With April's being National Child Abuse Prevention Month, it probably made sense that when Westfield State College's Dance Club (Westfield, MA) held it annual program two weeks ago one of the first performances included a graceful and moving dance, performed to Jason Michael Carroll's song, "Alyssa Lies". For anyone who is not familiar with the song, it is about a little girl who is thought to be telling lies when, in fact, she has not been. Only when something terrible happens to the little girl and when it is clear she will not be returning to school do people realize she has not been telling lies.

Westfield, Massachusetts was the home of a little eleven-year-old girl, Haleigh Poutre, before - after 17 reports to the Commonwealth's Department of Social Services, visits to the home, establishing that Haleigh was a troubled little girl who may have been "hurting herself", and any number of lies - she was beaten into a coma and serious brain stem injury that resulted in Haleigh's being believed to be in a persistent vegetative state and so close to death. Haleigh's story made the news when a court battle in which the Department of Social Services, acting on the word of a doctor who said there was no hope for recovery, asked a court to allow the removal of Haleigh's feeding tube while some people believed the Department of Social Services acted too quickly. The man arrested for allegedly beating Haleigh into a coma would have been charged with her death if the tube was removed, so his attorney was, of course, involved in the court case. Haleigh was further evaluated and determined to be showing some signs of slight improvement and was eventually placed in a rehab facility. It had become clear that this little girl did not beat herself into this coma.

Haleigh was beaten into that coma by an adult, who used a baseball bat. What somehow seems worse in this case is that Haleigh was not even with her biological mother. She had been adopted by her mother's half-sister, and she lived with her aunt's husband as well.

I don't know Haleigh Poutre, and it was a while ago now since Haleigh's court case was in the news; but as I drove past some homes in Westfield on my way to the college, I couldn't help but imagine that one of those could have been the home where Haleigh suffered one violent act after another until that final basebat-beating that ended all she had been going through.

I suppose I've been particularly haunted by the Haleigh Poutre case

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