Grief Gone Viral- Tweeting a Child’s Death
I’ve been there. I’ve been judged. I understand the anger of @Miltary_Mom when people started to judge her when she tweeted on the drowning of her two-year old son Bryson Ross in the swimming pool of their home in Merritt Island, Fla.
Shellie Ross otherwise known as @Miltary_Mom and who blogs at blog4mom.com tweeted the following:
5:22 p.m. – a breezy update about the fog rolling in and spooking the chickens as she worked in her chicken coop.
16 minutes later, , a 911 call was placed from her home saying that Bryson was lying at the bottom of the pool.
6:12 p.m. ““Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool.”
5 hours later, she wrote in tweeter ““remembering my million dollar baby” then posted photos of the little boy. (Some of these tweets and photos have since been removed.)
Then violent reactions errupted:
Not long after that, a firestorm erupted on Twitter, with strangers wondering what kind of mother tweets during a crisis. The debate has been going on for days around the Internet, with critics calling Ross callous (and suggesting that if she had been paying as much attention to her child as she had to her Twitter account, her son would not have come to harm) and supporters (many who know her in real life, and others who have never met her) describing her as a caring mother who reached out to her virtual community during a tragedy.
A local paper quoted Madison McGraw saying that ““If she didn’t want questions raised at such a painful time, perhaps she shouldn’t have tweeted immediately after her child died. A child is dead because (of) his mother’s infatuation with Twitter.”
In Madison’s blog, she points out that “Between the hours of 8:37 a.m. and 5:22 p.m (her first and last before son was found drowned in pool) she tweeted 74 times. ”
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