Lindsay Clancy sat in her wheelchair in a Plymouth County courtroom this week, sobbing so hard the judge had to call a recess. “I can’t do this,” she wailed, as a medical examiner described the abrasions on her 8-month-old baby’s neck.
Here’s what I can’t do. I can’t pretend the system didn’t see this coming.
Corn cheese (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsClancy had been hospitalized twice for suicidal thoughts before she strangled Cora, Dawson, and Callan with exercise bands on January 24, 2023. She told her husband she was having thoughts of harming the kids. She told her mother the same thing. She journaled about wanting to die. She texted a friend about “dark thoughts.” She was on psychiatric drugs, weaning off one, trying another, telling her coworkers the side effects were unbearable.
And what did the experts do with all those warning signs? What did the doctors, the psychiatrists, the whole apparatus of professional mental health care do?
CHROMAT (CC BY-SA 3.0) via Wikimedia CommonsThey sent her home. With three kids.
Funny how that works. The same medical establishment that couldn’t be bothered to keep a dangerously ill woman away from her children is now parading through court to describe what she did to them. Dr. Kimberly Springer spent 20 minutes walking the jury through baby Callan’s autopsy photos. Dr. Barbara Olson described Cora’s. A third examiner, Renee Stonebridge, testified about all three children. The