Mom's Tweets on Toddler's Death Spark Fury, Sympathy
(Dec. 18) -- A Florida woman who sent a message over Twitter as she waited at a hospital to learn whether her son had drowned has drawn support from some people and outrage from others.
According to USA Today, Shellie Ross used the microblogging site to send this message Monday to her 5,300 followers: "Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool." Nineteen minutes later, she was told he was dead.
About five hours later, ABC News reports, the Merritt Island woman sent another message: "Remembering my million dollar baby." That message was accompanied by a photo of the child, whose name was Bryson. She posted another photo of him two minutes later.
In the moments before her son fell in the pool, Ross was working in her chicken coop, according to a tweet to her account at 5:22 p.m. At 5:23 p.m., her 11-year-old son Kris called authorities to report that Bryson had fallen in the pool, USA Today said. Ross was performing CPR on Bryson while Kris placed the call, police told the newspaper.
Florida mother Shellie Ross sent this message on Twitter on Monday.
twitter.com/Military_mom
"Her tweeting had nothing to do with what happened with regard to her son. It was an accident," said Joe Martin, a homicide investigator for Brevard County. No charges will be filed, he said.
But on the Internet, some were ready to place blame.
"The first thing I thought when I saw the tweet was that it was very sad," blogger Madison McGraw told ABC News. "But then I thought, 'Who would tweet that her son just drowned?' I couldn't believe it."
McGraw said more about the case in her blog. "Maybe if she wasn't tweeting, her son might still be alive," McGraw wrote. She also suggested that Ross should be sued for negligence.
Amy Webb, the CEO of Webbmedia Group, told USA Today that it's understandable that someone with an active online presence would tweet about something so personal.
"There is something cathartic in ... asking a question or making a comment and eliciting feedback from a wide group of people, many of whom you may not know personally," Webb said.
Ross told ABC News that "nobody has the right to question" her posts about her son's death. "I didn't tweet-by-tweet the accident," she said.
Ross blogs at blog4mom.com. In a posting Thursday, she demanded that media outlets "please leave us alone, stop trespassing onto our property. ... If it were not for you, I could mourn in peace."
