Opinion: Abandoned in a Playpen, Only a Warning Survives

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

Political sites talk about the big picture, because that’s what’s at stake, isn’t it? Billions of dollars in taxation and government spending, millions of illegal aliens overwhelming our social safety net and our institutions, thousands of schools failing their student bodies, year after year.

But sometimes a story stands out because it’s not about the billions, or millions, or even thousands, but just about one. Sometimes a story stands out because, against all odds, justice is done; everything goes right, even though it’s still heartbreaking.

Such is the case with the news story of the week: An Ohio court has sentenced a woman to life in prison without possibility of parole, for premeditated murder, in as awful a case as can be imagined.

The facts are not in dispute; no “alleged” wording is required. Kristel Candelario, age 32, of Cleveland, OH, left her own 16-month-old daughter all alone, in a playpen in her apartment for ten days, while she went on vacation to Puerto Rico and Detroit in June, 2023.

Yes, her own toddler. Yes, for ten days.

She abandoned her own daughter in an apartment without food or care, to slowly suffer and starve to death over the course of her week and a half vacation.

As we try to wrap our head around such a crime – the killing not of a stranger, but of one’s own child, for whom she had presumably been caring for the prior 16 months – we find it impossible to relate, in any way.

There are accidental deaths all the time. There are even murders of strangers, too, all the time. And occasionally quick murders of family members or friends; it happens when people lose their minds, or when depression or drugs or alcohol take over. The burglary gone wrong, the crime of passion. These too are awful occurrences, and we are used to them.

But how does a person condemn her own child, too young and vulnerable to care for herself, to an excruciating weeklong period of lethal misery?

We don’t know for certain – all we can do is put our trust in the criminal justice system to exact punishment, and for once, it has done so, correctly. As Judge Brendan Sheehan put it, at sentencing: “Just as you didn’t let Jailyn out of her confinement, so too you should spend the rest of your life in a cell without freedom.”

The books are closed on this one, and we might want to turn away, to cheerier, or at least, more comprehensible stories.

But our job as Americans – and here, our job in public policy media in particular – is to study the news stories, and try to learn from them, and correct the paths our society takes when it strays.

Our Founding Fathers intended these United States to be the City on a Hill, the beacon for the rest of the world to admire, and to aspire to, themselves.

What has happened to America, that we could produce a person who could do such a thing?

Look back at the past fifty or sixty years. How has America changed?

It’s an old complaint that “we’ve driven God out of our schools,” but it is true, in a way. The First Amendment merely bans the federal government from endorsing a single specific denomination; modern schools have ludicrously interpreted that admonition to mean that government should be hostile to religion itself. This intentional misinterpretation of the Founding Documents has enabled malicious teachers and politicians to purge morality itself from most of our schools, especially those in the major metro areas – like Chicago, and Los Angeles, and Cleveland.

We allowed the Supreme Court to legalize most abortions through a plainly unjustifiable case – Roe v. Wade – a ruling so outrageous that it was bound to eventually be overturned. But in the 50 years for which it stood, the growth of the abortion industry, along with that industry’s massive financially-driven redesign of our pop culture, caused a large segment of Americans to be numbed to its horror. The thought of killing a child in the womb before 1973 was so awful that even the practice’s supporters had to speak of it in shame; the decades since have stripped away the shame, and in some sectors, people are even proud of its advocacy.

We allowed the criminal justice system to be softened. Instead of requiring that the punishment be more severe than the crime, in order to be a deterrent, we now usually require the punishment to be much softer than the crime, to show the criminal element how enlightened and modern we are. The result is that our streets are full of known felons, violent and immoral demons, convicted again and again, out on the streets, committing crimes, endangering our society. When you soften the punishment, you aren’t telling the criminal you’re nice; you’re telling the criminal you don’t really value his victims.

We have sat still while the federal government has ripped our border apart, allowing gate-crashers by the millions from all over the world to pour over our border and invade our society. The Tower of Babel this causes in our classrooms has ensured that the schools cannot teach our children. The gangs and other third world thugs who cross over, blending in with the peaceful migrants, add to the criminal underworld – brawling, raping and killing those in their path.

We have watched the slow transformation of our healthcare system from a culture of preserving life to a culture of welcoming death. America wouldn’t admit an openness to euthanasia when it was proposed, but they have done an end run around that opposition, haven’t they, as we now talk about hospice earlier than before, as we advise against treatment more often, and as the government – through Obamacare and its many fellow government programs – discourages or denies the tests, surgeries, or medications that the patient needs. It’s taken generations to get to this point, but as we learned during the Covid shutdowns, the healthcare industry has itself been turned away from the path of wellness.

Taken in context, seeing how so many different elements of our society that once championed life now champion death, how surprised can we be that there might be a woman somewhere in an inner city who would consider condemning her own child to death – not even a hostile, active murder, but a death by abandonment, a death by lethal neglect?

Kristel Candelario killed her own child from a thousand miles away, without remorse. And we ask how this can possibly be.

But if we look at the rest of our society, perhaps we should be surprised that it doesn’t happen more often. We welcome in known gang members and terrorists, and fly them to taxpayer-funded “migrant housing.” We release brawlers, rapists, drug dealers and killers from prison, or we even decline to prosecute them at all, setting them free, knowing full well what they intend to do with their freedom.

Our alleged vice president makes news by being the first to visit and cheer an abortion mill in Minnesota. Our governors condemned nursing home residents to death during the Covid pandemic by forcing nursing homes full of weak, vulnerable, immune-compromised patients to welcome terminal Covid patients into their midst, spreading the disease. Our hospitals and health officials banned the proven remedies to Covid that had already proven successful. And our state and county prosecutors increasingly restrain the police from any effort to protect innocent victims from a criminal element that only grows larger by the day.

The lesson our society provides is that life is no longer valued at all, that the protection of the innocent is passe. We are told to do what feels good – to take that vacation, attend that party, hit that weeklong rave. “Live your best life,” they tell us.

But, no matter who else is depending on you?

If you aren’t raised with the right morals, if you aren’t taught to listen to your conscience, you may never ask that question at all.

And if you are raised to believe that the Government is “mother, father, landlord and caretaker” all rolled into one, then perhaps the very concept of being responsible for someone else never even occurs to you.

Our society has strayed far from the path. It will take a great deal of focus to find our way.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer, and actor. Once a County Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, after serving as president of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud, “The Tales of Little Pavel,” and his three-volume political satires of the Biden-Harris regime, “Evening Soup with Basement Joe,” are available in eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.

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