A 1-year-old child is in a medically induced coma right now, recovering from having her throat slit. It's likely because her mother called 911 and made sure she made it to the hospital that the little girl is hanging on. But Danielle Busby doesn't have one of those happy stories we can all cheer about.
When she called 911, Busby told police in Texas that she cut her own daughter's throat with a knife. And did I mention she suffers from schizophrenia? She's now facing charges of injury to a child, but I'm wondering if it's really fair to put all this blame on Busby's back.
I'm a blogger who makes her living talking about what's going on in the world, and I think I may have just found myself at a loss for words.
When you're a parent, you take stories about kids being hurt especially hard. We look at the news, and a picture of our own child (or children) flashes in our mind, and we see red. How dare they, we think.
As a mother, I want to say Danielle Busby is evidence of evil in this world. She said herself that she cut her child's throat. Her 1-year-old child! An innocent baby!
But then I read that her sister called the cops just a week ago, telling them that she was a danger to her little girl. Only the cops showed up, said everything was fine, told the family to call social services if they felt like Busby was going to snap, then left. I read that Busby has been on and off medications for her conditions. I read that police have been to her home before, brought her in for running through her neighborhood half naked.
I read the word schizophrenia once. Then I read it again. And again.
I am not schizophrenic. But I know people who are. I have lost people to a disease that worms its way into the brain and begins feasting on a person's logic, their personality, their humanity. This illness stole them away, and there was nothing they, their families, I could do about it ... and trust me, people tried.
It's easy to hate a sin -- especially when the sin is a crime against a child. It's harder to face the fact that we can't always identify the sinner. If Busby's confession holds up in court, she is to blame in a physical sense. But who else is to blame here? The cops who left her with the child? The doctors who didn't lock her up long ago? The family members who didn't fight harder? The disease that can't be hauled into court?
What do you make of this story? Do you have a clear-cut feeling one way or the other?