Twenty-six years ago, Barton McNeil called 911 to report that his three-year-old daughter had died in the night. It was the worst thing that could ever happen to any parent. Then a new nightmare began. Matthew Bremner tells the harrowing story through a personal lens:
On Christmas Eve 2022, my three-year-old tried to pick up his baby brother and accidentally dropped him. On the way to the hospital, our baby was peaceful. His tiny hand locked around my pinky as he peered out the window at the orange blur of the streetlights in the nighttime drizzle. I felt guilty for a thousand things: for not intervening sooner, for not turning around a second earlier. It wasn’t my older son’s fault; it was mine. Normalcy was so fragile—one minute, things were fine, then they weren’t. Harmony and horror seemed divided by nothing more than an instant. I felt I’d failed to protect my baby in that instant.
Over the hacking coughs and squeak of rubber soles in the ER, the doctor told us he probably had a fractured skull. Results of a CAT scan would tell us if he had internal bleeding. I prepared for a tomorrow in which I loathed myself forever.
But somehow, he was fine. I’d narrowly missed what I supposed was the worst thing that can happen to a person. He would need to be monitored for a while, but my relief was immediate. I burst into tears. I’d never cried like that before.
A day later, crammed into a chair beside my son’s hospital bed, amid the click and drip of hospital machinery, the submarine pulses, I remembered a story I’d heard about a father in Illinois who’d spent the last quarter century in prison for the murder of his three-year-old daughter. He claimed he was innocent.
I’d heard it maybe a month before, but the man’s story came back to me now, as my son slept beside me, still wrapped in a tangle of tubes as I contemplated what nearly happened to him, to me.
If what I’d read was true and Barton McNeil was innocent of killing his daughter, then it occurred to me that I’d been wrong the night before. Losing a child was not the worst thing that could happen to a person: Being unjustly locked up for it was.
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