Jeremy Fraser's Unnecessary Death

I'm still trying to get my mind around the reports about Kristen LaBrie, the Massachusetts mother who is accused of withholding cancer treatment from her autistic son, Jeremy Fraser. Jeremy died in March of this year at the age of nine.

Yesterday LaBrie pleaded "not guilty" to a charge of attempted murder; she had earlier been charged with child endangerment. The July 6th Associated Press vis WBUR reports that Jeremy was diagnosed with a "severe form of autism" while young. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in October of 2006 and given an 85 percent to 90 percent chance of recovery. He received "large doses of chemotherapy" and his cancer went into remission. LeBrie was given prescriptions for medications for Jeremy to take at home and this is when the story turns more than puzzling. According to Assistant District Attorney Kate MacDougall,

LaBrie repeatedly failed to pick up prescriptions, but led doctors to believe they were being filled, at one point asking for a liquid version of the medication because her son was having trouble swallowing pills.

“Miss LaBrie never expressed any misgivings about the treatment,” MacDougall said.

In February 2008, after one of Jeremy’s doctors called LaBrie’s pharmacy and learned she had not been filling prescriptions, LaBrie said the pharmacy must have made a mistake, MacDougall said.

It was at that point that doctors discovered that the boy’s cancer had returned as leukemia and was untreatable with chemotherapy, she said.

The details only occlude the situation: LaBrie was divorced from Jeremy's father, Eric Fraser, and they shared custody until a year ago, when full custody and parental rights were signed over to Fraser. In court documents filed in April of 2007, LaBrie claimed that "Fraser chronically missed visits with his son and did not have contact with his school or doctors during the boy’s chemotherapy"; the withholding of medications for treatment occurred while Jeremy was in LaBrie's care. As reported in the July 4, 2008, Boston Herald, since 2000 both LaBrie and Fraser had been "the subject of nine complaints of abuse and neglect, called 51As, although seven of those were unsubstantiated or screened out, according to DSS records. A 51A complaint triggers a DSS probe."

In reading about this very sad case, I've mostly been thinking about what must life have been like for Jeremy, to have his cancer go untreated? What must he have suffered?

There's a lot of difficult and sad news that one reads about autism but this one is particularly disturbing. There's plenty of disagreement among parents and within the autism community about what to do for autistic children, but there's certainly the acknowledgement that things need to be done, and a deep sense of responsibility to do what's right.

It's not going to be easy to read further reports about Jeremy Fraser.