A Sad Christmas

During the years I was with the police force, I worked on Christmas Day several times. As with hospital workers, our business could not stop just because it was a holiday.

Usually, working on Christmas Day was slow and there would always be a large buffet set up in the roll call room. Every year, we'd empty out the jail as much as possible for Christmas, freeing all those serving time for minor offenses.

But one year, something happened that reminded me of just how crappy some human beings are.

One of the guys on my shift was driving idly through his patrol zone, when he came upon five children, all siblings, walking in the middle of the road. They ranged in age from a year and a half to fourteen.

Though the temperature that day was in the low 30s, none of the kids were wearing coats. Indeed, the littlest one wore nothing but a disposable diaper that should have been changed the day before. And what clothes the others had on were dirty, as were their faces and hair.

The officer put them all in his car and brought them to the station until their parents could be located. They were put into a small waiting room, normally used by those waiting to see the judge.

No sooner than they'd been seated, than the older two started trying to pull the wallpaper from the walls. Indeed, the kids acted as if they'd been raised by wolves. The only one who seemed relatively normal was the five year old girl, who was trying her very best to take care of the baby.

Eventually, the parents showed up at the police station. They were crackheads: skanky and rawboned, with greasy, stringy hair, wearing clothes just as filthy as what their kids had on. The father got right up in the face of the sergeant, telling him the police had no business interfering with how he raised his kids. It was all the sergeant could do to keep from beating the shit out of this guy.

The children were taken from their parents that day, with the three youngest being put into foster care. The older two were turned back to their parents, as I imagine it was thought it was already too late for them to be anything different.

To this day, I wonder how life turned out for those five kids.