Our Legal Parameters

Okay, so a girl I knew sadly decided to take her own life. She had her reasons for this. What makes this even sadder is that she was only twenty-one years old. She proceeded to shoot herself in the head, but even more disturbing, did not die from this. Her parents came home and found her this way. Panicking, they called the police but decided to take her themselves to the hospital to save time. They did so and she lived. She is still in the intensive care unit. This, as you can imagine is distressing enough for her parents but what makes me feel sorrier for her parents is the fact that the city has filed a $15,000 fine on them for “tampering with a crime scene”.

I don’t know about you, but I think that this is ludicrous. If I had a child and I came home to find them half alive I would not wait for the ambulance rather than take them to the hospital myself. Here, an ambulance takes about 20-30 minutes and by the time they arrive someone may be dead. I understand that there should be penalties for those who do tamper with a crime scene but I think that in extenuating circumstances such as this, that fee should be waved.The “crime” involved the gun in the girl’s hands and a suicide letter on the table next to her.

It is not enough that this family nearly loss their daughter, that they witnessed this, and that she is in a coma with an unlikely recovery. I am sometimes amazed by the legal parameters our law has and it’s not amazed in a good way. Police often get away with murder, won’t respond to calls made about domestic violence, take thirty minutes or more to get to a murder scene but  if someone moves their daughter’s body to take her to a hospital to save her life, we better believe that they will get a $15,000 fine!