We Can't Care for the Kids We Already Have, Part Three

Tell me, does this sound familiar? As in echoing the case of the mother in Texas, Andrea Yates, who drowned her own five children?

"Woman Charged in Deaths of Her 3 Children

By CAROLYN MARSHALL

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 20 - A woman whose family said she heard voices that told her to dump her three young children into the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay was charged Thursday with three counts of murder.

The mother, Lashaun T. Harris, 23, of Oakland, has been in custody since Wednesday in the killings of the children, identified by the police as Treyshun Harris, 6; Taronta Greeley, 2; and Joshoa Greeley, 16 months.

Rescuers recovered Taronta's body at 10 p.m. on Wednesday near the St. Francis Yacht Club, near the Golden Gate Bridge but about two miles from Pier 7 and the Ferry Building, where the police believe that Ms. Harris dumped the children.

The police said the search began at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday after an unidentified man called 911 to report he had seen the woman throw at least one child into the water.

The San Francisco police chief, Heather Fong, said on Thursday that a multiagency air, land and water search was under way, with 80 rescuers from the San Francisco Police and Fire Departments, the California Highway Patrol and the Coast Guard scouring the waterfront area. . . "

But with the San Francisco Bay's notoriously strong tides and 55-degree waters, finding the children alive and rescuing them was unlikely, she said, adding, "We have turned this into a recovery effort. . . "

"The waters are very murky and we literally have zero visibility," said one diver after a 30-minute dive. "We weren't lucky."

Ms. Harris apparently came from a large family, and about 40 of her relatives and friends gathered at Pier 7 on Thursday hoping to get information about the children. Friends and relatives said they had been worried recently about Ms. Harris's mental stability.

"She had been crying out for help," said Avery Garrett, 41, an Oakland resident who identified himself as Ms. Harris's uncle.

Ms. Harris had been living at a Salvation Army shelter in Oakland, Mr. Garrett said. He said he believed that she had been taking medication for emotional problems.

But Ms. Harris desperately wanted to get help, Mr. Garrett said, and recently tried to be admitted to a mental health facility. She was not admitted, he said, perhaps because she did not have health insurance."

Sorry, what was that again? She couldn't get treatment for clearly psychotic symptoms because she did not have health insurance?

Now, as I recall, this Preznit once was so moved by the plight of feti who cannot survive on their own that he pledged to provide health insurance for each and every fetus.

Will he be providing health insurance for the post-born anytime soon?

Don't hold your breath.

Will he and his cronies be cutting back even farther on mental and physical health care for those on Medicaid and Medicare anytime soon? You bet he will. He'll do with the most vulnerable sector of our population just what he did with veterans--pay for his useless, vicious war at the expense of the actual needs of actual people.

"Mr. Garrett said the family had grown increasingly concerned recently after Ms. Harris told a relative about the voices."

"She said she heard some voices in her head," Mr. Garrett said, "and they told her to take the kids and feed them to the sharks."

Failing to treat floridly psychotic symptoms like command hallucinations, such that lack of treatment results in the deaths of three post-born children, that should be a wake-up call for even the black-heart neo-cons.

Don't count on it.

To them, the lives and well-being of the post-born count for exactly nothing.



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