Facebook group responds to horrific child abuse
Fundraisers help victim and children of the accused
It still isn’t clear exactly what happened that day, but what is clear is that whatever happened was horrible and sad.
According to police, a 20-month-old boy suffered a catastrophic brain injury while in the care of his baby sitter, Candace Turner, a 33-year-old mother of two.
The baby endured hours of delay before he was, at last, rushed to Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin on Feb. 2, police said. There, the child suffered respiratory failure, posttraumatic seizures and an occipital stroke. Surgeons removed a portion of his skull to accommodate his swelling brain.
Within days, doctors were unable to detect any activity on the right side of the infant’s brain. The damage, doctors said, is likely to be permanent.
Candace Turner, who lives in Shorewood, is charged with child abuse and neglect. She has pleaded not guilty.
As word of the incident spread, message after message popped into Annie Monahan’s phone.
Annie is the founder of KidsCycle, a Milwaukee-area Facebook group with nearly 8,000 members.
When she started it in 2014, it was a buy/sell/trade page for parents needing to acquire or unload kid stuff.
It has since become something much more.
It is now a community, one in which commerce is infused with support. Someone might post that they have a crib for sale. Someone else might ask for suggestions on getting their little night owl to sleep.
KidsCycle is rigorously civil, adamantly kind and unfailingly pro-child. It is about these core values as much as it is about anything else.
“Our underlying message,” Annie says, “was always ‘love hard,’ or ‘be kind,’ or ‘love wins.’”
That is why KidsCycle is treasured by so many. And that is also why Annie’s phone lit up.
The parents of the abused boy are members of KidsCycle.
So is the woman accused of abusing him.
The messages, Annie says, demanded that KidsCycle shun Candace Turner. Immediately.
“Most of it was that she is a horrible person, that she needs to be removed, that she needs to be banned, she’s horrible, horrible, horrible,” Annie says.
Annie conferred with other leaders in the KidsCycle community. They struggled to find the right response.
“We wanted to lead by example,” she says. “How can I show grace? How can I heal? How can I show kindness?”
Yes, the abused baby and his parents need their support. But what about Candace Turner’s children? Weren’t they also injured? Aren’t they also hurt and in need? Isn’t Candace Turner presumed innocent? Did KidsCycle know all the facts? Was it in a position to judge?
It took a few days to work out. During that time, Annie says, she was harshly criticized: Candace Turner should be turned out. Any delay was an affront to the KidsCycle community.
In the end, what the KidsCycle leadership decided to do was support both families. Both.
They are doing so through Love + Lift, a nonprofit that grew out of the KidsCycle community. It is used to raise money, corral resources and provide volunteer opportunities when families are in need.
This is exactly the right approach, Annie says.
Because Love + Lift is a distillation of KidsCycle’s deepest purpose, beautifully stated on its website: “To strengthen the bonds within our local communities by making it the societal norm to do something kind or selfless for no other reason than to lift someone else.”