Kim Stagliano on Portage County's Sky Walker Autism Murder Case
Click HERE to read a brief piece I wrote for E-Portage.us news in NE Ohio about the Sky Walker murder case.
Photo credit: Christine Heeren, Lighthouse Studios of NY.
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This is a new breed of enchanced interrigation, seeing a autistic kid in jail with a net around his head and restrained to a chair this just abuse
Posted by: Dylan Ulin | January 21, 2010 at 10:49 AM
So sad.
Posted by: Laura | February 12, 2009 at 06:09 PM
Is that Sky Walker in a hyperbaric suit? If so, that makes me even sadder.
What is a hyperbaric suit? If it's anything like a hyperbaric chamber it wouldn't be a bad thing. H-bot is helping many with autism.
Sadly, Sky was wearing a net to prevent him from spitting and attempting to bite his jailers.
He also was restrained in a chair because according to the original article he was highly agitated and flailing around.
Portage County had a nice PR piece run this morning:
http://www.recordpub.com/news/article/4525084
Apparently, they have been extensively trained in how to handle someone like Sky. They must have forgot to demonstrate all their new found knowledge in court that day I guess.
Posted by: Andrea for Gatogorra | February 12, 2009 at 02:47 PM
Kim,
Thank you for having the strength and character to speak up for this boy. He has no voice.
Thank you for trying to prepare the public that a flood of Autistic adults is on its way. People will soon wish they had been listening and that they had prepared better.
Posted by: K Fuller Yuba city | February 12, 2009 at 12:33 PM
I wanted to take the time to thank Kim for the article. We just published it this morning and it has already seen over 25,000 page views, worldwide.
I can tell you that public officials in Portage County do read E-Portage.Us, so you may want to considering posting your thoughts under the article on the e-portage.us site. http://www.e-portage.us/newsgen/news_details.php?id=310
Thank you again,
Sal Pitera
Editor
E-Portage.Us
Posted by: Sal Pitera | February 12, 2009 at 11:10 AM
Excellent piece, Kim. Thank God you were there to put some sense on the situation before it runs out of control with sensationalism.
I'm really stunned by this. Normally I'd be mostly haunted and horrified by what the victim felt and thought in their final moments but we all know what went through that mom's head: all she cared about was her son, what might happen to him if she couldn't stop a prosecution against him for injuring her, wondering who'd watch out for him if she weren't around. So what's haunting and horrifying me now is out of respect for what this mother herself was probably agonized by-- what's going to happen to this boy?
We all know that as this generation of injured children grows older, it's tragically inevitable that there will be more reports of violent behavior. Most cases would probably be exascerbated by psychiatric drug side effects but some might just be because of the condition itself--that wonderful condition that we can't do without because it produces math and science geniuses, so says Simon Baron-Cohen et al.
My fear is that cases like this could become a fulcrum to pass drugging mandates for effected children, to label all as a danger to the public and to increase violence and abuse against children with autism because of a public conception that they're all bad seeds that have to be suppressed (or selectively terminated) before they burgeon into murderers.
Is that Sky Walker in a hyperbaric suit? If so, that makes me even sadder.
Posted by: Gatogorra | February 12, 2009 at 10:59 AM
Thank you Kim, tireless advocate.
It is hard to read this whole case, knowing that this child with good services and health care may not have killed his mother.
Posted by: karenatlanta | February 12, 2009 at 10:01 AM
Thank you Kim for taking the time to enlighten the community that now has the fate of Sky in their hands.
I hope and pray that your insights will help them show mercy on Sky. No matter where they place him, he has lost the most important person in his life. Trudy Steuernagel sounded like an amazing person.
The unthinkable has happened. We all need to step up and help Sky by advocating in all the ways we can for him and for our own.
Autism is a crisis and this incident has without a doubt shown us that.
Posted by: Andrea | February 12, 2009 at 09:51 AM