“A 40-year-old Racine man is accused of killing a 2-year-old boy, punching him because he was spilling his milk.”

Manuel Garcia “lost his temper with his girlfriend’s son, punching him numerous times in the abdomen on Thursday, killing him.” He “admitted punching the boy at least three times because the child was[...] ’frustrating him’ and spilling his milk.”

We at PWSBKTW understand that two-year-olds can be frustrating. They have terrible table manners. Still, no one should die over spilled milk.

The mother, Lawanda Martinez, “is charged with child neglect resulting in death. Prosecutors said she largely ignored the boy’s injuries and symptoms until it was too late.”

It’s hard to blame the mother. She’s probably had a tough life. She has (had) four kids. They must spill milk all the time. Well, maybe not anymore.

The grandmother kept telling Martinez (the mother) to take the child to the hospital, but was ignored. As someone with the brilliant moniker “NachoBizzness” said in the comments section of the Racine Journal Times:

You people need to stop ripping on Grandma! She could have encouraged the daughter to take the child but since Grandma is not the custodial parent the hospital would do nothing for the child if she took him to the ER. A custodial parent must give authorization for treatment. 

The grandmother is clearly not to blame as much as Garcia is, since she didn’t punch the child. And her authority over and responsibility for the child is not the same as the mother’s. But the grandmother could have called 911. We at PWSBKTW suppose that if you are allowed to call 911 for complete strangers you find injured on the side of the road, you can call 911 for your dying grandson.

Maybe we’re wrong. In that case, we bow to the expertise of NachoBizzness. Surely anyone smart enough to come up with a name that sounds like “not your business” and at the same time makes us hungry for a truly impressive plate of tex-mex nachos (extra guacamole!), must be smart enough to be a medical professional with great knowledge of emergency room protocol. NachoBizzness says it, so it’s true — if you carry a dying child into a hospital, a strange kid you found bleeding to death on the sidewalk, for example, certainly the doctors would refuse to stop the bleeding because you aren’t the parent. 

So we at PWSBKTW have to agree with NotYoBiz that the grandmother was right to do nothing. As the grandmother said, her daughter “should’ve took him to the hospital like I asked her to do.” Fortunately for the grandmother, we at PWSBKTW are not grammar snobs. (If we were, we might also have some words for the copy editor of the Racine Journal Times.)

The boy’s father told the Racine Journal Times that “he had seen signs of abuse with the child, but didn’t know how to report it.” We shouldn’t judge him. It’s not his fault. If only there were a section at the beginning of every phone book with phone numbers for local authorities and child services.

And if only people had invented a way to type in “racine wisconsin child abuse” and find out information. If one day they did invent some kind of machine that was connected to other machines — let’s guess they’d call it an inter-network of computing machines — and then someone invented something we might call a searching engine, and then someone created a really good searching engine that they would name after a large number, a number with lots of zeros, well, in that science fiction world, the father might have found a phone number right there on the searching page to a “Child Abuse Neglect Access Line.”

No, they probably wouldn’t name it something that obvious, even in the future (unless you passed your mouse over it). Yet it probably would be pretty easy to find. If this were the future and there were computers and such. We at PWSBKTW can only live in the present, so don’t know when or if we will ever have these miracle devices. In the absence of this advanced technology, perhaps the father could have called the police, or city hall, or asked a librarian, to find out how to report the abuse of his son. If it wouldn’t have been too much of an inconvenience.

In addition to the boyfriend’s violence and malevolence, there is an awful lot of stupid and neglect floating among this twisted family. We at PWSBKTW usually reserve judgment for the perpetrator of the crime, and in this case that’s an easy call: For punching a two-year-old in the abdomen over and over hard enough to kill the child, Manuel Garcia should be killed this week.

We at PWSBKTW will leave it to our readers to decide how much of a lightning bolt, if any, the mother, grandmother, and father deserve.

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