Gene Weingarten a câştigat două premii Pulitzer pentru feature writing in ultimii 3 ani. Scrie pentru Washington Post şi poate fi urmărit pe Twitter aici: http://twitter.com/#!/geneweingarten

“Fatal Distraction”, textul pentru care a câştigat Pulitzerul de anul acesta, reuşeşte să vorbească despre oroarea de a-ţi uita copilul în maşină fără să fie siropos sau compătimitor şi fără să judece. Şi, mai ales, făcându-te să nu ridici ochii de pe text până când nu l-ai terminat.

Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing

Fatal Distraction: Forgetting a Child in the Backseat of a Car Is a Horrifying Mistake. Is It a Crime?

By Gene Weingarten Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 8, 2009

The defendant was an immense man, well over 300 pounds, but in the gravity of his sorrow and shame he seemed larger still. He hunched forward in the sturdy wooden armchair that barely contained him, sobbing softly into tissue after tissue, a leg bouncing nervously under the table. In the first pew of spectators sat his wife, looking stricken, absently twisting her wedding band. The room was a sepulcher. Witnesses spoke softly of events so painful that many lost their composure. When a hospital emergency room nurse described how the defendant had behaved after the police first brought him in, she wept. He was virtually catatonic, she remembered, his eyes shut tight, rocking back and forth, locked away in some unfathomable private torment. He would not speak at all for the longest time, not until the nurse sank down beside him and held his hand. It was only then that the patient began to open up, and what he said was that he didn’t want any sedation, that he didn’t deserve a respite from pain, that he wanted to feel it all, and then to die.

The charge in the courtroom was manslaughter, brought by the Commonwealth of Virginia. No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer — beset by problems at work, making call after call on his cellphone — he forgot to drop his son, Chase, at day care. The toddler slowly sweltered to death, strapped into a car seat for nearly nine hours in an office parking lot in Herndon in the blistering heat of July.

It was an inexplicable, inexcusable mistake, but was it a crime? That was the question for a judge to decide.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/27/AR2009022701549.html