What About Katera Barker?

This dog don’t hunt.

I’m sorry. It does not hunt.

I have been a mother for a decade and some, and St. Louis summers are sweltering, and I have had children to take to day care, both in the backseat. I understand the rush of the demands of a day, on top of adulthood, but this story left me more angry than I would have.

According to the Daily Mail, Katera Baker was the one-year old adoptive daughter of Matt and Jenny Baker living in Nashville, Tennessee. Matthew had a business trip to fly out to, and took his five-year-old son to day care, and forgot Katera in the backseat. The temperature outside was 89 degrees, and it had to be at least twenty degrees hotter in that car. Being a mother of two whom are nineteen months apart, how can you leave the child in the backseat?

This is horrific!

In the wake of what happened to Devonte Hart and his five adoptive siblings, at the hands of his white adoptive parents, I have to look at this with jaded glasses. At one year old, Katera should have been babbling, or talking and should have been able to call for “Daddy.” In getting the older child from the backseat, did her adoptive father not see her? How could he miss her?

When I thought about this story, my heart broke. It broke, because I could only imagine what that baby thought, or could have seen as she boiled in her parents’ car. Was she strapped in? Did she cry? Did she stay asleep? Did her brother remind him she was there?

As a mother, this is a nightmare! In the current racial and social climate–it’s something all together more sinister.

There is no current criminal investigation about what happened to Katera, but there is something to this, in this, about this, which grants me no peace, and deep unease when I think about how Matthew Baker’s biologic five-year-old white son made it to day care, while his adopted one-year-old black daughter didn’t.

According to reporting, Matthew was contacted by his wife, whom was panic-stricken when she found out the younger of her two children didn’t make it to day care, and when she found Katera in the car, performed CPR. Her husband took a ride share service to the airport–and left the car. I don’t understand. I cannot understand. I do not get it. Every time I mull it over, I come up with sinister thoughts. It makes me think and believe the absolute worse in another set of human beings. It makes me believe the Bakers never wanted this child, and for that, she is now dead.

Hot car deaths are common, *accidents happen–I’m well aware of that. This, however, is troubling. I find it troubling because of the age of the child. He couldn’t have been that busy. There is always time to recheck and make sure the children are safe. Common sense would say, “You left the house with two children. And you dropped off one. Where is the other?”

Indeed, where is the other?

*-Take time to make time to make sure your children are safe. This is needless death. You cannot be that busy–I promise you.

[inages from Google]