“I wanted to take the autism out of her”: Taped Confession by Karen McCarron
June 5, 2007 by Kristina Chew, PhD
Filed under Health
WMBD/WYZZ TV (Illinois) reports on a taped confession of Karen McCarron that was given in a courtroom this Tuesday afternoon. McCarron is accused of murdering her then-three-year-old autistic daughter, Katherine McCarron on May 13, 2006.
A Morton woman accused of murdering her autistic daughter said in a taped confession that she was overwhelmed and wanted to take the autism out of her child.
A Tazewell County judge heard Karen McCarron’s confession in court Tuesday afternoon.
Mccarron’s attorney is trying to have the confession thrown out.
The defense says the confession is no good because McCarrron was hospitalized when interviewed by police.
In the tape, McCarron admitted to suffocating her daughter with a plastic bag, then putting her back to bed.
The judge hasn’t ruled whether the tape will be admitted in McCarron’s trial.
McCarron has pleaded not guilty to the murder charge.
Update at 22.20pm EST: These are Karen McCarron’s words from the May 15, 2006, interview done in her hospital room at OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, as quoted in the Peoria Journal-Star:
The Morton mother accused of suffocating her 3-year-old autistic daughter had thoughts about killing the child before – she said she “wanted a life without autism,” according [to] her videotaped hospital room confession.
“It seems that everything I tried to do didn’t help her. She was a tough nut to crack,” Karen McCarron said on the tape. “I didn’t know what to do . . . she was not learning at a rate I would expect . . .”
McCarron went on to tell Morton police Katherine “Katie” McCarron was “detached,” mentally disconnected and being vocal May 13, 2006, the day she allegedly killed her.
“It’s just really heartbreaking,” McCarron confessed of Katie’s disconnect.
“Autism left me hollow.”
This whole case makes me cry every time I see more about it. That beautiful little girl! I’m just goign to go hug my boys tight for a while…
It’s too heart-breaking.
Oh my.
My heart goes out to those who loved Katie for Katie and are having to deal with this circus and tragedy on top of each other.
I just posted quotations from another news article.
It gets worse.
You know, it’s almost a cliche anymore that parents hope their newborns will become a lawyer or doctor.
What if ALL parents killed their child because they did not learn at a rate they would “expect”?
What if ALL parents killed their child because they hit the teenage years and disconnected?
What if ALL parents killed their child was a “tough nut to crack?”
I have deliberately cultivated a good relationship with my fellow general education teachers. I’ve heard them talk about their students. I’ve heard them talk about their kids. I’ve watched them on the playground with each other, as well as when they interact with my students as peer buddies.
Typically developing and/or neurotypical kids may be slow learners. They may be disconnected or emotionally distant. They may be difficult to reach or motivate.
Nothing in life is ever exactly what you expect.
None of those justifications justify ANYthing just because Katie was also autistic.
I’m putting it down to the long-term medicalisation of what is a developmental (and therefore educational) issue. For quite some time, medicine has tried to gain footholds into areas in which it has no business, and this is one such area.
Medicalisation of an issue leads pretty necessarily to thoughts of cure or treatment, and – in an age of rapid development in the psychopharmaceuticals industry – that treatment or cure is pharmcological in nature. The medicalisation ignores the connection between the mind and the body (by which I mean the ways in which the biological aspects of our respective beings mediate – but to not control or cause – the psychological aspects of our beings), and this ignorance leads to the notion of autism as a separate matter, without which the person would be ‘normal’ – and all at the grave risk of missing the fact that being autistic is as much a part of the autistic person as being left-handed is part of being a left-handed person. Autism cannot be separated out any more than left-handedness can.
Medicine has one great failure to admit to (and I see no sign of that admission coming soon): it has failed to cure stupidity.
And ignorance……
“tough nut” is a term I’ve read used by biomed parents. Usually they don’t assign that term until they’ve tried everything for years. I think Jaqueline McCandless says it about her granddaughter who is a teen and not cured.
A mom uses it here:
http://www.spectrumhyperbarics.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=16&Itemid=39
A mom uses it here:
http://www.minimum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=719&sid=10625ee463a9e826dd14ec6960288cbf
and here
http://onibasu.com/archives/am/182495.html
Do a google search of “tough nut autism” and you can see where parents are using it to mean “non-responder”.
We already know that the mother was in deep with autism “biomed” and quackery, so we can assume that that’s where she picked up the term.
Karen Mc Carron, not-guilty because of mental problems; Katie Mc Carron, killed for being autistic (or too autistic for too long)?!
This does not make even a remote sense. I mean even worse than most stuff lately.
There are things some ppl learn as children that I am still learning in my 30’s. Thankfully nobody noticed how messed up I was. Thankfully I have often been treated as a real person, having a right to stay alive, anyway.
I googled “autism tough nut” and got this link—-it’s from Health News Feed, a service of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.
From my perspective, I think it is stress induced post partum psychosis induced infanticide. Pretty much like what happened to Andrea Yates.
There is no legal or moral justification for what she did. However fundamentally humans are not legal or moral organisms, we are evolved organisms, and there are evolutionary justifications.
I will be blogging about this in the near future. It is an evolved characteristic of mammals, that when females with dependant infants are put under enough “stress”, they will commit infanticide. It is a “feature” to shed metabolic load to survive.
I think that anyone under sufficient stress could do the same thing. This is something our ancestors had to do in deep evolutionary time. Sophie’s choice. Those who chose “wisely” survived and had descendents that survived, and so we are like them. Those that did not choose, or who chose badly, did not have descendents that survived.
Kristina: “And ignorance……”
Well, medicine is doing worse than we thought….
Not that biomedical treatments might be doing “better”…… I’ve been thinking all day about what that phrase “take the autism out of her” is really saying.
daedalus2u, I’ll be reading your analysis with interest.
I’m glad I’m not the only one troubled by the “tough nut” reference – as in, “that’s one tough nut to crack.” So an autistic kid who isn’t responding to certain education measures is merely a resistant little walnut who, if one applies just a little more force, would pop right open? Sure, the phrase may be said offhandedly, but I think every phrase has meaning. This sort of thinking about autism is dangerous and can serve to justify all sorts of abuses.
There’s also the sense of something (of value) inside a (resistant) shell…..
I think the “tough nut to crack” is an idiom that implies that while there is resistance to opening, that once that resistance is overcome, that the “nut” is open and is then just like any other nut.
I think this is the expectation of “curebie” parents, that once the “resistance” is overcome, that the ASD child will become “normal”. There is no basis other than wishful thinking that such a thing is possible, or will happen in any particular case.
There is a macadamia nut tree in my parent’s front yard. It grows thick and bushy with prickly leaves. My parents complained about the mess and spoke often of cutting it down but it had its good points (beauty, rarity, shade, privacy). The nuts are extremely difficult to crack because their outside shells are perfectly round, smooth and hard. We kids, with the persistence and free time of youth, spent hours trying to open them. We’d wedge one into a crack in the sidewalk, or hold it between the forefinger and thumb, and aim carefully with a hammer. Sometimes the nut would shoot down the street, or painfully bounce off our faces, or the hammer would whack our fingers. But, with luck and a steady hand, we heard a crack and were rewarded. The precious nutmeats never saw an oven or salt shaker since they were good enough just the way they were.
it’s just horrible.
I’ve done enough reading to know that her perception of Katie was flawed.
There needs to be a change in how parents are handed the dx. “with 40 hrs/wk of ABA, he may even be normal one day. For more information, see Autism Speaks”.
I was swimming against that current on gut feeling [translation=BAP] for a few years before I read anything by an autistic adult. I learned just last year of the HUB. WHY aren’t “THEY” telling us something helpful, like, he may do things other children do, but it will take longer. maybe a lot longer. Just take it slow and enjoy your child. Learn what needs doing, and what could be let slide. Watch the way he goes about learning things of interest, and participate with him.
Reciprocity is a two way street.
I love kids. i feel they should do to her what she did to her kid. it is really sad that more and more kids are being kill by there mom. i have a 11yr old and a 14 yr old boys. i could never hurt them.