A man who was arrested by police for leaving his young kids unattended at a McDonalds for nearly two hours was just caught lying about where he’d gone after he abandoned his children at the restaurant, a lie that had instantly sparked sympathy for him among social media users who were just a little too quick to believe the narrative.
The backstory: Chris Louis, 24, was arrested by the police after leaving his three children, ages 10, 6 and 1, by themselves at a McDonalds PlayPlace in Augusta, Georgia for an hour and 42 minutes. Another customer noticed the man had left the building and didn’t come back, and that these kids - one of whom is a toddler, at the most - were all alone. So he called the police and the kids were eventually taken to their mother.
When Louis showed back up to the fast food restaurant about two hours later, he was immediately arrested and has since been charged with deprivation of a minor. (Because I don’t know who needs to hear this today, but it is a crime to just abandon your young, underage children at a fast food restaurant playground. Kinda standard practice here.
But of course, Louis here is a down-on-his-luck black man. So standard practice that would apply to anybody else turns into a claim of racist persecution against a poor dude pretty quick.
At the time of his arrest, Louis told the cops that he didn’t have a car, and that he’d walked with the kids from his apartment to the McDonalds but didn’t want to make them walk all the way back. He claimed he left them alone because he had a job interview nearby.
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Which was all the information the local media needed to run with the narrative of a struggling black man with three young kids, just trying to get a job and provide for his family - and sure, he left his two elementary aged kids and his baby alone at a McDonalds, but he had a good reason.
This sob story made it all the way through social media to former Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver Antonio Brown, who launched this story into the stratosphere over on the internet, and who even created a GoFundMe for Louis calling him “A dad just trying to find a way to make some money for his family.”
“I know he shouldn’t just leave his kids, but some people don’t have the means for babysitting, etc,” Brown wrote.
That GoFundMe had a set goal of $55,000 and had raised nearly $80,000 as of Thursday morning.
Arthur Watkins, who chairs the Freedmen Reparations Fund Trust, wrote a letter to August District Attorney Jared Williams demanding the dismissal of all charges against Louis, on the grounds that “poverty is not a crime” and “survival should not be prosecuted.”
Because apparently, it is acceptable to leave your fourth-grader in charge of a kindergartner and a baby in a public place surrounded by strangers, depending on your socioeconomic status.
But come to find out, none of that even matters - because none of it was true.
Turns out, Louis did fill out an application and had an informal job interview that same day, but all that had taken place hours before he ever took the kids to McDonalds. According to the police report, Louis was not at a job interview when the children were left unattended. That police report also states Louis's 10-year-old, who was left in charge of her two young siblings at the McDonalds, told an officer that her father often left them alone, and that he’d told her he was leaving to drop off a backpack before he took off.
Now, I have no inside knowledge as to why Louis needed to “drop off a backpack” so badly that he was forced to leave his kids alone at a playground for two hours, but I can make an educated guess - and it’s not because he had to swing by the local Piggly Wiggly to ask about the open bag boy position.
But see, none of that mattered when the media and the online mob immediately rushed to defend this guy. What mattered was this sob story that showed how even the hardest working of black men just can’t catch a break, and the justice system is rigged against them, and maybe if the government would just pay for all our childcare, we wouldn’t have this problem of people needing to get to job interviews and having to leave their kids unattended in a ballpit for two hours just so they can earn a paycheck.
That’s all that mattered - the truth, and the kids who could’ve easily been harmed by it, be damned.