The grandmother and stepmother of 9-year-old child Alabama child are in police custody facing murder charges arising out of the child’s death.
The child, Savannah Hardin, was forced to run for three hours as punishment for lying to her grandmother about eating candy. During the ordeal, the girl became severely dehydrated and began to seize. She died several days later.
According to TheStar.com, eyewitnesses told deputies that they saw the child running outside her home last Friday but didn’t give much thought to it. One neighbor told authorities he didn’t see anyone chasing or coercing her.
But coerced the child was. The grandmother, 46-year-old Joyce Hardin Garrard, ordered her to run until she was told she could stop. The girl’s stepmother, 27-year-old Jessica Mae Hardin, refused to intervene.
Later that evening, the stepmother phoned the police, telling them Savannah was having a seizure and was unresponsive. The girl died the following Monday. An autopsy report revealed that she was extremely dehydrated and had a very low sodium level. A state pathologist ruled the death a homicide.
The two women are being held on a $500,000 cash bond for each.
There is no doubt that left to their own devices children will behave stupidly. They will take unnecessary risks that sometimes have deadly consequences. The last thing the U.S. as a society needs is caretakers who don’t know where the line is between common sense parenting and child endangerment, much less when they’ve crossed it.
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