Dear Parent of the child that beat mine,
I want to tell you how your child's actions have affected my family. For some reason, whatever it was, your child decided to incite a group of 10-15 children, middle and high schoolers, to go after my 111 pound, 17 year old boy with autism. Your child decided to bash my child's head in with a razor scooter multiple times. This vicious attack caused multiple head wounds and now my child has dozens of stitches and staples in his head to hold his scalp together.
I don't know if you've ever experienced seeing your child covered in blood, but I can assure you that it is not something that you ever want to see. All I can visualize are those kids in their hoodies and their ski masks standing over him beating him, searching his pockets and laughing while he laid on the ground bleeding.
Your child's actions have changed the way we feel in our community, they have stripped my child of his ability to be autonomous in our neighborhood because now he doesn't feel safe. Nor do we feel safe letting him go out in the community on his own. It also triggered PTSD in my older autistic son who was assaulted on the same playground two years ago.
I don't know you. I don't know the struggles you've had, or the trauma that you haven't processed that you've passed down to you children, but this is how it's manifesting.
Your child did this.
When children are teenagers, it is easy to feel disconnected, easy to just grant them independence because it's easy. But your child has learned that they can take their dis-regulated self into the community and harm others.
For both of us, this is a call to action. For you, to come to terms with your life and your trauma and to guide your children to learn how to behave respectfully in a community. For me, your child has shown me that this neighborhood is not safe anymore and I need to leave it to avoid children like yours. I never wanted to feel that way. I never wanted to have anger toward another child, but I do now. I wish I could take you and your child and beat the crap out both of you. But that wouldn't solve anything and I wouldn't feel better about it.
The only thing I can hope for is that your child receives the support, therapy, and guidance to become a productive adult in society. I hope your child develops a sense of sympathy and ownership for all the damage he's done. I hope that he can come back from this and see that this was the moment that he learned he had to turn his life around.
I hope that for you, too.
Your child has provided my child with a whole treasure trove of trauma that he will either get therapy for or it will stew in his head for the rest of his life. When you get beat, bullied, or berated, it stays with you forever. The bully never remembers and I need your child to remember. I need your child to remember that he chose to afflict harm on to another human being. He needs to know what a horrible thing that was and he needs to be held accountable. He also needs to tell the police the names of the other children that were involved, as everyone who is involved in beating my child deserves to be held accountable. My child deserves Justice.
When I take him back to the doctor next week to remove the stitches and staples from his head, the same place he arrived via ambulance, covered in his own blood, his head completely wrapped in blood-soaked gauze and a precautionary neck brace to keep his head stationary, we will be thinking of you and dreaming of justice for this vile act.
I hope you ground that child like never before. I hope you take that child's phone away and strip that child of everything that defines them. I hope you see this as a failing, and work hard to try to rectify that in your family's world. I hope you print out a picture of him, blood-soaked on a stretcher and put it on the bathroom mirror so everyday he has to look at it and see what he did and know that it will have a lasting impact on our family. The trauma doesn't go away once the stiches come out. The scars become part of us, a visual trail of trauma inflicted. My son will have those forever.
I look forward to our day in court and that your child is punished appropriately.
When I see you in court, you will be met with compassion, only because I understand how difficult teenagers are to raise and would feel horrible being in your shoes.
Please introduce yourself and apologize. We can start there.
See you in court,
Shari
