Warning- Graphic Content- May be disturbing to some readers-
A follower of my blog recently sent me an email directly telling me how her nephew recently died of an overdose. Her son is also an addict, the two of them would go out together, get clean together, and now she is afraid, they will die together. Valid concern. Many people think the death of a compadre would be a reality slap to an addict. They would be wrong. Any addict I know, and I have come to know many in recent years, has a list of names as long as my arm of fellow addicts, friends, family members and the like that have died of an overdose. We all know the “it won’t happen to me” phenomenon but I think it’s more than that. I think that using helps them not feel the pain from the death of their loved one. Basically, right in line with whatever reason they were drawn to using in the first place. Most addicts came from good people, and good families, with good intentions but missed the mark somewhere along the line. I say most, not all.
That brings me to the latest news circulating the Boston area News channels. Bella Bond, aka, Baby Doe. That computer generated composite sketch has been circulating the news on tv, in papers, and facebook since the day she was found on Deer Island in June. No one has claimed to know her, or that she looked familiar, or that she resembled Bella Bond. In reality, that composite sketch looked so much like her, it is impossible to imagine anyone not noticing the resemblance. The story of Bella Bond is one of heart break, tragedy and let down. That baby never had a chance at survival in this world. Any and all adults in and around her let her down. Including her father, who came back in August to get custody, but didn’t even know she was missing. Neighbors, relatives, DCF failed this baby. And they failed her mother too. Her mother is a drug addict whom has history of having other children taken away from her, which should have been a strong indication that DCF should stay involved with this family, but didn’t. I think most of us reading the papers and digesting this story have similar feelings of disgust and horror. Even if the mother did not actually murder this child, she didn’t protect her, she didn’t try to defend her, and then when the worst possible thing happened, she didn’t stand up for her daughter by calling 911, or screaming for help. I can’t, as a mother and a human being, understand any of these actions. I won’t try to because it would hurt my head. And I won’t blame it on her being a drug addict.
Now, I am in no way saying that her addiction didn’t help to play a role in this nightmare. It did. There is no doubt that her mind was too polluted, her brain nonfunctioning, to comprehend and facilitate the safety of her child. But that happened long before the night the kid was murdered. Beautiful Bella was well on her way to a horrendous life before it ended. Why? Because they are sick. Drug addiction is a disease. Probably a mental disease, but it does not mean that you are a murderer. It does not mean that you will punch a baby to death claiming she is the devil and it’s her turn to die. It does not mean that you will refrigerate her body and then weight it down in the Boston Harbor for some unsuspecting citizen walking her dog to make the startling discovery of her body washed ashore. Drug addicts make poor decisions. When in active addiction they won’t make good parents. No one would, in that state. But being a drug addict is not the reason this happened.
There are a lot of things drug addicts do in the name of drug addiction. Baby Bella would not be the first neglected causality of addiction, sadly. Many children have been raised by grandparents or relatives, ended up in Foster Care or adopted because a parent(s) couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of them. But they didn’t kill them. Killing a child and/or helping someone kill a child, especially your own child is a sickness that is much deeper than drug addiction. There is something missing in the normal thought process or a miss-fire in the brain that would allow a mother to stick her two-year old child in the fridge while you ponder what the next move is. This is just one woman’s opinion but I don’t believe that is a result of drug addiction that is a result of mental illness. Drug addiction is a symptom of mental illness, in many cases. But then, I thought, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe someone could be so consumed with drug addiction that this could happen. So I did some research. I looked up the worst cases of child murder by a mother. I was horrified to find out that there are mothers that killed their 3 week old child by putting her in a microwave, or stabbed them, or suffocated them, or drowned them. I learned that children under 2 are more likely to be killed by their mother, while older children are more likely to be killed by their father. I learned that most cases of parental murder end with the mother going to a mental institute and fathers going to jail. Most parent-to-child death happens from father-to-child. More than one article suggests that substance abuse can lead to parental murder; however, I couldn’t find one specific incident of a parent killing a child because they used drugs. And don’t think I didn’t look. I found a blog that specifically reports all incidents of mothers who kill their children (link below). I found one blog post dated November of 2013 that quoted parents that were accused of murdering their infant son of drinking and smoking marijuana the evening before they shook their son to death with such ferocity that he had 40 fractures I also found one article from USA Today from September 2014 that makes references to drugs in two of the cases of parental murder, but does not outline substance abuse as a cause . To help me feel right about society at as a whole, I also found several articles about parents that kill to protect their children, if anyone is interest, that link is also below.
Though all this may be morbid, and gave me nightmares, the point is that drug addiction is not what caused Rochelle Bond to commit the most repugnant of crimes by killing her beautiful baby, Bella Bond. She “allegedly” committed an act so heinous it’s difficult to call it a crime. Crime doesn’t begin to express the grotesqueness as it feels as though it is denying the law of nature, for a mother to come to that. In many cases society, family and the government failed the child by allowing them to continue to live with parents, specifically, mothers that were not fit, as is also the case with Bella. There were many, many contributing factors that lead to this horrific act. Many of which we haven’t even learned yet. One of them is that she is a drug addict. I believe that is pretty evident. I think drug addiction led too many poor choices in her life, time and again. That’s evident from the two previous children that were taken from her. And what does all this mean? It means that addicts have enough stacked against them, they have enough prejudice and judgment to also have murder listed as one of their many character flaws. Drug addiction may have caused her to be a bad mother, but being a bad person made her aid in murdering, hiding and disposing of her child. Some drug addicts might be bad people, and some murders might be drug addicts but all murders are bad, rotten to the core, hateful, disgusting people.
***Warning**** Many of the stories associated with the links below are graphic in nature.
I included the link to show where I got the information- Please do not feel like you have to read them.
http://thoughtcatalog.com/jim-goad/2014/04/20-moms-who-killed-their-kids/
http://motherswhokillchildren.blogspot.com/
http://mom.me/parenting/2422-parents-who-killed-for-their-children/?p=2
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/09/10/parents-kill-children-fbi-data/15280259/
The Addict In My Basement 