Autistic 4-year-old dies in hit-and-run accident
July 23, 2006 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
Xavier Tobias Moore, an autistic 4-year-old, was killed by an unknown driver early Saturday in Richland County, South Carolina. Xavier—wearing only his diaper—apparently wandered from his home and walked a half-mile before being struck, according to today’s The State.com (South Carolina’s home page). Xavier died from “multiple trauma and skull fracture.”
Xavier’s death is a terrible tragedy. But what was he doing wandering from his house before 4am?
i am a mother of 7 and 5 are autistic and this really bothers me that parents dont take more precautions i have locks on all doors and we have a fence around our house with a lock on the gate.Alot of these accidental deaths can be prevented if parents take the time to do it.i struggle every day to make sure every one is safe and sound.its hard work especially with 5 autistics running around.but it can be done if i can do it while taking care of 7 kids then others should be able.
tricia
Thanks, Tricia—-I have one son (my only child) and he seems to understand about staying in the house and even in the yard—-not that I’m never not watching him.
What we don’t know is how many locks Xavier’s family had. When Jared was 3 he opened the deadbolt and the twist-lock on the front door, then built a pile of toys to open the chain. We lived in terror that he’d get up in the middle of the night (as he often did) and go for a stroll down our somewhat-busy street.
We ended up getting double-key-sided deadbolts put on the front door and the screen door. You need at least two different keys to get out of the house. Fire codes be damned, you know?
A family we know had to put alarms in all of their windows after their son ran away 3 or 4 times one summer—in his underwear once—fortunately the dad is a contractor who installs windows….
This sort of thing is like what Mark Twain said about learning from experience: you get the punishment before the lesson. You can’t guess the way that your child will escape from the house until you see him bolting down the street, and then it’s a little late.
To whomever may be reading this,
I have a problem with parents of autistic children judging other parents of autistic children which seems like what is going on here..
.. I consider myself highly regarded as a parent that watches my children like a hawk, and thank GOD when this incident occurred involving my boy who is on the autistic spectrum, he was found alive. Please do yourselves a favor and thank the Good Lord everyday that you are as efficient of parents like you say you are to your autistic children, and pray for those like me that you may feel don’t watch our children as efficiently. Our locks have been redone and we have set an alarm everytime the doors open.. perhaps I am on the path to your parenting style! (chuckle)
Frankly, this can happen to ANY parent of ANY child on the spectrum.
We don’t want people judging our children, the last thing we want is autistic spectrum parents judging other autistic parents.. I would think not, anyway….
What the parents of Xavier need is compassion. Please respect them for that..
Very well put and thank you, Allison—-if there is castigation here, some of it is, perhaps, directed by parents to themselves—-reflecting on times when we have had a “close call.” Best wishes.
Because we don’t know this family’s situation, we cannot judge whether or not they were doing the best they could. Like someone else said, you cannot predict what day and time your child will “outgrow” whatever locks you might be using.
Also, though many children with autism will run away, some are much much more determined and aggressive about it than others. My son is very intelligent and also very obsessed with trying to get out of the house. He is smart enough to be on the watch for any small sliver of opportunity.
How could I possibly predict that one day he would be able to break the doorknob covers to get into the garage, climb in the van to get the garage door opener and open the garage door to escape? (He was fine, I caught him after hearing the garage door opening). He was only 2 and there was no way I could know that he would figure out, on that particular day, how to break those doorknob covers. I didn’t even know he knew how to use the garage door opener or where I kept it (in a small compartment in the van).
No matter how self-rightous anyone wants to act about how closely they watch their children (and I DO watch mine very closely), you are not watching them every second of the day. Nobody is following their child around every second of every day. If I go to someone’s house that doens’t have the appropriate locks, I do literally need to have my eyes on him at all times (which is why we rarely visit for very long). There is a HUGE difference between a child escaping because the parents had no locks, left the child unattended for long periods of time, etc., and a parent who is doing the right things, but the child escapes anyway. I would be very afraid to say “It’s not going to happen to me, because I’m doing everything right.” No one can be so sure of that.
My five year old just ran off in the night for the first time. Never ever would I have thought that he’d get up quietly in his PJ’s. put on two different shoes, and leave the house (with a flashlight no less) in the night, on his own. Ever so quietly. Two sets of locks. He’s been able to defeat all locks since the age of two anyway and he will climb, create and do whatever needs to be done to meet his end purpose. I’m the most watchful, involved advocate of and for my son and this floored me! My heart goes out to the mother of the boy who died so tragically. It was a tragedy and by no means does it mean she was a bad parent. Shame on anyone else for thinking so with your “better than thou” attitude.
Sometimes things happen…and even happen in spite of the best laid plans and contingencies.
I looked at the archived stories on this, and the little boy did not have a prior history of eloping. Sadly, the first time he decided to go walkabout was when the family was asleep in the middle of the night (the first time that Eleanor figured out how to navigate our door locks and let herself out of the house, we were fortunate enough that it happened during the daytime, were able to realize this quickly enough to find her before something terrible happened and have a chance to make changes. It could have conceivably been much worse.)
The saddest thing is that I could not find a followup story that they found driver of the vehicle that struck him. I hope the family has been able to find closure, because he sounded like a much loved little boy.
When my son was 2, he learned how to turn the doorknob. When he was 2 1/2 he could turn a deadbolt, pull up a chair (down 3 stairs!) and take the chain off. He ran off numerous times – each time he learned how to work the lock. We ended up with a key lock, with the key strapped to my wrist 24 hours a day. I lived in fear of the house catching on fire during the night and not being able to find that darn key.
No one said it was easy.
We should try not to judge these parents harshly.
Sometimes it seems the only thing that you can do is to sleep in front of the door, and I’m not joking. I don’t know how long it’s been since I showered with the bathroom door shut.