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How do you feel about the mother who "Tweeted" her son's death?

Asked by dpworkin (27085points) December 17th, 2009

I’m pasting an excerpt from the NY Times story here, because I think you need a password to see the content:
Two-year-old Bryson Ross drowned on Monday, in the swimming pool of the home his family had just moved into in Merritt Island, Florida.

Shellie Ross, Bryson’s mother, is a popular blogger, who chronicles her life as a mother of four and the wife of an Air Force sergeant, and whose Twitter account, @Military_Mom, has more than 5,400 followers.

She tweeted those followers at 5:22 p.m. Monday, with a breezy update about the fog rolling in and spooking the chickens as she worked in her chicken coop. Sixteen minutes later, a 911 call was placed from her home saying that Bryson was lying at the bottom of the pool. At 6:12 p.m. she tweeted again: “Please pray like never before, my 2 yr old fell in the pool.” And five hours later, she wrote that she was “remembering my million dollar baby,” posting photos of the little boy. (Some of these tweets and photos have since been removed.)

Not long after that, a firestorm erupted on Twitter, with strangers wondering what kind of mother tweets during a crisis. The debate has been going on for days around the internet, with critics calling Ross callous (and suggesting that if she had been paying as much attention to her child as she had to her Twitter account, her son would not have come to harm) and supporters (many who know her in real life, and others who have never met her) describing her as a caring mother who reached out to her virtual community during a tragedy.

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