Death of 3 Year Old Exposes a Larger Truth

This too is a story seldom told and often overlooked but this story here points to a much larger issue and it is the issue of how important we think paying child support is over how much more important non-custodial parental involvement is.  The article is titled “Police: 3-Year-Old Hung Up By Feet, Beaten, Killed In Pennsylvania” taken from WABC-TV Channel 7 Eyewitness News.  The article reports that “Police say a man and his girlfriend are charged with murdering the girlfriend's 3-year-old son.  District Attorney Tom Hogan of Chester County, Pa., announced the arrests of Gary Fellenbaum and Jillian Tait Thursday morning. He says Fellenbaum, his wife, and girlfriend, Tait, all lived in a trailer park on Hope Lane in West Caln Township.  Police say Fellenbaum, Tait, and another witness confessed that the little boy had been beaten with blunt and sharp objects, whipped, taped to a chair with electrical tape and beaten, hung up by his feet and beaten, leading to his death. Authorities say they beat Scott to death using homemade weapons, like a whip, a curtain rod, and an aluminum strip.  Police say Tait explained that the fatal beating began when the boy wouldn't eat his breakfast.  Hogan said, "Little Scotty McMillan is dead. Over a three day period ... he was systematically tortured and beaten to death. He was punched in the face and in the stomach. He was scourged with a homemade whip. He was lashed with a metal rod. He was tied to a chair and beaten. He was tied upside down by his feet and beaten. His head was smashed through a wall."  “Tait allegedly told police that Fellenbaum beat her 6 and 3-year-old boys on a number of occasions. He would allegedly hit them with a closed fist in the head, face, chest and buttocks, and on one occasion she says he strung the boys up by their feet and beat them, while she and Fellenbaum laughed.” 

So let’s just say Jillian Tait and the daddy of her two children could no longer live together and instead of them being adults and working out a solution on their own decided to play who could be the bigger douche bag and used the kids to try and hurt each other.  Jillian refused to allow the dad access to the children because he made her mad or wasn't paying child support like he should and the dad refused to have anything to do with the children because he was mad at Jillian and thought that this would be the perfect payback.  What they both refused to see that the damages were never as severe to them as it was to the children.  The 6 year old was taken by relatives so why did they leave the 3 year old?  Maybe relatives didn’t care for the dad of the 3 year old and allowed that to sentence him to death. 

Either way this child and all other children having to live with separate parents was failed today.  The focus is making sure that the non-custodial parent pays child support and they have many remedies designed to make you do just that but the true tragedy is not making laws to make sure that parents are involved in their children’s lives by separating child support from visitation rights.  If you choose to not help pay for the lively hood of your child that is one thing but to deny that child the need of just spending a few minutes with you should be more than just criminal.  We always talk about what is important but when it comes down to it, the most important thing we concentrate on is money.  At what point and how many more children must die before we learn that a truly concerned dad would have spotted this abuse early enough to get help and save this child or is that not as important as money?