Articles labeled: Charleston

A man is being charged with child neglect after he allegedly left his 5-month-old son in the bathtub alone and the baby drowned.

When police arrived at the home, paramedics had already taken the 5-month-old baby and were in route to Charleston Area Medical Center’s Women and Children’s Hospital.

The child’s father, Vereen Edward Taylor, 36, said he left his son, Zachari Taylor, in the bathtub and came back later to find him floating in the water, James said.

Taylor told police he had occasionally put the infant in the tub with the shower running and the drain open to pacify him as he took care of personal matters, James said.

Uh, hasn’t this guy ever heard of a playpen?!

A preschool girl was found to have lead levels at one of the highest known levels without succumbing to death. It was found that the little girl was eating paint chips off a front porch and carpeting from paint chips that fell on the floor.

The little girl is now undergoing very painful therapy and her prognosis is unclear.

What is most suprising, even after laws have long been established about the use of non-lead paint — contained lead paint is not illegal. Contained lead paint is also harmless, so long as a person is not knawing or eating the paint as an appetizer. This mother has decided to become an activist and blame our government for her child’s non-supervision.

How was it that this little girl was able to eat so much paint off the front porch and her mother never even noticed? Why are there paint chips on the carpeting, big enough to be noticed and eaten and where is any kind of supervision of this child and now the mother wants to blame the government for failing to babysit???

How about this?…YOU screwed up! How about being angry with yourself? It is not the governments job to make sure your house is clean and that your daughter is not left unattended to eat friggin’ paint chips off the front porch. Even if they weren’t lead laiden, it’s not something a kid should be left to do!

But beyond that, predictions about Amanda are difficult — the only case with such high lead levels showed up in February 2006 in Minnesota, when a 4-year-old boy swallowed a lead charm that came with a pair of Reebok sneakers. He was hospitalized with a lead level of 180 ug/dL and died four days later.

Taylor, meanwhile, has become a reluctant activist, lobbying Congress to get rid of lead in aging housing. “Right now I’m an angry mom,” Taylor says. “If you get enough angry moms together, something’s going to change.”