Feeling Safer Yet?
Feb 12th, 2008 at 4:38 pm by Susie
We have so many people exercising so much power with so little supervision or accountability:
A 14-day-old infant traveling here for heart surgery died at Honolulu International Airport on Friday after he, his mother and a nurse were detained by immigration officials in a locked room, a lawyer for the boy’s family said.
The Honolulu medical examiner’s office yesterday identified the infant as Michael Futi of Tafuna, American Samoa’s largest village, which is located on the east coast of Tutuila Island. Autopsy findings have been deferred.
According to police, the child died at 5:50 a.m. It is unknown why immigration officials detained the mother, the nurse and the child.
Scott Ishikawa, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, said the child went into respiratory failure while in the customs office, which is located near the baggage claims area of the overseas terminal. Airport paramedics were called about 6:10 a.m., he said.
Yes, this child’s death is tragic. And the various government agencies handling our airport “security” have a sorry record of pushing folks around so they can claim to be doing “something.”
But in this case it’s not so clear. A seriously ill child (needing heart surgery) arrives on a flight that lands at 5:30 AM. The child dies of respiratory failure 20 minutes later in a Customs Department office.
As outraged as I want to be I can’t see how the child’s death can be linked to ill treatment or neglect. Had the detention been 20 HOURS, if there had been some kind of abuse, or had medical care been denied the mother and newborn that would be different.
GWBush and fiends have changed the face of government. It used to be we could depend on our gov to do mostly the correct thing. Now, with new and omnipresent cronyism, we see this. Oh, the political appointees are now crawling into the civil service. They really don’t want to face the free market with their useless diplomas.
Anecdote: I signed up to work at the local Homeland Security office. Nice pay and benefits. I was declined (vet, 10+ years in investigation/enforcement, long list of contacts in gov, good rep with peers) and the people that were hired ….can we say “cousins” boys and girls? To real doorbusters the Bush choices are jokes.
If they hadn’t been detained, is it possible that the NURSE TRAVELING WITH THEM would have been able to call for an ambulance? The paramedics were not summoned until the child had been dead for twenty fucking minutes. What the fuck happened to humans in the last seven years?
Immigration took away the child’s oxygen, locked him, his nurse, and the mother in a warm room without supervision, and when the nurse and mother pounded on the LOCKED door screaming “Call 911″ simply told them, through the locked door, “Relax, stay calm.” A nurse from the hospital had arrived to meet them and transport them directly to the hospital, but could not convince immigration to release the child and nurse - WHO ARE US CITIZENS - to her so she could take the child to the waiting hospital. I think that situation certainly may be implicated in the death of the child. By most accounts, immigration never bothered calling paramedicas until the child was dead.