By Envy Writer: For More Info, Go Here…
My 9-year-old son was arrested, hospitalized for three months, and misdiagnosed twice.
My son was arrested on a Thursday night when he was nine-years-old.
By arrested, I mean Las Vegas Metro police officers came inside my house, with holstered guns and handcuffs, escorted him into the back of a police car, and took him away.
He was in juvenile detention for a weekend.
He was so small that they didn’t have clothes that would fit him. I was told that he did not sleep or stop screaming for me for seventy-two hours. He was isolated, because he was so young.
But also because he had to be restrained in a chair.
I called a lawyer and spent the weekend doing what I had to do to get my son admitted into a psychiatric hospital. I cried a lot.
Things are kind of blurry in my memory. I remember having a panic attack and being very sure I was dying. And I remember laying awake, staring at the ceiling, imagining my son in a room full of teenagers who had done whatever they’d done to get arrested.
Small and scared and strange, with a strong tendency to rub people the wrong way.
I was honestly afraid he’d be shanked.
And I remember thinking things would have been so much different if my kid wasn’t blonde and blue-eyed and living in a middle-class mostly-white neighborhood.
If he’d been a person of color. If we’d lived in a different neighborhood. If he’d been older or more violent or . . . things could have been so much worse.
