What It’s Like To Be Charged With A Felony After Getting Your Dream Job

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In this case, the dream job is any job because the job candidate is a single mother of three and veteran of the Air Force who’s losing money every month despite living frugally. So, she has an opportunity to get a job paying enough to support her kids and this means she can face her 9-year-old daughter who knows she doesn’t have a job (because she can’t get one) and they’re having to move all the time basically running from the rent. So, she goes to the interview and since her babysitter has bailed and she has no relatives who can watch her two small children she takes them and she locks them in the car during the 70 minute interview. It’s a choice without options. The interview goes well, she believes she’ll be offered the job and as she comes out of the office to go get her children (who are just fine) she’s arrested for felony child abuse, held on $9,000 bail, and has all three of her children taken from her.

The following is quote from the NYTimes article A Job Seeker’s Desperate Choice’.

Looking for stability, she applied for job after job — PetSmart for $10 an hour, a bus company for $10 an hour, an Internet service provider. But the job at a Farmers Insurance broker in Scottsdale was different. “Thirty-nine thousand the first year, $65,000 the second year, $89,000 the third year,” Ms. Taylor recited. “And the fourth year, with proper work, I could have had my own agency.” She thought her experience as a loan officer made her a perfect candidate. She had a feeling that the job would be hers.
The night before the interview, she put the children to bed at her parents’ house and went to a Walmart parking lot, where she spent hours scrounging up recyclable cans and asking passers-by for gas money, to make sure she had enough for the 35-mile drive to the interview. Her parents would be at work the next day, so she had arranged to leave the boys at a babysitter’s house, she said. But when she arrived, she said, no one answered the door.
“I felt like this was my opportunity to basically improve life for all of us, and the one key part of it is now not available, so what do I do now?” Ms. Taylor said. “That was my only thought: ‘What do I do now? What do I do now?’ That was kind of what started the whole chain of events that day.”

I’m linking this article from the New York Times on Shanesha Taylor because I’m afraid, like retractions in the media hidden on the back page, the reality of Shanesha’s tale will slip through the cracks.

There are thousands upon thousands of people just like Shanesha in America today who are desperate to make ends meet in an economy that has shrunken with wages that continue to stagnate. They’re called the working poor and in cases like Shanesha’s it seems like we’ve almost made them illegal.

You can read the rest of the NYT article A Job Seeker’s Desperate Choice’ either using this link or the link above.