Another mom arrested for leaving children alone in car; system needs fixing

Tearful Shanesha Taylor after being arrested for leaving children 

alone in car while she went on job interview

(photo credit:  Jupiter Sinclair)

She is Shanesha Taylor, 35 with two small kids, ages 2 months and 6 years.  For whatever reason, her life is, by all accounts, a shambles.  She is homeless, a single mother, and almost at the end of her rope.  She gets called in for a job interview and suddenly there is a small ray of hope that things are about to look up, that she may be able to provide a better life for her babies.  She jumps at the chance and, to her dismay; things go from bad to worse.  She came out of her 45-minute interview to find police waiting to arrest her for child abuse.

Taylor says she left her children in the car, with the windows cracked for air, because she had no money to pay a babysitter.  A passerby heard a child crying in the car and called the police.  According to Scottsdale Police Officer Mark Clark, “She was upset.  This is a sad situation all around.  She said she was homeless.  She needed the job.  Obviously not getting the job.  So it’s just a sad situation.”  You can see the whole story on this video posted by CBS 5 Arizona news.

There have been so many stories of people who just snapped when the situation got too hard.  There are far too many tales of mothers who killed their children, mistakenly thinking they were doing them a favor.  They couldn’t stand to hear their babies crying from hunger or shaking from the cold due to the mother not having the money to pay the electric bills.  Some even murdered their children out of frustration and anger towards the absent father who was giving no help.  The nation was shocked earlier this month by one such story when a desperate and pregnant mom of three tried to kill her kids by driving her van into the ocean and later said that she was trying to take them “to a safer place”.

So even though Taylor may have been wrong to leave the kids in the car, she gets credit for trying, for not giving up and throwing in the towel.  There may yet be some good to come out of this story as over $43,000 has been raised through a campaign to help Taylor.  The money is to cover her $9000 bail and also try to raise enough money so that she and her kids can live (rent, electric, food) for a few months until she finds a job and starts receiving paychecks on a regular basis.  For information on how you can help click here to go to the campaign fund site.

Finally, let us hope this is a wakeup call to all of the fathers out there who love their kids, but cannot stand the mother.  If you are going to be an absentee father, and if you will not (or are not able to) financially provide for your children’s well-being, please be there to tend your children for a little while, especially if their mother is trying to find a job.  Not only will you end up spending more time with your babies, you just might literally save their lives.