If you see something, say something.
While it’s generally the case that people should mind their own business when it comes to the way others parent, when it looks like a child is in danger, we all have a responsibility to step in and do what we can to help those who can’t help themselves.
An Olive Garden waitress in Paducah, Kentucky did just that and saved a toddler from an abusive home.
Jordan Cooper told local news channel WPSD that she and her coworkers noticed something off about a family having dinner on a Sunday night with their two children. The 20-month-old toddler looked like she had been beaten in the face and her parents were attempting to force-feed her at the table.
“I first walked around to the baby. She looked at me with a face that said help,” Cooper said. “I can’t even describe to you how bad she looked and how and why nobody noticed it.”
Newsweek reported that in a now-deleted Facebook post, Cooper said the baby’s face was “black and blue” and that the father “kept taking her to the bathroom when she cried and acting very aggressive towards her.”
“Cooper wrote [that] she saw a man ‘force-feeding her [the child] food down her throat and grabbing her by her shirt and getting in her face.’ She told Yahoo Lifestyle the father shoved breadsticks into his daughter’s mouth, and told her ‘you’d better eat this’ and got in her face while she whimpered.”
That’s when Cooper and her co-workers devised a plan to snap a photo of the family. Staging a photo with a neighboring table in order to capture the allegedly abusive parents in the background, Cooper then asked the customers to send her a copy of the photo she took on their phone and slid them her number. The couple sent her the photos as soon as they walked out the door.
But the parents got suspicious and left the restaurant shortly after. Cooper managed to get their license plate before they drove away. She also mentioned that the couple was in such a hurry to leave that they failed to strap their baby into her car seat.
Cooper then called 911 to report the incident and took to Facebook with her story and the photos as soon as she returned home from work.
“I could not just not know what was going to happen to her,” she said.
Cooper’s Facebook post was shared over 14,000 times and also caught the attention of a childhood friend named Aaron Caldwell, a Metropolis 911 dispatcher. Caldwell told WPSD:
“I got everything so I could run him and find who he was. I found that and ended up contacting Paris Police Department, Tennessee. I even went further into it through social media to find his girlfriend, who lived in Pulaski, Illinois.”
The Paris Police Department then did a welfare check at the home of the couple and advised them to take their child to the Henry County Medical Center. That’s where police detained parent Mark Lee Pierce and Jessica Woodworth and later charged both with aggravated child abuse and neglect.
Both children were removed from the home.
Caldwell and the police department praised Cooper for her quick thinking and attention to the child’s safety. Caldwell said “There’s a lot of times we don’t find people like this.”
Meanwhile, Cooper can rest easier:
“I’m so glad that I did, because she could still be getting hands put on her.”
Please SHARE this with your friends and family.
