I'll never forget a story my EMT instructor told me years ago about a call he'd gone on involving a 12-year-old girl. They'd been called because she was unconscious and completely unresponsive. They arrived to find her beaten half out of her wits and struggling to breathe. Police arrived and managed to wrangle an explanation out of her stepfather.
She had come home with a report card that her stepfather found unacceptable, so he put a book in each hand and made her stand with both arms straight out. Every time an arm drooped he'd take the book from her, hit her in the head with it, then give it back and make her take up her position again. He did this until she collapsed with severe head trauma. Each and every one of the men on that crew wanted to pick up those books and give that animal a taste of what his daughter had endured, but they quietly took her to the hospital, working feverishly to care for her. It was all for naught. She died in the hospital.
Fast forward to the present day. We've all seen those stories on the news of parents too young to be patient with a child losing their temper and shaking them or hitting them, causing often fatal injuries. We all know that the parents will clam up after they call 911; what little they do say never adds up. We all know that babies don't usually just die, particularly not with nosebleeds and bruises all over their bodies.
We all know that it's not a question of if, but WHEN we go on a call like that - a call where a parent, through either negligence or outright malice, has caused life-threatening injury to their child. When I saw that baby that morning, I knew full well what had happened even with his father standing there, looking me in the face, telling me that he had no idea what had happened. He said he'd gotten out of bed to check on the infant and found him completely unresponsive, laying on his back, his nose bleeding. Something must have registered in my expression as he said this to me because he didn't look at me again after that first explanation. He asked a couple of questions but he didn't look at me.
The thing that sucks the most about those calls is that we usually hear on the news that the child has died. I found that out not a few days after going on that call. I found out a lot of things about that young man afterward that I won't talk about here. I'm sure I'm not the only one who thinks about what it would feel like to be able to beat those people unconscious, to both help them understand exactly what they did to that defenseless child and set an example for those in the future who might lose their temper and do something that they can never undo.
Not I nor any of my brothers and sisters in this profession would ever break the law, no matter how badly we would like to take justice into our own hands. I believe, however, that we all feel when we do nothing in such moments we are showing mercy to a waste of space who refused to show it to a helpless, defenseless child who deserved far better.
I think we all know what's going to happen, too. This guy will get ten years in prison, be free by the age of 30, and will immediately go knock up another hapless girl who either really thinks this animal loves her or simply doesn't have any respect for herself. He won't learn anything behind bars except how to be a better crook and liar. I just hope that the next time he calls 911, I'm not on the crew that responds.
