What Happened to That Little Boy?

Last week, a dazed mother was found pushing her lifeless, three-year-old son in a swing at the park. Now, the citizens of my town in Maryland, are left wondering what happened as police investigate further.

I have read the comments both for, and against the woman found with her boy on a sunny day. They are supportive and harmful, uplifting and crushing, and they certainly aren’t fact.

Public opinion seems to be divided into two camps:

• The first, express empathy for a mother who lost her child. They are aware this is a situation all too common. One which could, at any time, happen to any parent. They follow the age-old adage, innocent until proven guilty.

• The second camp is already pointing the finger, accusing the mother of harming her child and ultimately playing a role in his untimely death. They are ready to condemn her without actual proof. The situation seems so strange, they don’t feel any proof is needed.

I’ve thought of her often this week, that mother. She is a 24-year-old woman, and she was swinging her son at a playground just like any mother would. She’d had been there for a long time before anyone thought something might be wrong. There is speculation that she was there for hours, and had possibly spent overnight in the park.

When police arrived, they realized this wasn’t just a mother and son on a day out at the park. They found her little boy unresponsive, eyes closed without a mark on him. The boy, Ji-Aire, had died some time before, but with no visible signs of foul play. They don’t know what had happened, but Rigor Mortis had not yet set in. They are still piecing things together, even now.

The details are spotty.

The maternal grandmother swears her daughter would never hurt the boy, though the grandmother openly admits her daughter was recently diagnosed with some sort of unidentified mental illness, for which she was attempting to get help. The grandmother is living in a nearby hotel because she is currently homeless. The daughter’s exact address, however, is unknown.

There is also a father, identified as James Lee, who had been trying to gain sole custody, possibly because of the mother’s mental illness, though this has not been confirmed. He maintains that Romechia Simms, the woman identified as the boy’s mother, was not an unfit parent but was currently unable to take care of their son. There are reports that Simms contacted Lee in the days leading up to their son’s death, but Lee says at some point Simms stopped answering his calls.

As a person and citizen, I am interested in the factual hows and whys of this case. But as a mother… I feel a deep and morbid sadness.

I find myself wondering why she continued to swing with her son? Was she unable to let go? Was she aware that he passed? Was she talking to him, singing a song the two of them shared, one from her days of rocking him to sleep, attempting to comfort and soothe as all mothers do?

No one knows what really happened. I tend to believe she may have temporarily lost her grip on reality in the face of her son’s death. Wouldn’t we all? I don’t want to believe she played any part in her little boy’s death, and as of now, there is no proof she did, though speculation remains.

I am of the first camp of speculators. What I want to believe, what I need to believe, as a mother of four, with a child currently the same age as the little boy on the swing, is that she could not let go of a boy she loved so much. I want to believe her mental illness was coincidence, at least when it came to this incident, and it had nothing to do with what happened on a spring Friday so similar to any other Friday.

I find myself clinging to the sentiment of her own mother, swearing her daughter could never hurt her little boy.

I need to believe these things, to convince myself his passing was purely organic, a natural act, not one of violence… because my mind can’t wrap itself around anything else. Because if she took her son to swing because the truth wasn’t yet a reality she could handle, I would understand. I think any mother would. To believe anything else makes us ache as women, mothers, parents.

As I dig through the clues to explain the unimagineable, I find myself reminding myself that she was, is, a mother just like me. And as I wait with the rest of the world for answers, I ache for her loss, and the loss of everyone in that young boy’s family. Becasue no one should have to endure such a tragedy.

Nicole Johnson is a fiction writer, blogger and stay at home mom raising four children, a dog, a cat and a husband. She fears birds, anything with the potential to cause fire, and Disney World. She loves scary movies, books with ambiguous endings and all things dark, absurd and funny. Her blog, Suburban Sh!t Show: Tales from the Tree-Lined Trenches chronicles her life in the sh!t show, and she can be found on Facebook and Twitter, which is her new obsession because it forces her to get to the damn point.