Sad End To A Sad Case

I've been following the story of little Shaniya Davis, the little girl who authorities say was basically sold into sexual slavery by her drug-addicted mother. Shaniya's father, Bradley Lockhart, felt that Shaniya's mother, Antoinette Davis, had gotten her life together enough to raise her daughter and become a part of her life.

Unfortunately, a father's well-intentioned attempt and uniting mother and daughter ended in horror after Antoinette gave her child away, and today Shaniya was found dead in a wooded area in central North Carolina.

They will undoubtedly report that she had been sexually assaulted.

When I worked in a group home for teen moms, there was one girl who had a similar story. Her mother had A LOT of kids, I can't even remember exactly how many. One by one, she lost custody of them. She was busy drinking and sleeping around. The girl told stories about living in dank hotel rooms with her brothers, and how they would get into fist fights over who got the last hot dog in the mini-fridge. Eventually, her mother - who wouldn't work and lived off the government - "traded" the girl to neighbors and such for sex, in return for the perpetrators paying her rent, utilities, etc.

When she was 14, she got pregnant to a 25-year-old man. And throughout her stay at the group home, her mother did her best to keep the two in touch.

When you do those things for a living, you see a lot of sad crap - parents who just don't care and let their kids run wild, parents who overlook their child's drug problem because they don't want to be bothered, and moms who bring a string of shady guys in the house all the time. But nothing ever blew my mind like the mom who sold her child for sex, in return for some cash.

These are the things I sincerely hope we learn the answers to in Heaven. Either that, or we're just so dang happy to be with God, we forget it ever existed. I'll take whatever I can get. Pin It