A Georgia mother of four arrested in front of her children after allowing her 10-year-old son to walk home alone last month isn’t going away quietly — and is using her newfound profile to make the case for free-range parents and their kids everywhere.
Brittany Patterson, 41, was taken into custody and slapped with child endangerment-related charges by the Fannin County Sheriff’s Department on Oct. 30. She’s been ruthlessly fighting back ever since, including refusing to accept a plea deal.
Patterson appeared on “Fox & Friends Weekend” with her lawyer to share her harrowing experience–and her next steps in her crusade for free-range parenting.
“It’s definitely been a little traumatizing. My kids have never seen anything like that or been exposed to anything like that, so really their first encounter with police or law enforcement is to see them taking their mother out of their home in handcuffs I think was pretty traumatizing,” Patterson said.
Patterson’s son Soren, who was 10 years old at the time, had ventured less than a mile away into town a day before Halloween. He did not ask his mother’s permission, but Patterson said that she probably would’ve allowed him to go even if he had.
Sheriff’s deputies later spotted Soren wandering through town close to the North Carolina border and called Patterson to let her know where he was. At the time, Patterson was tied up at the doctor’s office with one of her other sons.
Deputies drove Soren home and returned later that day and arrested Patterson in front of her family.
Law enforcement officials have since suggested that they will drop the charges against Patterson if she agrees to put a GPS tracker on her son’s phone so she can track him. This has not been officially written or verbally offered, Patterson told the talk show, only vaguely hinted at.
“The irony here too is that the next day was Halloween, where kids walk often without their parents door-to-door in the dark and knock on the doors of strangers, and yet [Soren] was in the middle of the day just walking down the street not a tenth of a mile [away],” her lawyer David DeLugas said.
Her arrest sparked a wider conversation about the government’s control over parenting, and what exactly a free-range household can look like without authorities stepping in.
“The reality is as parents we should have that autonomy whether we want to wrap our kids in bubble wrap or whether we want to give our kids a little more freedom and autonomy,” Patterson said.
“It should be our decision as parents, and not the decision of some government authority who doesn’t even know our kids or know our family.”