Alleged mother may soon go to trial in baby’s 2008 death, but it’s an indictment of SC too

I wasn’t there when “Baby Boy Horry” was discovered in a bag inside a box off Meadowbrook Drive in Conway Dec. 4, 2008, wasn’t there when detectives and first responders had to grapple with that grizzly discovery. I don’t know what it felt like having to autopsy such tiny body, a baby officials believe was born alive before being discarded like last week’s trash. But I know what it was like to stand with dozens of other strangers who were also strangers to the baby as he was memorialized in a Conway cemetery. It felt . . . cold.

Maybe it was the temperature. Maybe it was the seemingly cold-calculation many of us thought had to be at play to convince someone her best or only option was to resort to such a horrific act. Or maybe it was just the sense of helplessness that had been growing in me for many years.

I had been spending a lot of time investigating the treatment of children under the supervision of South Carolina’s child protective services agency. The kids were disproportionately Black and brown, but plenty of them were white as well. Almost all of them lived in poverty, often extreme poverty. Some had been killed early in life, as early as six months, by neglect and abuse. Others had been suffering in abusive homes, others were being dragged from shelter to shelter by moms addicted to drugs or being forced into prostitution by the men in their lives. I was the first reporter to conduct interviews with a young Myrtle Beach couple who had given up their newborn — by wrapping him in a blanket and leaving him at a nearby Eckerd drug store. I wrote about how the General Assembly was thinking about cutting Department of Social Services funding far more deeply than even then-Gov. Mark Sanford said was safe. They didn’t listen to Sanford, cut the funds deeply, and we saw an increase of abuse and death cases involving kids already known to an overworked system.

When I heard about Baby Boy Horry, the name officials gave him when he was discovered, I had to be there, though I’m not sure why. There was nothing I could do but stand quietly at the back of the crowd to pay my respects. Because he was already lost. Because I feared there would be more like him, if not discarded inside a bag inside a box, but essentially discarded by an uncaring public and opportunistic politicians more concerned with soundbites and political positioning than doing everything they could to improve the status of children in South Carolina. And that has happened over the past 14 years in ways seen and unseen as politicians declare this a “pro-life” state.

Now that police and prosecutors believe they’ve identified Baby Boy Horry’s mother, allegedly a then-Coastal Carolina University student, I suspect that broader reality might get lost, that there will be those intent on burying it alongside the child’s body. We’ll likely hear about her supposed depravity, how uncaring she was, about the banality of her evil. Many will be content to listen to such claims, for if she alone is complicit in the death of Baby Boy Horry, the rest of us don’t have to consider the role we’ve played — the roles we still play — in the poor condition of young life in this state.

If she did what she’s accused of, murdering a helpless human being, she has to be held to account for that, no matter the nature of desperation — real or imagined — that convinced her to kill her baby. But that shouldn’t let the rest of us off the hook.