Sad Commentary from Gene Owens

A culture in which it's dangerous to be a child

By Gene Owens

A child's first fear, I'm told, is the fear of falling. It's the fear one has coming fresh from the womb, before the outside world has showcased all its other instruments of terror.

On Jan. 7, a vehicle stopped at the peak of the Dauphin Island Bridge, which spans the waters between the Mississippi Sound and Mobile Bay. It connects the Alabama mainland with Dauphin Island, a narrow strip of populated sand that lies between those bodies of water and the Gulf of Mexico.

At that point the bridge was 80 feet above the water -- the height of an 8-story building.

Three children, their ages ranging from 4 months to three years, were taken from the vehicle. They were tossed like refuse over the bridge rail. It was daylight, so they saw what was happening.

If I remember my high-school physics lessons, a free-falling body accelerates at the rate of 32 feet per second per second. If I did my math correctly, these bodies were in free fall for around two seconds. They struck the water at a speed of around 45 miles per hour. Let us hope the ordeal was no more than 2 seconds; that they were not subjected to 57-degree water enveloping them, entering their lungs, causing them to die in terror and pain.

The national news media gave the event perfunctory treatment. The children were neither celebrities nor offspring of celebrities. They were not teen-agers from an affluent family on a school-sponsored lark to an exotic locale where they made unwise choices as to conduct and associates. They were not coal miners trapped in a collapsed shaft or a Midwestern child who had fallen down a well.

Their names were mixtures of American and Southeast Asian: Danny Luong, 4 months; Ryan Phan, 3; Hannah Luong, 2; and Lindsey Luong, 3.

Their disappearance triggered a dogged search by Mobile County deputies and by people who lived along the waterways. Lam Luong, the children's father, confessed to investigators that he had thrown them over the bridge as an act of revenge against his 23-year-old wife, Kieu Ngoc Phan. Later, he changed his story and said he had given the children to some unknown women who said they knew the mother and would take them back home. The Gulf Coast community waited, hoping the children would still be alive.

Five days later, a duck hunter spotted the body of little Danny washed into some marshes on a peninsula jutting into Mississippi Sound. An autopsy showed that he died from drowning and from blunt-force trauma, probably a result of the fall. The next day, some three miles to the west, two men wading in search of oysters found Ryan's body. The search went on for the missing sisters.

The three children had lived in a three-bedroom house with 15 other members of their family. They were part of a Vietnamese-Cambodian community made up mostly of shrimpers who had left their Southeast Asia homeland after the Vietnam War and practiced their traditional vocation along the American Gulf Coast. Their father had picked up an American addiction: crack cocaine. One of the casualties in a crack addict is the conscience. If his story is true, his conscience went up in smoke.

But where were the national media while this tragedy was being acted out? Is this tragedy less poignant because it happened among "people whose eyes are oddly made; of people whose skin is a different shade"?

Or is it because, in our 21st century culture, killing children has become commonplace? About the time those children were dying, a 6-month-old baby in my town died after its mother stepped on it. But that type of horror is no longer unusual. Children die in drive-by shootings; they die at the hands of Mommy's boyfriends who shake them to death to silence their crying; they die in suicide bombings in the Middle East; they die in military attacks in which bombs are not yet smart enough to distinguish between combatants and innocent bystanders. They died in Lam Luong's native land when planes dropped napalm to wrap them in sheets of fire.

In ancient Canaan, they sacrificed their children to idols. The stone idol would be heated red hot, and the infants would be tossed into their arms amid loud music and chants, which drowned out their cries. Parents were expected not to weep.

The four little Gulf Coast victims died without the pagan pageantry to drown out their screams, but it didn't matter. Nobody who cared was within hearing distance. They were sacrificed to a cocaine god and to a modern culture battling a pandemic of evil.

(Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson SC or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com)