Mike Tang was charged with child endangerment for leaving his 8-year-old-son in a grocery store parking lot a mile from home. It was supposed to be a life lesson.
“I just wanted to reinforce that money is hard to earn and that, if he doesn’t do a good job at school, he could end up sleeping out here where the homeless people sleep,” says Tang.
Tang says his son, Isaac, had been slacking in school, and when Mike caught Isaac cutting corners on his homework by reading his little sister’s book instead of his own he drove him to the parking lot and left him to walk home.
It was a little before 8 p.m. on a 50-degree January evening in the Southern California suburb of Corona, and about 10 to 15 minutes after the drop, Tang sent Isaac’s grandfather to pick up the boy.
Turns out Isaac had already been picked up. He was in police custody. A stranger had spotted Isaac and called the the cops. The cops arrested Tang, and he spent the night in county jail. A jury later convicted him of child endangerment, and the judge sentenced him to parenting classes and a 56-day work release program picking up trash and doing other menial work.
Mike is refusing to serve the sentence, and there’s an outstanding arrest warrant for his failure to comply. He scrawled a response on top of the warrant and mailed it back.
“Fuck you all!” Mike’s written response begins. “Walking on a public sidewalk at 7:45 p.m. is not child endangerment.”
Is Mike right? Or did he jeopardize Isaac’s safety? And was it appropriate for the police to intervene?
“It rises to the level of unusual. It rises to the level of, perhaps, controversial. But it was not literally dangerous. That’s not a crime,” says journalist and Reason contributor Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free Range Kids movement.
Approximately 5 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Weissmueller and Alex Manning. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
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