It turned out to be a disastrous decision. Someone, it seems, deliberately
set fire to her apartment. Her children died. And within hours, Ms. Brathwaite
was under arrest, charged with recklessly endangering her children.
The investigation is continuing, and an arrest in the arson may soon
overshadow the criminal charges against Ms. Brathwaite, who is not a suspect
in the fire, investigators say. But she is now facing up to 16 years in prison
for a decision that, surveys and interviews with experts suggest, cuts
uncomfortably close to some choices made every day by American families.
Nationwide, parents themselves report leaving more than 3 million children
under 13 some as young as 5 to care for themselves for at least a few hours a
week on a regular basis, according to a recent study by Child Trends, a
nonprofit research organization in Washington, D.C., that analyzed census
information and other data.
And so the Brooklyn case highlights a much broader debate, one with few
fixed legal guideposts. For state statutes typically set no age under 18 when
a child is legally considered old enough to stay home alone. Thus parents are
left with many case-by-case judgments, and prosecutors with vast discretion
when something goes wrong.
The cases that surface are almost always the notorious failures, like the
story of the 9 and 4 year-old cousins in Little Ferry, N.J., who went
joy-riding in a leased S.U.V. or the former welfare mother in Cuyahoga County,
Ohio, who was afraid to lose her night job processing checks at a bank, and
instead lost her unsupervised toddler in a fall from a ninth-floor balcony.
But how those cases are treated, and whether they result in prosecutions,
can vary widely. Several years ago, after two grand juries in Santa Fe, N.M.,
refused to indict parents when they had left young children at risk one child
was left freezing in a car while her father drank in a local bar the local
district attorney altered his policy for arresting and prosecuting parents in
such cases.
"The grand jury is reflective of a community standard," the district
attorney, Henry Valdez, said after his second failed prosecution.
A professor of family law at New York University, Martin Guggenheim, said
that the ambiguity in criminal laws touching the "home alone" question made
wide discrepancies in the handling of cases inevitable.
"It puts all parents at peril in making parental choices, without warning
them that certain choices are forbidden," he said.
Brooklyn prosecutors argue that no matter what, Ms. Brathwaite should not
have left her children, 9-year-old Justina Mason and 1-year-old Justin
Brathwaite, alone in a basement apartment in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn,
especially children as young and vulnerable as hers.
Both had sickle cell anemia, a chronic blood disorder that often requires
hospital care. And though prosecutors concede that Justina and her mother were
talking by phone as late as 10 p.m., when the baby sitter had still not
arrived, such conversations fall far short of the adult supervision needed in
an emergency.
"She knew they were at risk," said Ama Dwimoh, the chief of the Crimes
Against Children Bureau in the Brooklyn district attorney's office. "I'm not
trying to do a rush to judgment, but this is why you can't leave kids home
alone because it can result in death.
But others, from Ms. Brathwaite's lawyer to researchers of family life, say
her case needs to be seen in a broader social context.
She was, they note, a single mother by some accounts quite devoted living a
life of complicated choices.
Recently promoted to assistant manager at the McDonald's, Ms. Brathwaite
was required to work a rotating mix of morning, midday and nighttime shifts
that made reliable child care nearly impossible to keep on her modest wages.
Nor could she leave early, since she was responsible for securing the day's
receipts. When desperate calls to the missing sitter and a neighbor went
unanswered, her lawyer said, she was afraid of losing the job that supported
her children.
"She is guilty of nothing more than being a single mom working a 12-hour
shift," said her lawyer, Douglas Rankin.
Richard Wexler, the director of the National Coalition for Child Protection
Reform who has compiled research on children left at home, said many parents
take similar risks, often because better options are not available. "Although
news stories repeatedly say there is `no firm rule' concerning when a child
can be left alone, actually there is one," Mr. Wexler said. "It's the rule of
fate. If something goes wrong, then you are a bad parent and you will be
charged. If nothing goes wrong, you won't."
Ms. Dwimoh, of the Brooklyn prosecutor's office, was not swayed. "Just
because everybody does it doesn't make it right," she said. And a spokesman
for the district attorney's office, Jerry Schmetterer, argued that tragic
results cannot be disregarded.
"The case will be presented to a grand jury and the people of Brooklyn will
speak," he said. "But our position is we had to charge two babies are dead."
Of course, the decision by parents whether to leave children alone usually
depends on many factors besides age, such as the capabilities of the children,
the ability to pay for care, cultural traditions and the perceived safety of
the neighborhood.
Linda Gordon, a professor of history at New York University who has written
extensively on America's shifting definition of child neglect since the 19th
century, said that in an immigrant nation, with wide economic inequalities,
beliefs and customs differ.
"This may have been an extremely competent 9-year-old,"` Professor Gordon
said, referring to the older child in the Brooklyn case. "There are all kinds
of societies where 9-year-olds take care of children. And what would have
happened if the mother had been there? It's not so obvious that it would have
been different."
The Child Trends researchers found that higher-income children between 6
and 9 were actually more likely than poor children to be left unsupervised for
several hours, even after controlling for the fact that the better-off parents
were more likely to have jobs.
The authors of the report, "Left Unsupervised: A Look at the Most
Vulnerable Children," warned that leaving such children under 13 routinely on
their own may put them at risk for injuries and developmental problems. But
they also hedged, writing: "Self care is not always harmful. Children
typically become more independent as they mature, gradually spending more and
more time alone and taking increasing amounts of responsibility."
When unsupervised children become notorious, the legal system may feel
extra pressure to hold parents accountable, even when the case did not end in
tragedy.
In the case of the child joy riders in the S.U.V. in New Jersey, an elderly
pedestrian who was knocked over suffered no lasting injuries.
Lawyers for the mothers of the two cousins said they were hard-working
single moms in their 30's who were juggling responsible jobs, one at a bank
during the day, the other in a hospital at night. By their account, the lack
of supervision was just the result of a misunderstanding with a 22-year-old
niece who was also in the patchwork child care mix.
But six weeks later, the children are still in New Jersey foster care while
the State Division of Youth and Family Services conducts its investigation.
And criminal charges of endangering their children are pending against the two
mothers, said Dolores Aretsky, the lawyer for one, last week.
In the Ohio case of the toddler falling to his death, the 23-year-old
mother, Tanisha Gill, was charged with involuntary manslaughter for choosing
to leave for her job when her baby sitter failed to show up. She had said the
child's father promised to "be right over," to watch the sleeping boys,
Charles, 2, who died, and his 4-year-old brother. The father denied it.
In the end, a judge placed her on probation for three years after she
pleaded guilty to reckless homicide.
Yet in other strikingly similar cases, parents wound up not prosecuted.
In one of the cases in Santa Fe that were rejected by grand juries, an
illegal immigrant and mother of seven had gone to work at McDonald's, leaving
a 6-year-old daughter in charge of siblings aged 3 and 1. The frightened girl
had called 911. But supporters including the sheriff who bailed the mother out
of jail saw her as a desperate single mother fearful of deportation who was
doing the best she could in poverty.
A district attorney in Greeley, Colo. declined to prosecute Jennifer
Farrell, a more affluent mother who left her six children home alone for 17
days while she vacationed in Italy. He found no evidence that the children -
aged 6, 8, 10, 11, 12 and 14 - were harmed or faced imminent danger when the
single mother left them with a stocked kitchen, a debit card for buying more
food, and a list of family friends and relatives to call if they needed help,
The Denver Post reported.
Annette Lareau, a sociologist at Temple University who has studied the
child-rearing practices of poor, middle-class and affluent parents, said of
the Brooklyn case, "You could say this family had very bad luck."
Professor Lareau said that among the well-off families she followed for her
new book, "Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life (University of
California Press, 2003), were a pair on an out-of-town trip to a soccer
championship who left two 10-year-olds, two 8-year-olds and a 5-year-old alone
in a hotel room while the two sets of parents went out to dinner a mile away.
"They left the kids with cell phones, pizzas and videos saying to each
other, `They'll turn us in,' " she recalled. The children did not turn them
in, however, and no fire broke out.
