By now, parents everywhere have made up their minds.
They empathize with the woman whose 4-year-old son slipped into a gorilla’s zoo enclosure.
Or they don’t.
The gorilla named Harambe, at the Cincinnati Zoo, was shot dead. The kid will be okay. PETA is miffed. And sales for those leashes specifically designed to keep children close by probably skyrocketed.
I went to White Park to find some voices, hitting the jackpot on a day when students from Penacook Elementary School were there on a field trip. Dozens of small children swung from swing sets and climbed ladders.
Adults like Jeanne LaBelle, a veteran teacher at the school, were there to keep the children safe, and in sight. LaBelle has twin daughters, 23 years old. Once upon a time, when the girls were about 5, she took them to JCPenney.
The kids, thinking they were funny, hid for five minutes, under one of those clothing racks. LaBelle said the time seemed a lot longer than that.
She called the manager, who locked the doors. Then she screamed out to her girls, who eventually moved back into view.
“Scared the dickens out of me, and boy, were they in trouble,” LaBelle told me. “I can see that happening, what happened at the zoo, absolutely. You’re looking right there and you turn and they’re gone. Those things happen.”
That’s what happened this past Saturday at the Gorilla World exhibit in Cincinnati. A woman was there, with, according to a witness, four children, including a baby in her arms. Other witnesses said the boy got through wire and wood barriers, rushed through brush, then fell about 15 feet, into a moat.
The gorilla, weighing 420 pounds and possessing hands that could crush a coconut, dragged the boy through the water, a scene captured by a cell phone video, forcing parents to look at themselves hard in the mirror.
Might you have taken your eyes off your kid long enough for that to have happened?
Maureen Hill, mother of two adult children and a paraprofessional at the Penacook school, says it’s possible.
“I brought my children here (to White Park) and had trouble keeping track of them,” Hill told me. “There was one here, one over there, and you can’t see every angle here. I heard an interview and was surprised that so many parents were blaming (the mother).”
The unidentified mother, in fact, was vilified in many corners of the country. By late Monday, an online petition called “Justice for Harambe” had gathered more than 380,000 signatures.
“It is believed that the situation was caused by parental negligence and the zoo is not responsible for the child’s injuries and possible trauma,” the petition says. “We the undersigned want the parents to be held accountable for the lack of supervision and negligence that caused Harambe to lose his life.”
Signers said the woman should be investigated by law enforcement and child protective service agencies. They thought she was negligent, a bad parent, irresponsible, at fault for both the child’s experience and the gorilla’s death.
A bit self righteous on their part? A tad overboard?
Some parents I spoke to weren’t so sure.
Heather Baggett, a volunteer on the trip to White Park, sat on the ground, her 6-year-old daughter a few feet in front of her, munching on a crunchy snack.
“I’m not sure how your kid can get that far away when you’re at a zoo,” Baggett said. “I mean, it happens. But I don’t know if she should be prosecuted. It depends on the circumstances.”
Heather Wunschel, a bus driver in the Merrimack Valley School District and the driver for this field trip, had conflicted feelings as well. She has five children, one as young as 11.
“I could see both sides,” Wunschel told me while sitting in the driver’s seat. “When dealing with children, in five seconds they can be out of your sight. But when you’re in an area of potential danger like that, you tend to keep better track of your children.”
I asked Wunschel if one of her children had ever fallen off her parental radar. She said one had, during a parade in Florida, where she used to live.
“My oldest son is special needs,” Wunschel said. “He was on one of the floats and he got off when it stopped and the person in charge didn’t realize it. We alerted police on the parade route.”
Her son was found five to 10 minutes later. “I was a little bit nervous,” Wunschel said.
I thought about what these moms were telling me. I have no kids of my own, but I once took a friend’s 6-year-old son to Fenway Park for a Red Sox game. We waited in line at the concession stand. I wondered if Jake wanted a hotdog. I looked down to ask.
He was gone.
“Jake?”
“Jake?”
“JAKE!!!!!”
“I’m here, Uncle Ray.”
Longest 10 seconds of my life.
LaBelle said she learned a lesson after her twins hid under the clothing rack. “I used a leash after that at the Deerfield Fair,” she told me.
Erica Whitney of Keene, who was not part of the field trip, also uses a leash and was critical of the Cincinnati mom, saying, “She should have been paying more attention.”
Whitney used her child harness at the New England Aquarium in Boston to keep tabs on her 2-year-old son, Gunner. “It works pretty well,” Whitney told me. “He can’t go too far.”
She didn’t need it Tuesday at White Park. It’s a monkey backpack, with the tail serving as the leash.
“I can show it to you,” Whitney said. “It’s in my car.”
Just then, Gunner was on the move, his tiny legs not taking him very far.
Whitney gave chase.
“He tries to run off,” she said. “But I can catch him.”