Getting arrested for letting your child walk alone??
A Georgia woman was arrested and accused of allegedly endangering her son — all because the unsupervised 10-year-old walked less than a mile away from home, officials said.
Brittany Patterson, 41, had taken another son to a doctor on Oct. 30, and she became mildly annoyed — but not at all worried — when the Fannin County Sheriff's Department called to say her son Soren had wandered from their rural home in Mineral Bluff and into town.
"It's not a super dangerous or even dangerous-at-all stretch of road," Patterson told NBC News in an interview that aired Wednesday. "I wasn't terrified for him or scared for his safety."
Deputies drove Soren, now 11, home and that was that, or so Patterson thought.
But then hours later, the sheriff's department went back to the family's home near the North Carolina border, where Patterson was handcuffed, arrested, booked on suspicion of reckless conduct and forced to post $500 bail.
"It was anger and frustration, of course, because my children were having to witness that all," she said. "They asked me to put my hands behind my back and all that stuff, and I realized what was going on."
The laws in each state differ when it comes to leaving children alone outside. Just as an example, here are the laws in Georgia, and here are the laws in Texas.
The more “blue” your state, the more restrictive the law is against what parents can do.
Your kids can't even walk outside anymore without being supervised all the time.
Or else you go to jail.
And then people wonder why these future adults are still momma's boys and act like children when they're 30.