This story has been in the national news for a couple of weeks, but CNN carried it yesterday. What the story doesn’t say is that Glenn Patterson, the boy’s grandfather, serves on the Fannin County Commission. This has led some to speculate that there’s more to this case than meets the eye, although there’s been very little public discussion of the arrest. The newspaper was silent for a few weeks, and then the publisher offered what he could muster in defense of the sheriff’s department, which was pretty lame. All I can say is that if the law was enforced this way fifty or sixty years ago, they would have put my mother in jail and thrown away the key. Apparently, the idea is that a mother is negligent if the kid is ever out of sight. I could entertain this point of view on a visit to downtown Atlanta, but how much sense does it make in Mineral Bluff? William Burroughs said that if they enforced all the laws all the time, everybody would be in jail. Or, in this case, everyone’s mother.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/us/mother-arrested-missing-son-georgia-cec/index.html