Her Son Went for a Walk. She Was Charged with ‘Reckless Conduct.’ Facing a year in jail

Fat Lady cop with Tattoo's 

There’s no shortage of lawbreakers worthy of police attention in America right now. Like the drug traffickers and murderers coming over the southern border. Or the shoplifters wreaking havoc in our cities. And how about those parents whose children go on walks without their knowledge? 

I’m not kidding.

Increasingly, police officers in the U.S. are targeting hands-off parents for their “negligence.” Take the case of Brittany Patterson. Last month, the 41-year-old mother of four from Fannin County, Georgia, was arrested after her 10-year-old son Soren was spotted a mile from his home on a spontaneous visit to see his friend’s grandmother. 

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A Boy Went for a Walk. His Mom Was Charged with ‘Reckless Conduct.’

Brittany Patterson was hauled to jail because her 10-year-old son wandered off. She says her case is a cautionary tale for all parents.

At about 6:30 p.m. on October 30, two police SUVs pulled up to the home of Brittany Patterson in rural Fannin County, Georgia. The 41-year-old realtor and mother of four was on the phone when she heard a knock on her door.

Seeing two officers outside, Patterson opened the door and held up her forefinger, asking for a minute to wrap up her call. 

“Nope, not one second,” Officer Kaylee Robertson insisted. “I need you to come out here.”

Video footage captured by a police body cam attached to the other officer showed Patterson—in a purple fleece pullover and blue yoga pants—stepping outside. After establishing that Patterson’s father was at home with her children, Officer Robertson told her: “Okay, turn around for me.” 

“Why?” asked Patterson, furrowing her brow.

“Because you’re under arrest,” the officer replied.

Then the two officers turned Patterson around, pushed her sleeves above her wrists, and handcuffed her behind her back, as her 10-year-old son Soren watched from inside the house. Afterward, Patterson was hauled to jail, forced to strip in front of a female officer, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, and locked up.

Her crime? 

“Reckless endangerment,” she was told.

Watch the body cam footage of Patterson’s arrest in comments

Patterson was shocked. Around noon earlier that day, she had been at a doctor’s appointment when Officer Robertson called her with the news that a stranger had seen Soren wandering down a country road, about a mile from his home, and phoned 911. Officer Robertson, who said Soren was in danger of being hit by a car in the 25–35 mph zone, picked up the child and brought him home at 1:30 p.m. Patterson returned home about 20 minutes later. 

Six hours later, Patterson was charged with a crime. 

Patterson said Soren had been at home with his grandfather when he walked to the gas station in Mineral Bluff, a town of a couple hundred people with no traffic lights. This was unusual for the boy, but not particularly surprising, either: His best friend’s grandmother works at the gas station, and he had gone to visit her. As soon as she got home, Patterson said she warned Soren that he had to text her if he went anywhere on his own in the future. Then she went on with her day, not giving any more thought to the incident.

“I never thought I’d be dragged out in handcuffs in front of my kids,” Patterson told me over the phone. She said the experience was “humiliating” and “traumatic”—not just for herself but for her kids, too. 

“I’ve always had the utmost respect for law enforcement,” she said. 

Technically, there is no “reckless endangerment” charge in Georgia, and Patterson was actually charged with “reckless conduct,” punishable by up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine, Patterson’s lawyer David DeLugas told me. Almost three decades ago, that same charge was brought against Rosalind Hall, a mother who went on a date and left her 11-year-old son to babysit her other three kids, aged one, three, and five. While she was out, her three-year-old son died of a head injury. But when the state tried to prosecute Hall, the Georgia Supreme Court threw out the case and deemed the law unconstitutional. 

Patterson, who has three other children older than Soren, is married to Josh, a superintendent at a Native American school system in Montana where he spends most of his time working. But her father, who is disabled and doesn’t drive, lives with Patterson and her kids and is home all the time. Under Georgia state law, kids between the ages of 9 and 12 can be left alone for up to two hours, and Patterson had left Soren—who was just days from turning 11—at home with his grandfather for 90 minutes. She did not give Soren permission to walk to town by himself, although even if she had, DeLugas said, it would not have constituted a criminal act.

“It’d be like if there was a law that said it was illegal to allow a child to ride a bike without a helmet, and a kid rides off by himself without a helmet,” said DeLugas, who runs a parents’ rights organization called Parents USA. “The parents didn’t do anything. Even if he did ask for permission, there’s nothing inherently criminal about giving a child permission. But that’s not even the case here.” 

Lenore Skenazy, a parenting advocate who runs the nonprofit Let Grow and first reported Patterson’s story, told me that her case shouldn’t have even required police involvement.

The female stranger who first saw Soren walking down the road asked if he was okay, and was told yes, but the stranger called 911 anyway. “When the sheriff answered the call, that should have been the end of it,” Skenazy said, who went on to describe how the call should have gone: 

“Is he in distress?”

“No.”

“Is he on fire?”

“No.”

“Is a lion eating him?”

“No.” 

Then, Skenazy said, the sheriff should have said, “This doesn’t sound like it’s anything.”

But increasingly, parents all over the country are being punished for giving their kids a bit of leash. In a suburb of Detroit, police threatened to call Child Protective Services on a father for allowing his 6-year-old daughter to walk a few blocks by herself to a store. In Connecticut, a librarian told a mother she had committed a misdemeanor by letting her 6 1/2-year-old son browse the shelves of the children’s section at the local library by himself for a few minutes while she ran across the street to buy him a bag of chips. And in Waco, Texas, cops arrested a mother for making her 8-year-old son walk half a mile home to discipline him for acting out. She was charged with a felony and consequently lost her job. 

Skenazy believes there has been “a shift in the culture” when it comes to parenting, driven by two factors. First, there is now “a pervasive belief that any child alone must be in danger, and any parent who lets their child be alone must be terrible.” The second factor is cell phones. In the days of landlines, the woman who called 911 would have had to go home, hang up her coat, remember the boy she’d checked in with, and then pick up the phone and call the police, Skenazy said. Every step of that process would have made the outcome less likely. But with a cell phone in hand, “we have the ability to call anything in.”

On top of that, we’re constantly told, “If you see something, say something,” to treat everything like a potential emergency. “We’ve tipped over into: Don’t even let your brain work. Just call the authorities,” Skenazy said. Today, instead of rationally comprehending the miniscule risk of doom in every mundane situation, “we’re always fantasizing about the worst-case scenario.”

Now, the state is pressuring Patterson to play along with its catastrophic thinking. The week after her arrest, she was presented with a “safety plan” from the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services. Under its terms, she would correct her “inadequate supervision” by downloading an app on Soren’s phone to monitor his location as a case manager stood by as a witness. Patterson must designate a “safety person” to watch over the kids whenever she leaves home without them, and inform all household members any time she leaves the residence. And, with a case manager watching, she must tell Soren how important it is that he stay on the property.

Patterson and her son, Soren. (via Brittany Patterson)

Patterson refuses to sign this plan. DeLugas told me that Patterson has yet to be offered a plea deal, but when it comes, it will likely involve parenting classes. Turning down the deal could invite criminal prosecution. The assistant district attorney did not respond to an interview request from The Free Press.

Patterson told me she is perplexed by the entire episode, having grown up with the kind of independence once considered perfectly normal. Originally from Daytona Beach, Florida, she moved as a teenager with her family to Georgia, where her mother grew up, and like most kids in the ’80s and ’90s, she spent a lot of time unsupervised. “We were always out on four-wheelers, mopeds, dirt bikes,” she told me. “Many a time we would not make smart choices. We went out to the woods with tools and built forts. We climbed 80-foot trees,” she said, finding nothing remarkable about such a childhood.

But now, things are different. “The culture has changed,” said Skenazy. “People see an 11-year-old by himself and determine that he’s in danger, like an escaped lemur from the zoo.”

Patterson told me that her story has come as a shock to many parents who grew up like she did. It’s been about three weeks since she was arrested, and she said she has had a flurry of support from the public, with dozens of emails, texts, and Facebook messages reaching her every day.

Patterson said moms and dads all over the country are asking her if they, too, could face charges for doing what they’ve always done as parents. 

Her answer to them, she said, is “yes.”

Skenazy seconds that motion. “You can’t make laws and run society always fantasizing about worst-case scenarios,” she said. Auto accidents, she pointed out, are the biggest threat to kids’ safety. So should Patterson have been charged for driving her eldest son to the pediatrician?

She describes Patterson as “a mom whose kid went for a walk.”

“To treat her like they caught Osama in his cave is really a break from reality,” Skenazy said.