It is not simply that it is a toddlers death, said Franklin E. Zimring, a criminologist and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. It is that its a toddlers unreported death. Whether it is accidental, intentional or something in between, when the death of somebody that young goes unreported to the authorities, the lack of reporting suggests that this is intimately linked to events involving the custodial parent. Sometimes its abuse. Sometimes its neglect. Sometimes its an accident.
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She recalled an Ohio case where a child died of a fever because the mother and stepfather did not take the child to a hospital. The mother agreed not to report the death, but wanted the body nearby, so they hid it in a crawlspace of the house.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/30/n...rded-on-a-beach-one-that-doesnt-fit.html?_r=1