A Child's Sacrifice

I'm back, sort of, from my self-imposed hiatus. I hope to post sporadically between now and December 31, then I should get back up to speed in the new year.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the story I'm commenting about, which caught my attention yesterday, is not much of a happy one. Not surprisingly, it comes out of Detroit, a city so far gone even the mayor is a hip-hop street dude who shows off his bling. A little girl is recovering with great difficulty from gunshot wounds she sustained when she jumped in front of a gunman crying, "Don’t hurt my mother," when the gunman pointed his weapon at her mother.

He fired anyway. The little girl was hit six times and was blinded in one eye. The mother was also hit anyway, but not as badly as she could have been.

Seliethia Parker, a 30-year-old Detroit resident with a seven-year-old daughter, Alexis Goggins, had been harassed by a former boyfriend for a good deal of the year after she broke up with him. "He would constantly call my house, popping up in the middle of the night," Parker said.

On December 2, Parker and Alexis were in her friend’s car when the ex-boyfriend, who allegedly had been hiding in the bushes, jumped into the vehicle. He allegedly got into the back, next to Alexis, held a gun to the friend’s head and forced her to drive for several minutes. The friend, Aisha Ford, convinced him that she needed to stop for gas. Once inside the gas station, Ford and an attendant called 911. Ford said she heard shots being fired inside the car. Police arrived on the scene, finding little Alexis curled beneath the steering wheel in a pool of blood and arresting Parker's ex-boyfriend.

Parker is still touched by what her daughter, who was so sickly she'd had a stroke at a year old, had done. "She was trying to save me," Parker told the Associated Press this past Monday, as she sat by her daughter’s bedside at the Children’s Hospital of Michigan. "My baby is just an angel to her mother. I thought as the mother, I'd be saving my child. I never thought my daughter would be saving me."

Fifty years ago, any gunfire in Detroit was cause for alarm, but today it's as common as sunrise on Lake Huron. :-( This story stands out due to the horrible nature of it - what man would be so low as to shoot a little girl like that? More to the point, this story is as inspiring as it is horrifying. It asks the rest of us whether or not we would put our lives at risk for our own parents, and if not, why not.