Not quite lost in the big amusement park story out of Coney Island was the heartbreaking news of an 11-year boy killed in an apartment fire on West 24th Street:
An autistic 11-year-old boy who can barely speak died in a fire that he set Tuesday when his grandmother left him alone in her Brooklyn apartment, officials and witnesses said.
Tavon Turpin used matches or a lighter to ignite the blaze in a hallway closet while his grandmother, Melinda McLain, 59, had gone to a deli near the Coney Island apartment, police said. (NY Daily News)
McLain was arrested and charged with reckless endangerment and endangering the welfare of a child. I don’t know about that one. I’m going to take the unpopular stand here and say that leaving an 11-year-old – a middle-schooler, not a toddler – unattended for such a short trip is not criminally negligent (though please note, none of the news stories were able to say exactly how long she had been gone). It was poor judgment, given Turpin’s autism and prior history with fire – he had previously started a small blaze when he put a cell phone in a microwave. It’s a decision that will weigh down on the grandmother for the rest of her years, but under the circumstances, I think the NYPD was unnecessarily piling on by taking her into custody.
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