It's Pulitzer Time, and the winner this year for feature writing is Gene Weingart who wrote an article about parents who accidentally leave their childern in the car and end up killing them. It happens about 15-20 times a year, and it happens to people from all walks of life. From doctors to gardners.
It is one of the best and most haunting articles, I've ever read. Here is one short excerpt from the piece.
I was that guy, before. I'd read the stories, and I'd go, 'What were those parents thinking?' " Mikey Terry is a contractor from Maypearl, Tex., a big man with soft eyes. At the moment he realized what he'd done, he was in the cab of a truck and his 6-month-old daughter, Mika, was in a closed vehicle in the broiling Texas sun in a parking lot 40 miles away. So his frantic sprint to the car was conducted at 100 miles an hour in a 30-foot gooseneck trailer hauling thousands of pounds of lumber the size of telephone poles. On that day in June 2005, Terry had been recently laid off, and he'd taken a day job building a wall in the auditorium of a Catholic church just outside of town. He'd remembered to drop his older daughter at day care, but as he was driving the baby to a different day care location, he got a call about a new permanent job. This really caught his attention. It was a fatal distraction. Terry, 35, wasn't charged with a crime. His punishment has been more subtle. The Terrys are Southern Baptists. Before Mika's death, Mikey Terry says, church used to be every Sunday, all day Sunday, morning Bible study through evening meal. He and his wife, Michele, don't go much anymore. It's too confusing, he says. "I feel guilty about everyone in church talking about how blessed we all are. I don't feel blessed anymore. I feel I have been wronged by God. And that I have wronged God. And I don't know how to deal with that." Four years have passed, but he still won't go near the Catholic church he'd been working at that day. As his daughter died outside, Read the whole thing.