UPDATE: Multiple Volunteers Want To Adopt Toddler Boys Abandoned By Parents
Gillette authorities took two toddler boys into custody Monday after neither parent wanted to keep them.
Two 23-year-old women who had driven to Wyoming from Louisiana called the Gillette Police Department just before 4 p.m. Monday from the Cam-plex Events Center. They had two boys with them, ages 1 and 2, said Brent Wasson, deputy chief of the Gillette Police Department.
One of the women is the boys’ mother. She was trying to give the toddlers to their father, a 25-year-old man who’d been working a rodeo in Gillette, although he’s from Louisiana as well.
There was a rodeo at Cam-plex last weekend, Wasson added.
“Both of them were refusing to take possession of the children,” he said. “So we contacted the Department of Family Services, the children were taken into protective custody.”
Wasson said police also are consulting with the Campbell County Attorney’s Office about the possibility of filing child-abandonment charges in this case.
The children were in “good condition,” said Wasson.
‘Breaks Your Heart’
To Rep. Jeremy Haroldson, a Republican state legislator from Wheatland who also is a pastor and a foster parent, the incident marks one more symptom of a selfish world.
He said that he hasn’t encountered a case with these exact circumstances before, however.
“For these boys, that’s where my heart breaks,” he said. “All of us have value given by God, but they’re being told at a very young age that they don’t have value.”
But we don’t all know what’s happening in the lives of that mother and father, he added, and it may be better for the children to be with a foster family than with one or two parents who don’t want them.
The remedy for situations like these isn’t changing the child-abandonment laws Wyoming already has, Haroldson added. The remedy, he said, is for families, churches and school workers to make a “cultural shift” away from selfishness.
“I can’t legislate someone to be kind or moral,” said Haroldson. “It breaks your heart, but that’s what we’re dealing with right now — a generation and a culture driven by selfishness.”
Contact Clair McFarland at Clair@CowboyStateDaily.com
