Quote:
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Originally Posted by Bill O'Rights
and...his... parents...are...punished???  |
When my two oldest daughters were about 10 and 7 they broke our neighbor's camera and I was the one who had to pay to replace it.
Them breaking it was an
accident even though they shouldn't have been handling the camera. They received a lecture and a few weekends of being grounded.
The article above states that this was an
accident even though, obviously, he was doing something he shouldn't have been doing.
Now breaking a camera does not really compare to starting this fire, but it's highly likely that this little boy didn't think anything more about playing with fire than my kids did about playing with someone else's valuable property. Kids do things without thinking about the consequences. It is seeing them go bad that makes them learn. Unfortunately, this was a really hard lesson. I don't doubt he is very troubled by the knowledge of what he did.
New information supporting the fact that this kid did something malicious aside, I don't see the child being punished by law-enforcement or the state in any way other than community service. And trying to draw blood from a stone in the form of millions of dollars from his parents seems unproductive, as well.
This is just a very unfortunate circumstance.