Editor’s note: An earlier version of the story referred to the girl as an “orphan” who had recently lost her mother and grandmother. This was based on information that the unidentified girl’s attorney gave the New York Daily News. The New York Daily News has now updated its reporting to state that the girl is in foster care.
There’s the saying that you never know what someone is going through during his or her day. You don’t know what’s going through a person’s head, or what stressful situations he or she is presently dealing with. But even without knowing any of that, there comes a time as a human being when showing compassion for a person is the least you can do.
Reading comment after comment about how the teen girl at Columbia, S.C.’s Spring Valley High School somehow deserved what she got—or about how, if she had just listened, she wouldn’t have been manhandled by a sheriff’s deputy twice her size—was disheartening, to say the least. What little faith I had in humanity was lost.
Want to know what else is disheartening?
Finding out that the girl, who has been so cruelly judged by the world, who will have to suffer the mental and physical anguish that was inflicted upon her by now-fired Sheriff’s Deputy Ben Fields—who worked at the school as a school resource officer—is living with a foster mother.
That young girl, who some of you said deserved what she got, was recently placed in a foster home, according to the New York Daily News, which interviewed Todd Rutherford, the young girl’s attorney.
That young girl, for whom some didn’t even flinch when she was thrown to the floor and dragged across a classroom by an officer twice her size, is now sitting at home trying to cope with the loss of her family, but also with the loss of her dignity at the hands of Fields. That young girl, who now has bruises and injuries from her encounter with Fields, will carry those scars for the rest of her life.