This is a very fair piece. Unlike the Blatchford column today which blasts defence counsel for raising the shortcomings, DiManno acknowledges their relevance but suggests we not judge.
Which is correct -- it is very clear Tori's mother was innocent of wrongdoing in Tori's death.
She is a victim too.
Tori's mother's shortcomings are relevant only insofar as they serve to explain what happened. We should remember that and not cast any stones:
http://bit.ly/zZQeth
Rosie DiManno
Star Columnist
LONDON, ONT.—Bad things happen to the children of good parents, too.
From the outside looking in — and deeply inside, intimately inside, voyeuristically inside we have gone — Tara McDonald was not Mother of the Year to Tori Stafford.
This makes her terrible loss no less anguishing. It should make us no less pitying, either.
McDonald's self-confessed shortcomings were on stark display in the courtroom here Wednesday.
She was a drug addict when 8-year-old Tori went missing April 8, 2009.
She did not walk her Grade 3 child home from school, a distance of almost a kilometre, on that fateful day.
She waited some two hours before reporting her daughter missing to police — and even at that point, it was McDonald's mom who went to the station.
Most tragically, it may have been McDonald who inadvertently brought Tori into the deranged orbit of the young woman who is serving a life sentence for the youngster's murder — and her ex-boyfriend, Michael Rafferty, now on trial for first-degree murder, sexual assault and kidnapping.
No comments:
Post a Comment