#182

Post by timbit42 »

lufte wrote: post #169

Offtopic: I'm seeing a trend of titles that, as a non native English speaker, always confuse me and take me a good couple of seconds to finally understand. This is one of them. It's like they use a comma where I would expect an "and" to be. I wish I had more examples to show, but I have seen a lot here in HN. Is this some new editorial style or was this always used?

When you write a list of items, such as, "one, two, three and four", you use commas instead of "and" or "or" between each of them except the last so people know whether the rest are "and" or "or". In this case, "or" doesn't make sense so the comma means "and".

Re: Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

#183

Post by sandos »

giarc wrote: post #46
rlkf wrote: post #25

In my twice-the-size European city, kids walk twice that distance to school and back home again, alone. Every. Single. Day. If this place isn't safe enough for kids to walk by themselves, maybe the question should be raised whether the police and municipal government really is doing their job the way they're supposed to.

The irony is one of the officers claimed the boy could have been kidnapped or taken into a sex trafficking ring. And their solution is to arrest the mom, not to take care of the kidnapping or sex trafficking.

This is kind of funny. At what age does that stop being a possibility? At least in my country kids are kids until 18... so it would just as illegal let a 17-year old walk alone? He _could_ be kidnapped. Nobody can say it's impossible, however improbable!

Re: Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

#184

Post by psychlops »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #115
warent wrote: post #34

Note she also has a GoFundMe to help cover her legal expenses to right this wrong. It's a pretty severe miscarriage of justice that has grievously altered this innocent woman's life going into a recession. Please consider donating what you can: https://www.gofundme.com/f/restore-money-lost-after-wrongful...

> has a GoFundMe to help cover her legal expenses to right this wrong To be clear, Wallace "is in debt after losing her job and paying for the lawyer and the diversion program" and "hopes to hire a lawyer to get her record expunged so that she can work with kids again." The GoFundMe is to pay for those costs. It won't do anything to undo the original miscarriage.

Part of the problem is that she pled guilty, thereby endorsing the position of the police and creating a larger problem in the future. I don't know what the correct response is when looking down the barrel of a 2 year sentence for nonsense, but think this publicity battle should have been before the plea.

Re: Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

#187

Post by NoImmatureAdHom »

This was regrettable and it shouldn't have happened. It also reflects a sort of safety-above-all note in the zeitgeist that's also regrettable.

But I want to point out that the reason you're all rubbernecking is that it's unusual. Mostly, this just doesn't happen. Mostly people are reasonable.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't help the lady with her gofundme and try to punish the other adults involved, though :-)

Re: Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

#188

Post by jfk13 »

ajross wrote: post #30

I don't want to be one doing the "Don't Trust reason.com to report news" schtick, but... The only independent verification I can find on this story is a GoFundMe launched by a relative: https://www.gofundme.com/f/restore-money-lost-after-wrongful... Reason exists to flog stories about our terrible government overlords, and they've been caught pushing bad info in the past. This doesn't even report info that is publicl…

Checking the GoFundMe page, I see it has a recent update: "Here is the news writeup that a journalist published about Heather's story. Let's get this viral!" ... which links to -- yes, you guessed -- this reason.com story.

There don't seem to be any other corroborating reports to be found. Make of that what you will.

Re: Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

#189

Post by tunap »

no_wizard wrote: post #42
Maximus9000 wrote: post #6

> Waco, Texas What? If this draconian policy is happening in Texas, the land of the free, can I assume it's even worse in the rest of North America? I hope Texans are up-in-arms about this government overreach.

I don't think Texas or any other conservative state that touts "small government" in practice really practice this in any substantial way, especially as you start looking more locally.

Smaller county Texas LEOs make their own rules, in direct contradiction to state law(s). They are also wont to lifting bills out of wallets, FYI.

Check out Llano's glorious history:

https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=llano%20corruption

Re: Mom handcuffed, jailed for 8-year-old son walking half a mile

#190

Post by leephillips »

lufte wrote: post #169

Offtopic: I'm seeing a trend of titles that, as a non native English speaker, always confuse me and take me a good couple of seconds to finally understand. This is one of them. It's like they use a comma where I would expect an "and" to be. I wish I had more examples to show, but I have seen a lot here in HN. Is this some new editorial style or was this always used?

It’s a common style of telegraphic English used in headlines. In normal prose we would write “handcuffed and jailed”. I don’t think the style is new. In fact, as a native speaker, I also sometimes have to read headlines three times to figure out what they mean.
Post reply on HN