The Haunting

I have always tried to be very honest and open in my blog entries...."keeping it real" some might say. This entry is about as real as one can get. Some portions of this incident have become fuzzy with the passing of time but it is the best that I can remember of the event....an event that occurred well over a decade ago.
It was an early Spring day in Manchester, NH. I was working as an investigator with the Public Defenders Program at the time. The temperatures was in the low 60s. It was noon time or thereabouts. Myself along with 2-3 colleagues were going to lunch. We were walking towards our parking lot, where our cars are parked, approximately 3 city blocks away from our office building. We had just turned left out of the building in which we worked in and had walked for 2-3 minutes at the absolute most. They were parked cars along the street to our right hand side and as I was walking past a parked vehicle, I noticed that there was a child in the back seat. I mentioned it to my friends and we stopped at the car and looked in. The car windows were rolled up and the car was locked. We looked around and figured that the child's parent(s) had gone into the apartment building that this car was parked in front of and would return shortly. I remember that the child was a boy and was dressed in some bib overalls with a shirt underneath. The child looked like he was sleeping. We decided to walk up another 1/2 block, which is where the Manchester Police Department was located. We went in and told the front desk/reception person what we saw, gave them our names and where we worked at. We left and went about our business. Upon returning to work, we later heard that the babysitter who was taking care of this child, had run into the courthouse, which is across the street from where the car was parked and that she had left the child sleeping in the back seat of the car. We also learned that the child had died. The child was no more than 2 maybe 2 1/2 years old...possibly 3 at the most. An autopsy was done on the child where an approximate bracket time was given for this child's death and for the cause of his death...heatstroke. The bracket time estimated that the child died during a period of time prior to me first seeing him until around the time that I first noticed him in the backseat of the car. I have been laboring with the thought that it might have been possible, that I could have saved this child's life. That maybe the bracket time was off just a little bit. Although we lightly knocked on the windows and got no response from the child, leading us to believe that the child was soundly sleeping, thinking that the temperature outside was not warm at all....should I have just broke out the windows of the car or was going directly to the Police Dept, which was a 2 minute walk from where the child was and reporting what I saw enough...was our actions or should I say my actions...were they sufficient...were they proper...did I handle the whole thing wrong...was the child still alive when I saw him but thinking he was sleeping...was he actually asleep at that time or had he already died based on the autopsy bracket time. I wake up every day not knowing what the truth is...I will never know......this is MY inescapable haunting that I carry with me.

The babysitter was later charged with the death of this child...

Photos From Canada

My friend John Jakobs, from up in Canada, sent me these photos. I am not sure who took them but I would like to Thank both John and the anonymous photographer for sharing them with us.

I have no idea what kind of bird this is...might be a grouse.

A couple of photos of a fox

Smile for the camera

Magestic Eagle...we see lots of Eagles when we go up to Canada

Canadian Winter scenes

Moon over Canada

Slow Loading Blog aka Sloth of The Internet

I have been receiving some comments and emails about my blog loading up rather slowly. I just made a major change that should help with quicker loading of my blog...I reduced the number of posts on my first page from 30 down to 10. I recently added several features that you might have noticed. Some are on the right hand side bar column and others are at the end of each post. I also have many other features that load up...the music player along with all of the photos. I just went through and dumped some features in an attempt to have my blog load up quicker. I hope that this helps. If it doesn't, please subscribe to either a feed or get my blog updates via email...you can get it either with or without the pictures embedded in the feed or email...at least I believe so. If you have any problems, please feel free to contact me. PS- If you have dial up internet access...my blog will load up very slowly for you because of the amount of graphics and data that needs to load up...dial up internet is slower than cable or dsl, especially with the loading up of graphics.