A woman who admitted she was on Facebook while her son was drowning was sentenced to 10 years in prison Friday.
Shannon Johnson, 34, will also serve five years probation upon her release from the slammer, prosecutors said.
Johnson pleaded guilty in March to felony child abuse resulting in the death of her 13-month-old son Joseph in September. Instead of monitoring her child in the bathtub, she admitted to investigators that she was on Facebook.
She told police that she heard the infant happily splashing around in the bathtub as she played a Facebook game called "Café World", checked her friends' profile and more on the social networking site.When she didn't hear any sounds from the baby after about 10 minutes, she said she went to check on him and found him slumped over making "gurgling sounds." She called 911, but it was too late to revive the boy, who was pronounced dead from drowning at the hospital. The boy's grandmother told police that she had warned her daughter about leaving the baby alone in the tub – especially after the baby had suffered a seizure a month before he died. But Johnson told cops that she left the boy alone because she didn't want him to be a "mama's boy." She also reportedly admitted to police that her actions were "stupid," Johnson could have been sentenced to 48 years in prison.
There's no excuse for leaving your child unattended in the bath. You can drown in just one inch of water and a few minutes inattention is all it takes.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there can be any question of Shannon Johnson deliberately harming her child, much less letting him drown but he did drown. And it was complete preventable. It shouldn't be possible for a child to drown in the bath because someone should always be watching.
I also think it's too easy to blame this on Facebook or on the game. Those things were just the medium. It could just as easily have been a TV program or a phone call. There have always been distractions in life and you don't see childrens charities campaigning against them. They're not the root cause and it would achieve nothing. A good parent would not allow those distractions to come before the safety of their child. A bad parent would. That's the root cause.