Autism Memorial

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I've started up a site that will serve as a memorial for autistic people who died because of abuse or neglect. These people are all too often forgotten, and I want to be sure we remember them.

The memorial site is nowhere near complete. I would welcome any assistance. Names, photos, and details about these people are all useful. If you know of someone I should include, please contact me.

Autism Memorial

awesome,great idea callista,its about time the autist got some rememberence and not just the parent in these cases!
am going to blog roll it or whatever the hell its called.

Callista, that's very sweet of you to keep their memories alive.
It is so sad that evil exists and that children have to suffer and die from abuse from evil bad people =(

I always want to adopt an autistic child yet my partner doesn't want to be "stuck with one for life" which i think is horrible way of her thinking.
I told her if i were to have a kid myself it's likely to be autistic (genetics) yet she says that is different.
There is so many stuck in the system and foster care that need permanent homes that i would love to adopt them.

Callista, i found some links for you of more cases in which the autistic child has died from abuse at the hands of adults/parents

http://www.wtsp.com/news/article/288262 ... a-Stoddard

11 year old Melissa Stoddard was murdered & abused badly by her father and step mother (link is above link) Dec 21, 2012 Sarasota,FL
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Jonathon Carey, Autistic 13 yrs, NY FEB 2007 was murdered by a state employee in the back of a transport van

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/nyreg ... d=all&_r=0
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That is rather sad, yeah. At least she admits to it.

I have a prof who has adopted some special needs kids, often teens--he has a big family, like thirteen kids, though never had more than about four or five in the house at once. He's always talking about his kids. Most are grown up now. He's got an Aspie teen son still at home. Thing is, most of the stories he tells are just stories about kids being kids. You forget how much people have in common with each other when you focus overly much on a disability.

But... it's probably smart of you not to adopt right now, if your partner thinks she couldn't love a special-needs kid. That's pretty much an automatic no, right there. Maybe you could do something like big sister/big brother and mentor one instead, if you want to hang out with the younger generation. I know I could've used somebody like that as a kid; somebody who didn't mind that I was weird and--let's be honest--wouldn't mind listening to me lecture on for hours about my latest interest!

Are you familiar with ThAutcast? The owner, Landon Bryce, once posted a memorial of about 20 autistic individuals who died of either abuse or neglect on a ThAutcast Facebook page. Those links appear to have gone missing on the Facebook page (or maybe I am just not looking in the right place on the page); he would be a good person to contact.

Here's a few links that I was able to find on the ThAutcast page:
Melissa Stoddard
Matthew Graville
Van Ingraham
Apologies for my laziness, but typing in "death" in the ThAutcast search bar provides several other results: link


The memorial page page looks very nice thus far, and the idea is a much needed one. May your page prosper greatly!

I'm up 32 names now and still there are more...

I can't do too many at once. It just makes me feel too angry to keep going.

I get how you feel. I was reading your memorial and the cases made me sick. And this is coming from a person who almost does not possess the ability to cry from sadness...
Thank you for undertaking such a project, they need to be remembered.

Wow...so disturbing. You're doing a very good thing by raising this awareness, Callista.

Loud Hands, autistic people speaking is dedicated to a whole bunch of people killed by family members.

Some of them you don't seem to have. Others you do. I haven't sorted out which ones you do or have. This is just the list they have (as well as I copied which I think is good).

Tracy Latimer, 12 years old, gassed by her father, 1993
Scarlett Chen, 4 years old, drowned by her mother, July 2004
Tiffany Pinckney, 23 years old, locked in a basement and starved to death by sister and brother in law, 2005
Katie McCarron, 3 years old, suffocated by her mother, May 2006
Marcus Fiesel, 4, wrapped in heavy blankets by his step-parents and left in a closet to suffocate while they went out of town, August 2006
Francecca Hardwick,18, locked in a burning car with her mother, October 2007
Naomi Hill, 4, drowned by her mother, November 2007
Calista Springer, 16, chained to a bed and abandoned in a fire by her entire family, Feburary 2008
Tom Inglis, 22, died after his mother administered an overdose of heroin to him, November 2008
Jeremy Fraser, 9 years old, died of recurrent leukemia after his mother withheld the medication that would have saved his life, March 2009
Peter Eitzen, 16, stabbed by his mother, Jul 2009
Jeremy Bostick, 11, gassed by his father, September 2009
Tony Khor, 15, strangled by his mother, October 2009
Betty Anne Gagnon, 48, tortured to death by her sister and brother in law, November 2009
Walter Knox Hildebrand Jr, 20 years old, died of a seizure induced by his brother's physical abuse, November 2009,
Laura Cummings, 23, tortured to death by her mother and brother, January 2010
Ajit Singh, 12, forced to drink bleach by his mother, Feburary 2010
Gerren Isgrigg, 6 years old, died of exposure after his grandmother abandoned him in a remote area, April 2010
Leosha Barnett, 17, starved to death by her mother and sister, May 2010
Glen Freaney, 11, strangled by his mother, May 2010
Payton Ettinger, 4, starved by his mother, May 2010
Christopher Melton, 18, gassed by his mother, June 2010
Rylon Rochester, 6 months old, suffocated by his mother because she believed him to be autistic, June 2010
Kenneth Holmes, 12, shot by his mother, July 2010
Zain Akhter, 5, and Faryaal Akhter, 2, strangled by their mother, July 2010
Rohit Singh, 7, beaten to death by his father, September 2010
Zahra Baker, 10, murdered and dismembered by her stepmother and perhaps her father, October 2010
Chase Ogden, 13, shot by his mother along with his sister Olivia, October 2010
Kyle Snyder, shot by grandmother, October 2010
Karandeep Arora, 18, suffocated by his parents, October 2010
Julie Cirella, 8, poisoned by her mother, July 2011
Noe Medina Jr, 8 months, thrown 4 stories by her mother, August 2011
Benjamin Barnhard, 13, shot by his mother, August 2011
Jori Lirette, 7, decapitated by his father, August 2011
George Hodgins, 22 shot by his mother, March 2012
Daniel Corby, 4, drowned by his mother, April 2012
And all the names we may never know

Thanks, Tuttle, I'm going to start working on these...

Up to nearly 60 names now.

I'm thinking of including a memorial to the victims of Aktion T4, in Nazi Germany. I couldn't find any specific stories that suggested that the victim was autistic; if anyone has a link to that information that'd be good. However, because of the sheer number of victims and because autism is relatively common, some of the "feeble-minded" patients who were killed there were probably autistic.

There are many memorials I've found out there on the Internet already. They are usually just names, dates, and ages, though--I am trying to get data about who the person was during life. I think that if my child were killed, I would want people to remember that they liked fingerpainting or dressed the cat in doll's clothes or took saxophone lessons... I would want justice, but memorials that focus on the killers aren't really remembering the lives of these people.

I am also deliberately not posting the names of the murderers (unless they show up in the references links) for precisely that reason. The tragedy is that an innocent person was killed. I have no pity for anyone who decided to kill them.

It is sad, yet true, and it's very likely this relationship i have will not last as she lacks the capacity for love that i have. She also is very manipulative.
Also it's true right now is not a good time for me to have a kid.
Thank you for suggesting Big Brother/Sisters, i'm sure they have it around here.
I need to get myself better first, then i want to be of help for others.
I think helping others can bring more meaning into life a lot of the time...

So... progress. I'm over a hundred profiles now. I think this is going to be a long-term thing.

Does anyone know whether there's a way I could monitor newspapers? I don't trust Google to give me the news stories, especially since some of these people's deaths had practically no press coverage. When some random autie suffocates when six staff pile on top of him, there's usually not too many reporters interested in it. Even worse if the person in question is poor, black, or both. (Autistic and black is apparently a double whammy. They are disproportionately represented in the memorial already.)

So sometimes you get just one brief news story in a small-town paper. Tracking those down is going to be tough. I'm used to researching stuff in journal articles, but I really don't know much about newspapers and obituaries. Does anybody have advice here?

Bumping to update and plug the memorial site again.

I've been doing upkeep on this for a few months now. I am up to 137 cases.

The latest one, a 16-year-old named Maxwell Webb, committed suicide on September 30 after a long period of bullying. The school system refused to do anything about even when Maxwell and his father tried to get them to take action. He is one of several "bullycide" cases on the site--people who were abused so relentlessly that they developed depression and took their own lives. (There are also a few people there who were killed in incidents involving bullying.)

I've got a paid LJ account now, so that people don't have to look at ads while they're on the memorial site, something I never did with my own blog because I'm cheap and I figure people use adblock.

But yesterday, a relative of Maxwell Webb visited the site and gave me a correction on the date of death--September 30, rather than October 2. They didn't say anything more and I didn't ask; they're mourning a boy who died much too young and I don't even know them. But at least once I've been visited by someone who knew one of the people on the memorial. That's kind of scary. I hope I am being respectful, honoring their memory properly.

I've also sent an e-mail to the funeral home where Tamiyah Audain's service was held, essentially a note of sympathy, telling them that the autism community stands with them in mourning Tamiyah's death. I haven't received any reply, but that's not surprising; when I called the place, the funeral director told me that he had had a lot of calls from complete strangers like me wanting to express sympathy, to tell the people who cared that we weren't going to forget her.

To the point of this post: I'm an undergraduate in psychology, but I am capable of writing a research paper, and a couple of my professors seem to really think I am graduate-school material. What I want to do is gather the information about these deaths and actually do statistical analysis on it. 137 cases are enough for a good picture. I don't know if any journal would publish something written by an undergraduate, but no one has yet published an article on this phenomenon. There have been quite a few papers on bullying, abuse, etc., and quite a few about autistic people, and even a few on autistics as abuse victims... but no one has pulled it all together yet.

I know there are some people here who are proper scientists. Can you tell me how I would go about doing this? I can write the paper--find the references, put it in the proper format, all of that. But I don't know how to find out who, if anyone, would publish it. And I really think I have information here that the psychology community needs to know.

I am afraid that I have no connections with the scientific community or with any scholarly journal, though I fully support you writing and publishing this paper. rdos, the user, recently had a paper published; perhaps he would be able and willing to help you with this?

Best of luck to you.