What Was Maureen Faibish Thinking?
The SF Chronicle reports that the trial of Maureen Faibish begins today. For the uninitiated, Ms. Faibish's 12-year-old son Nicholas was fatally mauled in June 2005 by the family's two pit bulls after she left him alone with the dogs - a female in heat and a pheromone-crazed male.
Today's article offers new details I hadn't read before: Nicholas was a special education student with severe learning disabilities, he was known to demonstrate oppositional behavior and have difficulty following directions, and his mother clearly knew the dogs were dangerous because she admitted to warning Nicholas repeatedly about being anywhere near them while the female was in heat.
Apparently, when Nicholas refused to go on a family outing, his mother left him in a dank basement with a non-working bathroom and told him to stay there until she returned several hours later. Um . . . the kid gets locked in the basement while the dogs get free run of the house?
Leaving a child alone with two menacing dogs is reckless in any case, and especially egregious if the child is unable to grasp the danger the dogs represent. Ms. Faibish was initially quoted as saying she didn't believe she'd done anything wrong, and that the attack was her son's fault for not following her directions. We have no way of knowing if she now understands just how irresponsible her actions were, but her previous attitude represents, unfortunately, a common misperception of kids with learning difficulties--that they are lazy and disobedient, rather than people whose brains are just wired very differently than most.
Today's article offers new details I hadn't read before: Nicholas was a special education student with severe learning disabilities, he was known to demonstrate oppositional behavior and have difficulty following directions, and his mother clearly knew the dogs were dangerous because she admitted to warning Nicholas repeatedly about being anywhere near them while the female was in heat.
Apparently, when Nicholas refused to go on a family outing, his mother left him in a dank basement with a non-working bathroom and told him to stay there until she returned several hours later. Um . . . the kid gets locked in the basement while the dogs get free run of the house?
Leaving a child alone with two menacing dogs is reckless in any case, and especially egregious if the child is unable to grasp the danger the dogs represent. Ms. Faibish was initially quoted as saying she didn't believe she'd done anything wrong, and that the attack was her son's fault for not following her directions. We have no way of knowing if she now understands just how irresponsible her actions were, but her previous attitude represents, unfortunately, a common misperception of kids with learning difficulties--that they are lazy and disobedient, rather than people whose brains are just wired very differently than most.
4 Comments:
What are you thinking? PLEASE!!! As a member of the media and after listening to the actual testimony of this case, I will provide you with the truth:
1. Nicholas was of average intelligence who simply had a speech problem.
2. He was never locked in the basement. The Police officer's testimony showed the door was broken in that there was no doorknob. The only way for Nick to close the door was to put a shovel against it.
3. The evidence showed that he was just instructed to stay away from the dogs, NOT to stay in the basement.
4. The evidence showed that Nick was up and downstairs throughtout the day: he used the upstairs bathroom, he ate from the refrigerator, opened a toy-left the wrapper upstairs, and brought the toy downstairs.
5. The dogs were not violent.
Kamala Harris' office messed up pretty bad with this one.
Well, as a member of the media maybe you should look at how the media has reported this case. I, like Rachel, came to the same conclusions based upon what you and your buddies in the “media” have reported. Ok, neither of us sat in court listening to the testimony, but that does not mean we may not form an opinion based upon what MOST people hear about the case, and that is what is on television and in the newspapers. If we “got it wrong” then only “the media” is to blame for misinforming us.
>^..^<
Here’s what has been stated in the Chronicle, directly contradicting what you said you have heard in court:
7/17/06: << Assistant District Attorney Linda Moore portrayed Faibish as a woman who knew that her son had a learning disability that prevented him from following instructions to stay in their dank basement, away from the pit bulls, while she went out.>>
7/17/06 << Faibish told police she had lectured Nicholas, who had chronic learning disabilities, for half an hour about staying away from the pit bulls before leaving him in the basement on Lincoln Way with snack food, video games and the family's pet reptiles and rodents. She said she had told him to prop a shovel against the door to keep the dogs away.>>
7/17/06 << Faibish also told investigators that her son had learning disabilities and had to be accompanied by an "inclusion specialist'' when he was at school.
"She said he didn't follow directions very well,'' Casillas said. "She said Nicky wouldn't listen ... oftentimes to what she said and what he was instructed to do.''>>
7/18/06 << Faibish's son Nicholas was killed June 3, 2005, after she told him to stay in the basement of their Inner Sunset District home where there was a shovel to prop the door closed against the 70-pound dogs, one of which had bitten the boy earlier in the day.>>
<< Faibish knew her son had a learning disability that prevented him from following instructions readily, Moore said. Yet Faibish trusted him to stay in the basement for nearly three hours playing video games while she accompanied her young daughter to a school picnic, the prosecutor said.>>
7/19/06<< Faibish -- who put her son in the basement area with instructions not to come out -- never envisioned any harm would come to her son by leaving him home with the dogs that day.>>
<< Natalie Hom, a speech and language therapist who worked with Nicholas from the first to the fifth grades, testified in San Francisco Superior Court that the boy was two to three grade levels behind. His biggest weakness, she said, was his difficulty following directions.>>
7/20/06 << The prosecution wound up its case by calling the boy's special education teacher at Roosevelt Middle School and a school speech pathologist assigned to him in elementary school. Both testified that they had told Maureen Faibish her son had problems listening and following directions.
Those problems, the prosecution has suggested, should have signaled to Maureen Faibish that Nicholas was unlikely to pay attention when she left the house the day he died and told him to stay in the basement, away from the dogs. One of the dogs had bitten the boy earlier in the day.
Moore asked Natalie Hom, a speech and language therapist who worked with Nicholas from the first to the fifth grades, what would happen when the boy was given a task and left alone.
"He would attempt to complete the task, but he could be spacey and wander off," Hom said.
Hom said she had met with his mother and had told her about the learning challenges the boy would face throughout his life. "Mrs. Faibish said he did have difficulty following instructions at home,'' she said. "He needed prompts and reminders.''
>>
7/24/06 << Prosecution witnesses have testified that Nicholas was learning disabled and had difficulty following instructions. Given that, and given that the basement where he was supposed to stay had no working toilet, Assistant District Attorney Linda Moore argued that he would have been unlikely to follow his mother's orders to avoid the dogs.>>
I agree with you. I am embarassed at my profession and how we destroyed this mom. Everything sounds really bad when taken out of context. We have to stop listening to everyone's opinion in this case and start looking at the facts. In that same article, defense counsel asked Karen Anzaldo, a special education teacher who worked with Nicholas while he was in the sixth grade.
"Anzaldo also said Nicholas was better at following directions when it came to things that interested him, such as movies and his dogs."
Interesting perspective from someone who knows the truth rather than the media who wants to sell papers.
Beck Jury Foreperson, August 8th, 2006 12:46 pm
http://www.blogexplosion.com/review.php?SiteID=66404
1. Beck August 8th, 2006 12:46 pm
“Nicky received two bites that morning. While the one on his arm could not be identified due to the horrible damage later caused by the dogs, the medical examiner was able to identify the bite on his torso. That bite was deemed mild - something that would not have been very apparent when it happened and had barely broken the skin. I think that, for a lot of people, this would be enough to make sure Nicky was not left alone with the dogs. But I don’t think that most people would conclude from this that their family dogs, who had never shown aggression to any people or animals prior to Ella going into heat a few days before, would do such a horrendous thing. The defense even submitted that Ella had been through a heat before without incident, so the simple fact that she was in heat probably wouldn’t have been cause for alarm either.”
“A child left alone with the family dogs who had bitten him mildly that morning is not probably going to die.”
“I did not know much about the case prior to the trial (probably one of the reasons I was selected for the jury), and I made sure that I only received information about what happened from the trial itself and the evidence submitted. Since the trial ended, I have been reading news accounts of what happened; there is a good deal of misinformation or misleading information out there. The media has been slanted in its presentation of the situation, whether intentionally or not, and has presented facts of the case in a manner differently from what we were told and shown in court. But regardless of what the media has said, it ultimately came down to whether or not Mrs. Faibish was guilty of the crime for which she was accused. The only measure of that was the charges filed, and, as I explained above, many of us could not in good conscience find her guilty based on the evidence presented to us.”
“This was a difficult case for everyone involved. The things that Nicky must have experienced were horrific; there are images that I saw and testimony that I heard in the trial that I cannot get out of my head weeks after seeing and hearing them.”
Comments:
1. Tim August 8th, 2006 1:29 pm
“It’s easy to stand at a distance and be morally outraged by this sort of case. On first blush, it seems so black and white. Why is it that when someone tells us that we may not have the full picture, so many of us stubbornly cling to our original perception? Because moral outrage feels good, that’s why. “This person is a vile monster. Punish them. Let them rot.” We want these things to be uncomplicated and for our righteous indignation to be, well, righteous. Well, you have that kind of luxury being an idle spectator. I’ve just got to shake my head in wonder at folks who read a pretty thoughtful and sensitive explanation of the jury’s position by the jury foreperson (I’m assuming Beck is the genuine article) and then still have it in them to assert that they know the facts better.”
Paul August 8th, 2006 11:36 am
In all fairness, we on the internet only have the information that the news media provides for us. I’m sure the news is only giving us the most shocking and emotionally charged facts… it’s what keeps people tuned in. What REALLY happened is mostly unknown to us.
Remember, the media are businesses out to make money. That is their objective. Do not believe they are there to give us an accurate and/or unbiased account of events that happen in our world.
The jurors are undoubtedly aware of many more facts in the case than any of us.
Beck sounds like a reasonable person whose credibility is not in question. His explanation sounds reasonable to me.
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