It’s Our Village That Let 2 Children Die

It takes a village to raise a child, we tell ourselves in these slogan-filled years. So tell me: Where was our much-vaunted village when Jackie Robles needed it?

Where was the village on Tuesday morning, when the 21-year-old mother put her infant and two toddlers down for a nap and fell asleep?

Where was the village, when, as 3-year-olds inevitably will, tiny Alexes took the hand of her not-quite-2-year-old baby sister, Deziree, and somehow opened the apartment door?

Where was the village when two barefoot babies, one in nothing but a diaper, were seen and heard and, indeed, allowed to toddle unsupervised more than 100 yards down a sidewalk to the bed of a railroad track that was unfenced because that village deemed the cost, in the words of one transit official, “prohibitive”?

Where was the village at 10:56 a.m. when the engineer of the Metrolink commuter train, roaring around a curve at some 50 mph, tried with every ounce of his soul to stop and could not?

Is there any parent out there who did not feel their blood run cold at the report of the deaths of those two toddlers? When the story appeared on the late-night news Tuesday and in the papers, who among us did not have to suppress the urge to turn off the TV, set the paper aside?

When I finally forced myself to read all about it, here is what came to mind: the time our middle child, then 3, tiptoed barefoot out the kitchen door while I was folding laundry, and I didn’t even know it until she ran around the house and rang the doorbell to be let back in. And the time I turned my back for a minute and our youngest unlocked that same kitchen door and was down at the end of our driveway in the time it took for me to hear the door creak and run to scoop her up.

And this also came to mind: a little, dusty-faced boy who lived down the road from the house where I grew up, whose mother was always worn out and preoccupied. There were no sidewalks, and everyone kind of kept an eye out in her behalf, taking her little boy home when he wandered away while she napped.

Our houses were far apart, farther apart even than the houses in the far reaches of Southern California, where suburbia gives way to desert and farmland and long stretches of railroad track. But we knew each other and so we felt comfortable looking out for each other and for each others’ kids. No one I grew up with would have ever watched two babies wander alone down a street without their mother and figure, as one witness told a reporter, that “they were heading to their home.”

Heading home? A 3-year-old? A 22-month-old? And were they also checking door-to-door for the correct address? What has gotten into us? Have we lost our conception of what it is to be a child? Or have we just lost the heart to think about it anymore?

It isn’t easy to be a good neighbor in this world. Tell someone how to raise their children and you might get sued. Act too interested in someone else’s toddler and you might get accused of attempted child abduction, or worse. We recognize that nothing is more intimate than the relationship between a parent and a child; we mind our own business and give each other the benefit of the doubt.

But isn’t there a difference between keeping your mouth shut when you see an overwhelmed mother slapping her child in the checkout line at Target and resisting the urge to step in when you see two babies running down the street unsupervised? And isn’t there a problem when, in the larger picture, even the most basic levels of caring, public and private, have become too expensive or too fraught with risk?

Jackie Robles’ neighbors considered themselves caring. “We all watch each others’ children when they’re outside,” the next-door neighbor said. But one neighbor doesn’t make a village. We are the village. And ours is a village in which, when it comes to children, talk--like life--is cheap.

Ours has become a village in which the only mothers who get help looking out for their children are the mothers who can afford to pay and pay. Ours has become a village that is too cheap to ante up, not only for good child care, but for all sorts of things that our children deserve, from child welfare caseworkers to decent schools to better counseling to railroad tracks that are childproofed.

A skeptic might remind us that we don’t yet have all the information. After all, the police have arrested Robles on suspicion of felony child endangerment. People, mothers included, are capable of awful things; Robles’ husband is a convicted wife-beater, and we don’t know yet whether there is more to the deaths of those children than meets the eye.

According to the neighbors, Robles was “a wonderful mother” whose only crime was nodding off while her babies, presumably, napped. But even if she was a terrible mother, is that not all the more reason for the village to pick up the slack?

“This doesn’t need any elaboration,” an Upland police captain snapped when asked for details. “The person who had the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the safety of her children failed to do so.”

It does need elaboration.

We need to hold up the microscope any time we so tragically lose one of our children. Too often, we settle for the explanation that the costs associated with protecting them--from safe haven to safe railroad tracks--are financially or personally “prohibitive.”

It takes a village to embark on that kind of elaboration, the same village whose negligence at every level allowed Jackie Robles’ babies to die.