Holly Robinson Peete, a co-host of CBS’s “The Talk” and mother of a 13-year-old boy with autism, said she has had nightmares about a boy sitting on a lawn with a hooded sweat shirt. “In my dream, the boy’s face is my son’s,” said Peete, who, with her son’s twin sister, has written a children’s book, “My Brother Charlie,” about a boy with autism. “I’m telling you: It haunts me.”
And it haunts other parents, too.
Ann Worley of Springfield has a scar on her cheek where her son David bit her. When he was younger, David would take out his frustrations on himself, she said, but now he is 18, 6-foot-2 and 360 pounds, and he lashes outward.
“There was a time last September, I actually locked myself in the bathroom,” Worley said. “I was scared. I thought I was going to have to call the police.”
If she had, she said, she wonders what the officers would have done.
Worley followed Latson’s case through Facebook and started prayer chains for him that stretched to Chicago and Michigan. When she read about the verdict, she said, she felt “sick.”
“My David,” she said, “could have done the same thing.”
Juan Navarro of Waldorf has long been aware of the dangers of having children who are growing older and larger and craving independence they may not be ready for. After moving moved to Charles County five years ago, he took photos of his autistic sons, Omar, now 17, and Sebastian, now 25, to the police station so officers would know their faces.
But on a recent night, Navarro hesitated to call 911 when Sebastian, who has Asperger’s, took off down the road. The Latson case was fresh in Navarro’s mind. Yet there was his son, a young man, 5-foot-9, who recently couldn’t stop talking about Harry Potter, running down a busy street in the dark.
He dialed.
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