About 20 years ago, I responded as a paramedic to a 911 call. A man had called the emergency number because his wife had called to tell him she was going to kill herself and the kids. We responded and the entry team went into the house. Inside, it was discovered to be too late. The woman and all four kids were dead.

In January of 2023, in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy sent her husband out for takeout and medicine, and while he was gone, she strangled her three young children (Cora (5), Dawson (3), and Callan (8 months)) using exercise bands. She then called her husband to tell him he should come home right away, and as he arrived at the house, she jumped from a second-story window in an attempted suicide that left her paralyzed.

In Jacksonville, Florida police arrested a couple who had refused to let the woman’s children leave the cab of the truck for years. Investigators say the four children had been living in the cab of a semitruck driven by the woman’s boyfriend (who is a truck driver for a company operating between Atlanta, Georgia, and Miami, Florida) since December 2019. The children had been locked in the cab of the truck for so long, they could no longer walk. The man had been sexually abusing the children. The children told investigators that the mother was informed of the abuse but did not believe them and continued to leave them alone with him.

I wanted to post on this because it brought back a flood of memories for me. I don’t mention this often, because I don’t want sympathy. In fact, I’ve only mentioned this on my blog one other time. When I was a child, my mother used to burn my fingers with matches when my brother or I touched something that we weren’t supposed to. When we said something objectional, she would put hot peppers in our mouths. She used to tell me things like “I have to love you because I am your mother, but I don’t have to like you.” Later as an adult, I was homeless for a time. That’s when I called my parents for help, because even though we hadn’t been speaking for a couple of years, I had nowhere else to turn. They hung up on me. There were plenty of reasons for me to resent her. All of those reasons are probably why I have had so many failed relationships. It made me into a person that isn’t good at being vulnerable or sharing my feelings. It’s also probably why I am such an overachiever and why I try to be the righter of wrongs, even if it means tilting at windmills.

The relationship between a mother who abuses her children and the children she is abusing is a complex one from the viewpoint of the child. Children are born with an impression of their mother. She is supposed to be the one person they can count on and depend on. They are the one person that’s supposed to be the child’s safety, their protector. When that person becomes the one causing the child’s pain, it destroys their world, while even at the same time the child is drawn to that same person for love and safety.

So to the people who say the mothers above are sick or should have some sort of mercy given to them because of post partum depression, I have to tell you that there is true evil in this world. I was once one of the victims of that sort of abuse. I’ve also had to be there to see where that abuse often ends. It’s always a tragedy. When I see stories like this, I imagine the child standing there crying to its mother for protection as they watch her strangle their siblings to death, knowing and fearing that they are next, and wondering what they did wrong to deserve this. It’s overwhelming.

My son had a best friend growing up, let’s call him Brad. I knew the kid. The group of friends that my son was a part of and who grew up together eventually married and had kids. Brad was always there for them, good old friend Uncle Ben was being a good friend and watching the kids for them. It turns out he was molesting them and filming it. When he was eventually caught, my son agreed to testify against him. Instead of facing a Federal trial for distributing child porn and the 30 years he could have gotten if convicted, Brad pled guilty. His lawyer argued to the judge that he be given leniency, since he had confessed. The judge agreed and knocked six months off of sentence he could have given him. The kid is doing 29.5 years in Federal prison.

In a moment of complete honesty to my readers: Truly evil acts like this are what completely destroyed any positive religion in my very core. I just can’t understand how any god that can allow things like this to be done to children cannot be loving or good. I just can’t understand any being having the power to stop such evil, yet allowing it to happen. Please don’t think of this as an attack on your or your beliefs, this is just a statement of why I feel the way I do. I have seen far too much evil, suffering, and pain to understand how there can possibly be a good and loving deity running things.

For those of you who *ARE* religious, please explain to me how these two things can simultaneously be true-

• An omnipotent, loving God
• Evil existing that harms children too young to have committed no sin worthy of such pain

I struggle with this each and every time I see something like this with my own eyes. It hurts me to my core each and every time I see it or hear about it. Maybe that’s a me problem, I don’t know. All I do know is seeing things like this made me a bitter, withdrawn human for awhile. When people would tell me “I know how you must feel,” my answer used to be, “Have you ever held a dead baby? No? Ever seen a mother stab her child to death? No? Then you can’t possibly know how I feel.” Such things are an assault on a person’s very core. It changes you forever.

The best answer I have ever been able to come up with is this: Some people are just evil or broken. You can’t reason with them, you can’t fix them, you can’t predict which of them will be like this. You have to wait for them to commit one of these heinous acts in order to identify them. Once you know who they are, there is only one true way to make sure they never do it again.

Even though I don’t trust the government with that power, I still think it’s the only way to prevent a person from committing evil again.