Mark Pinsley

They walked me through like the basics.

I mean, it was more than just the basics, but, you know, it was an hour and a half phone call.

The mom did most of the speaking.

And so it was a very emotional story.

Like, you can't come away as a parent and be like, well, hey, that was that.

Who cares?

At first, I just thought that, like, this is two unfortunate souls.

So the husband and the wife got caught up in something.

And then I started looking in and it just became very quickly apparent that there was a problem.

Very quickly.

And I was a neophyte about this when I started too, right?

So like I didn't know what certain terms meant.

And so in the beginning, I'm like writing down the terms like so that I would remember them.

And so many times I would have to go back later and reread a section and it had a whole new meaning to me.

You have 60 days as a caseworker to decide whether something is unfounded, meaning we really don't suspect child abuse at all, indicated, which is supposed to mean that there's a lot of evidence that kind of makes it suspicious that you might well be a child abuser.

This mom had talked to me about, like, and she was a nurse.

So she had talked to me about this case where

Her husband called her and said that the child wasn't able to sit up.

So she calls her pediatrician.

The pediatrician says, you know, take them to the hospital.