Brandon Williams Was Only 5
March 3, 2008 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
5-year-old Brandon Williams died on Wednesday night, March 21st, 2007. His mother, Diane L. Marsh, had given him six to seven Simply Sleeps, five to six Tylenol PMs, two chewable aspirin, and a tablespoon of Benadryl. When medics tried to revive him, they noticed signs of abuse on his wrists, ankles, and feet: It was found out that Marsh had been giving Brandon, who had autism, sleep-inducing medicine twice a day, and also been disciplining him by “tying him up, plunging his feet into scalding water and beating him with a wire hanger,” today’s Arizona Daily Star reports. An autopsy revealed that Brandon died of a skull fracture.
Marsh and another woman, Flower Nicole Tompson, 28, were arrested last year and charged with first-degree murder and multiple counts of child abuse. Thompson entered a plea agreement today in Pima County Superior Court and agreed to testify against Marsh; Thompson acknowledged that she never called authorities despite seeing Marsh abuse Brandon.
This is too sad and more than reminds me of why we need to focus on helping to improve the lives of autistic children and persons now, over and above sometimes contentious questions about what causes autism.
I have a fairly strong stomach, but I almost threw up while reading this.
How terrible. What a terrible way for Brandon to live, and to die.
Joe
I just read about another death; Calista Springer of Centreville, MI. She died of smoke inhalation while being chained to a bed in her home. Am I just spending too much time on the internet, or are these stories becoming more common?
I remembered the story from last year and feel no better reading about the news today concerning the accused.
I don’t know if these stories are more common—-I hope it’s that they are being reported more. I hope.
Pass bills, save kids
(Arizona HB 2594, HB2599, HB2454, HB2453, HCR 2054, HB 2455; Currently in committee)
“A package of bills before the House Government Committee today represents a reasoned response to the agony of child abuse.
…House Bill 2599 requires notification of the Arizona Criminal Justice Information System and the National Crime Information Center when children who are involved in CPS investigations go missing.
This type of information sharing could have saved 5-year-old Brandon Williams. CPS was looking for him because of concerns about his safety, but a Pima County Sheriff’s deputy who encountered the boy and his mother didn’t know that. The officer believed the mother’s lies about why the child had bandages on his legs. The mother is now charged in his murder…”
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/articles/0226tue1-26.html
HOLY MFS. That is horrendous — I have no words for this. Just tears. ffs.
I came here to let you know that I’m trying to get some bloggers together to blog for autism awareness in april (offical month for autism awareness).
I’m also looking for guest posters on my blog that month. More info can be found here: http://momologue.blogspot.com/2008/03/join-me-in-blogging-for-autism.html
Simply sick. I have to think that incidents like these seem more common because what was once a village secret gets on the net. They are still very, very rare.
It also seems that is almost always the mother who commits these sadistic acts, though often times the father has abandoned the family.
Who was this Flower Nicole Thompson? It’s difficult to understand how such ugliness could inflict two people.
As awful as that is, what bothers me even more is that psychological abuse is more common by countless orders of magnitude — and yet, in this country, the general population scarcely recognizes it as abuse at all.
That one would be egregiously mean and nasty, to the point of causing painful lingering death to one she is naturally and legally required to nurture and raise up, just, well, the thought of it does make me throw up in my mouth, a bit, as Rachel Lucas says.
I’ve pretty much resigned myself to the idea that I’m unlikely to have any offspring. I’m pretty old, and the only woman who’s expressed a desire to get nekkid with me is going through menopause.
I do not understand people who’ve managed to reproduce, and then be mean to, and kill, their kids.
This makes my stomach turn so badly. He didn’t deserve to live to die this way. No autistic child or teen or adult does.
I’m torn between the desire to go vomit in the bathroom and to scoop up my little guy, hug and kiss him, and snuggle him until I forget what I’ve just read. Awful, so awful it’s hard to imagine. Not only could I not even begin to understand a mother who does something like this but, how exactly could someone stand there and do nothing?
The mother’s actions aren’t too complicated, she was mean and crazy. The two other people living with her (and I don’t understand why the male is being left out of this narrative) were complicit, sometimes helping her apparently. I guess the male “roommate” had his charges dropped because he didn’t “care for the child” even though he was allegedly just as complicit as the female “roommate”.
The mother had custody of the child because the father already had been jailed or charged with abusing another autistic child of theirs. He was no longer with the family by this time. Despite CPS “looking for the family”, there was never a missing persons claim. Despite being uninvolved with his dead son, he is filing a lawsuit against CPS.
As a person located in Tucson, I feel this case has more to do with drugs, law enforcement, CPS and out of control parenting than with autism. It’s identical to a couple other cases that occurred at the same time with nonautistic victims.
I fully believe that Brandon Williams would have been killed regardless of his neurology.
They are being reported more, but my preference would be for them to be reported less, as in the child being removed or some other intervention before we have to read of severe neglect, injury or death.
Child abuse statistics
http://www.yesican.org/stats.html
We have had some horrendous child abuse/death stories here and they leave me shaking because by the time it reaches the paper too often it is too late to do anything except punish the perpetrator, not rescue or spare the child. There is no child anywhere for any reason who should have this happen to him or her.
Thanks for that link, Regan.
Equally disturbing, I think, is this rather unusual report pertaining to adults in mostly institutional settings:
Abuse and Neglect of Adults with Developmental Disabilities (California)
http://www.pai-ca.org/pubs/701901.htm
For those who don’t feel up to reading the whole report, the most compelling data can be found in Chapter 1.
In comparing these different sets of statistics, we might bear in mind that victims taken out of the first (domestic) settings routinely wind up in the second (institutional) settings … which, it would appear, are vastly more hazardous on the whole than the averages of domestic life.
In other words, as horrific as the “disease” is in this case, such general “cures” as present-day society is prepared to administer somehow always turn out to be worse.
(now I’m getting this strange “deja vu” feeling for some reason…)
dkmnow,
Thanks in return for that link.
Your point is taken, also considering the apparent nightmare going on with Nate Tseglin as described elsewhere on this blog.
http://www.autismvox.com/nate-tseglin-removed-from-his-home-and-institutionalized-why/
(Although in some defense of alternatives, I know folks who act as foster parents and do a good job of it, even with special-needs children.)
Agreed.
In my opinion, it is largely the “traditional” authoritarian bias (power for its own sake) that still permeates our culture, in extremely subtle ways as well as overt, that is responsible for both the abuses that occur in institutional settings (including on the policy level), and for those that occur at the individual and family levels in domestic settings.
The imbalance of power that exists between individuals and groups is itself the flash-point of all injustice, and viral authoritarianism thrives on that imbalance. We rely upon such authoritarianism by default, because we, as a whole, are unwilling to commit to the risk and much harder work that more egalitarian approaches demand. Oh, we love to wear our “enlightened” garbs and trinkets on the outside, but we are still tribal predators on the inside…
[/soapbox]
but, yeah, on the level of individuals and small groups, there is quite a lot of good being done.
Reading these comments and some other posts about institutional care, I can only feel beyond grateful that I just tucked Charlie into his own bed.
Thanks for all the links, not easy reading, needless to say.
I’m sorry to say, Kristina, that this is actually another teen who died in a fire. Last year’s victim was a 19 year old boy in Oregon. This week’s victim was a 16 year old girl in Michigan.
Diane Marsh has also been indicated on a charge of kidnapping her son, Brandon Williams.
http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/crime/244795