Put Poverty on Trial, Not This Mom

Tabitha Frank, a Hartford, Connecticut, mom whose 2-year-old son died from falling out a window while she was on an Uber shift, has been charged with manslaughter. The boy was home with his four older sisters. Frank had called the toddler's father to come watch the kids, but he got delayed. The oldest child in the house was 12, an age at which many kids babysit their younger siblings.

Corneliuz Alfonso Shand Williams died two days after his July 22 fall, according to the Hartford Courant.

Frank was arrested the night of the fall and taken to jail. Her family bailed her out the next day. She appeared in court last Thursday, flanked by relatives and supporters, including a pastor whose child had also fallen from a window, but thankfully landed in some bushes and survived. He didn't know Frank but understood that there but for the grace of God... go any of us.

"My baby died. My baby died, and they're looking for someone to blame," a grief-stricken Frank told me on the phone. The authorities "want to hang me for something I'm already suffering from."

I, too, do not understand how making this mom suffer even more serves any purpose. Her real crime? She's poor. She was trying to make money to support her kids. She had secured an adult to watch them. The fact that he arrived too late, that the 12-year-old didn't see the boy climbing out the window, the fact Frank didn't have a live-in nanny, or the ability to turn down paying work, and that sometimes terrible things happen... those facts seem more than mitigating.

"They've charged her with manslaughter in the first degree, which requires 'supreme indifference to human life,'" says Wesley Spears, Frank's attorney. "That statute is designed for people like a drunk who goes down the highway on the wrong side of the road at a high rate of speed — that kind of thing."

Spears took the case pro bono because he has known Frank's father for many years.

Frank was working for Uber because of the flexibility it provided, said Spears. During surge pricing, she could make twice as much money, so she looked for those opportunities. The drivers call it "purple time."

When her app went purple on July 22, she called her son's dad to come watch the kids. He said he would be right over, according to Spears, but fell asleep. He arrived just as the police were getting there.

Frank and her children live in public housing. (The four daughters have since been placed with relatives.) Police described their third-floor apartment as "deplorable," but a Department of Children and Families (DCF) worker who investigated the home a month earlier had not found it in particularly bad shape, according to the Courant.

But the Office of the Child Advocate, which oversees DCF, has called the death "preventable and tragic."

Tragic? Indisputably. But preventable? In hindsight, perhaps. The impulse after an accident is always to blame someone.

"Usually it's the mother," says Diane Redleaf, a longtime civil rights lawyer and legal consultant to Let Grow, the nonprofit I founded. "We seem to have no tolerance for tragic accidents that don't have a wrongdoer."

The night before the boy fell, he had been eating ice cream outside with his sisters and playing in a kiddie pool they set up. Relatives told the Courant that Frank tried to make this summer as sweet as possible for her kids, after the all the confinement of COVID-19.

The funeral is planned for next week. Frank's sister has set up a GoFundMe to help cover expenses.

On the phone, Frank says she could understand being prosecuted if she had been an abusive or unloving mother.

"But I kissed the top of his head, and the bottom of his feet," she says. "You don't have to punish me because I am already punishing myself."

Agreed.