Daughter Dies While Parents Play WOW

This is really sad :(

Yes, it is very sad. Unfortunately, too many people blame a game, rather than the irresponsible individuals playing it, when something terrible like this happens.

Family first, always. Everything else is secondary.

This is just as bad as people who leave their children in locked cars in the middle of summer . Hopefully they will be prosecuted and it will be a wake up call for anyone else out there who might not be as close to their family as they should .

Oh how awful! What were they thinking leaving a 4-month old alone like that??

I wonder, though, if anything would have been different if they were playing at home. I don't have kids, so I don't know how you even know that a baby has turned over and is suffocating without watching her constantly. If they had put her to bed on her side properly and she didn't have a history of sleep apnea, how would you know even if you were in the next room? What if you were sound asleep at the time? Would you pick that up on a baby monitor? And would they still be charged with murder if they were in the house?

So sad.

Another case of WoW becoming more like EQ.

Online Games and Automobiles:
Cattering to irresponsible parents every day.


And yes, it is pretty sad.

While I'm not a parent, I do think that I would keep a close eye on my children. You know the baby monitor, peeking in the room every 1/2 hour or so and stuff like that. If the parents would have been home it would have been a different case. I would understand a lot more, especially since they are new parents and probably don't know all the ins and outs yet. But they left the child alone, even though the grandmother was upstairs in the next building, and went away from the home, for HOURS. It's completely irresponsible

Another case why parenting should be a privelege and not a right. =(

That's one of the most intelligent things I've heard in a LONG time.

My first response was to think of Trainspotting.

Thanks. And you wouldn't even need to ban childbearing (that would be a horrific trample on civil rights). Simply require parents to pass a free several-week parenting class in order to qualify for welfare for children, tax breaks for children, free public schooling, etc.

That's why you leave your baby on a bed of nails- if they turn over then they can always still breathe.

I dont get this. Little babies die all the time. If they were at home at the time, in a deep sleep or banging each other, it would just be a tragic story, but since they were playing a game it is a tragedy. There is no reason to believe that if they were acutally home this could have been prevented. That does not excuse them from leaving an infant home alone, but I dont think them being home would guarantee the child would still be alive.

Consider possibilities:

(a) Parents can use baby monitors, and when they haven't heard the baby making any noise / breathing for a minute, they could rush in and save them.
(b) The parents, god forbid, could have been in the same room or in eyesight of the baby.
(c) Parents generally "check in" on their baby if they can't do one of the first two.

It's a baby. Babies should be monitored.

yes the issue is that they left the baby home alone =(

that is never right.

isnt any different then if they had gone to a bar or whatever.

The baby didnt die while they were playing WOW at home.

The parents seem to be very irresponsible people.

Hiro, that reminds me of this quote from the movie Parenthood. Keanu Reeves was talking about his father and said something like, "You need a license to drive a car, you need a license to even catch a fish, but they let any buttreaming a$$hole be a *parent*."
*he said father but either way it applies*

Darwinian Evolution at work.

How many babies do you have? When you have a baby, especially a baby that young, you sleep when the baby sleeps, that is the only way to get any rest. You can't hear a baby BREATH on a monitor, they aren't fire breathing dragons. You can hear them cry, that is what monitors are for, so you can hear the baby if the baby wakes up, not monitor its every breath. They aren't that great.


They were grossly irresponsible to leave the child home alone. My only point is, the exact same thing could have happened if they were home, it happens everyday. It is called SIDS.

After reading through this thread, it seems to me that the real issue that has outraged a few of us is that the parents really didn't have to leave the child unattended. There was another adult relative who could have looked after the child.

Even worse, the trip away from home wasn't exactly necessary. Lets forget they went out to play WoW. Some of us would feel differently if it was a single mother who left home for 15 minutes to shop for groceries. Had that been the case, this story probably would not have got the media attention it did. What we have here is two adults who chose to leave their child unattended so they could go out and have fun. There is no sense of urgency in this night out. Could one have stayed home while the other went out? Maybe they asked grandma to babysit too many times.

Re-read the first paragraph of the article. It has a definite "shaking one's head ruefully" feel to it. The writer used the term irresponsible to describe the couple. A more objective approach might have replaced irresponsible with tragic.

The child could have died even if the parents were home. The thing that makes this case stand out is that the parents were indulging in the latest pop culture fad away from the child, and she died alone. Normal SIDS deaths just don't sell papers, generate web traffic or grab decent Nielsen numbers.

We need to know MUCH more before we can judge whether the absence did actually in fact CAUSE this death. But we do know that a 5 hour absence is in itself criminally irresponsible. In that time the child would almost certainly need attention, and could easily come to harm, as it obviously did.

I don't know what is normal in this culture, but in the west a child of this age should always have someone responsible within earshot. Asleep is OK. Evolution has designed a baby's cry to wake you up, no problem. Especially if you're its parent lol.

yes it is hard to monitor a baby or child every second of the day
unless you want to never sleep, eat, bathe, restroom and etc etc
it takes less than a minute for a child to disappear...jusst ask a LOT of parents who turned their eyes away to pick up the toy dropped- among other things- and when look up the child is gone, and have went 2 blocks before you know it..they can be fast when they want to be
now take that and add least one or two more children....
When you never had one child it is hard to really know how parenting is...babysitting helps a little but that is for a short time...and the baby/child goes back to its parent/s
leaving you to not having to worry and watch

The parents of the baby should be held for neglect of the child by leaving it alone like that
as for the death it could had happened while all in the house was sleeping really

i have read articles of the baby monitor being used, but the parent that was home was asleep ...if a deep sleeper even what little sounds made couldnt be heard from the monitor
for example say mom is asleep but very light sleeper, has monitor on...baby rolls over , cant breathe..cant roll itself back over either...what sounds it tries to make are muffled for the monitor ....what breath the baby needs to cry out cant be had for it is faced down
this is when the baby dont know how-(would say old enuff but each baby developes in thier own stages)- enuff to move its head to side to breath while sleeping

Isn't there special bedding available to prevent SIDS from occuring?
If so, one of the other questions this story provokes is why the government doesn't require cribs be sold with this type of bedding.
==Chris

You really can't prevent SIDS, since they still aren't really sure what exact causes it. There are preventative measures, but nothing is 100%. And who would be dumb enough to sell this stuff? The first baby that dies they would get sued into the ground.

"Time flew by as the couple lost themselves in the game, and when they returned home at 9:00 p.m., their daughter was lying on her stomach, dead of suffication."

The article didn't mention SIDS. It sounds like there may have been too many soft items in the crib (blankets, pillows, stuffed animals, etc.).

On cynical days I find myself thinking that most people shouldn't breed.

You beat me, Blayze. I was about to post the same quote. It's so true.

Anyway, what I really want to know is why so many in Asia supposedly die by Blizzard game. After Diablo II had been out about as long as WoW has been out now, there was a story about a guy who died from playing the game too long. This time it's a child who died because his parents played the game too long.

The running theory in the D2 case was that the 20-something year old man had had epilepsy, and that staring at a flickering screen had caused a seizure, but that was just speculation since the source artical never said what actually killed him. Other online magazines who picked up the story later said everything from heart attack to sleep deprevation to seizure, but none of them said where they got their information. I find the similarities in this newer case to be a bit uncanny. Again, there is no mention of the actual cause of death, and again, it's 20-somethings involved.

I'm not trying to belittle the tragedy in either case if it's true, but I can't help but wonder how much fact is in these things vs. how much anti-online gaming propaganda. These articals are not dissimilar to the "dangers of rock n' roll" articals that were all over US news reports in the 1950's. Makes ya think.