If You Don’t Notice Your Child Is Dead For Four Days, I’m Judging You”
In what is probably the most messed up piece of news that I’ve read in days, a profoundly disabled boy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was decomposing in his feces-smeared room for days before his mother knew anything about it. Believe it or not, the entire story gets more confusing and fucked up from there, leaving me to wonder how these people were able to maintain custody of all of their children for so long.
Kimberly Tutko only realized that her eight-year-old autistic son was dead when she smelled a foul odor coming from the third floor bedroom belonging to her son, Jarrod Tutko, Jr.
According to Penn Live, Tutko’s husband, Jarrod Sr., was aware of the situation but hesitant to bring it to his wife’s attention until much later:
“Kimberly Tutko said she noticed a strange odor coming from the third floor of her Green Street home Friday night.
Her husband, Jarrod Nicholas Tutko, went upstairs and came back with body of their eight-year-old son, Jarrod Jr., wrapped in a sheet and laid him on the bathroom floor, she said.
Believing the boy had just died, Kimberly Tutko said she pulled the sheet back and quickly realized he had been dead for several days.
Kimberly Tutko said her husband told her the child died on Tuesday.
“I said to him ‘Why didn’t you say anything?'” Kimberly Tutko said. “He said he was too afraid to say anything because of other kids in the house.”
Kimberly Tutko said she then called 911.”
Jarrod Jr. had multiple diagnoses including autism, failure to thrive, and Fragile X syndrome, which is a genetic mutation that can affect several facets of development including behavioral and cognitive functions. Jarrod required round the clock care, which his father, Jarrod Sr., provided, because, “He would rip up the flooring and carpeting of his bedroom, smear his feces on the floor and walls, and refused to wear a diaper. He did not attend school because he was agitated by loud noises.”
Kimberly had her hands full with their five other children, between the ages of three and 13 years old, most of which cope with various health issues of their own: one daughter is blind, deaf, autistic, has a collapsed lung and requires a feeding tube. Because that child requires so much of Kimberly’s care, the mother said she had not seen her son since 2010.
All of the children have been removed from the home pending an investigation, and the father has been charged with endangering the welfare of children, concealing the death of a child, and abuse of a corpse.
This story is obviously horrible on multiple levels; at the core of the situation is a dead child, and that on its own is a tragedy. Beyond that, there is so much going on that it is difficult to look at the entire scenario without suspicion.
I try to never play the role of arbiter of how many babies people are allowed to have, since I don’t feel like it is any of my business. But given the scope of the issues that the other Tutko children live with daily, and considering that at least two of the bunch needed constant care, I have to confess that I wonder why these two people continued to bring children into the world.
Children with special needs can require and deserve a lot of care, and while I can only speak for myself, I don’t know if I could justify having five more children when one so desperately needed one-on-one care. So yes, I’ll admit to pulling on my judgey-pants this morning and just say it; I don’t know how the hell these people were allowed to keep all of these kids.
If each child received the specialized care that they needed and deserved, I wouldn’t bat an eye. For now, the cause of Jarrod Jr.’s death remains unknown, but the very fact that he was dead for four days before anyone except his father knew about it indicates that this family was in way over their heads in a best-case scenario and straight up neglectful in a worst-case one.
Compounding the entire tragedy is the general sentiment among the neighbors on that block of Green Street in Harrisburg – a street with which I am particularly familiar – that the Tutkos were a family you didn’t go near.
Most of them were familiar with three Tutko children; Aaron, 12, Makayla, three, and Deanna, 13, who often played outside. Aaron was described as “unusually skinny” and often invoked the ire of his father, who would allegedly smack the back of his son’s head in anger. On more than one occasion the boy is said to have attempted to run away.
At least one neighbor was completely shocked at the news of other Tutko children; there was nothing to indicate that other kids lived in the house, and so the news of Jarrod’s death came as a double shock: most people on Green Street had no idea that he even existed.
There seems to be two narratives about the Tutkos: according to Kimberly herself they were a family doing the best that they could in horrible circumstances. But to the outside world they were “a fighting family” whose actions troubled the people around them. Some people are sympathetic about the recent turn of events, while others remain suspicious. I guess you can officially count me in the latter camp, because everything that I’ve heard about this so far is too reminiscent of abuse and neglect to me. Perhaps the most chilling and telling account comes from a 15-year-old friend of Aaron Tutko’s, also named Makayla:
On Kimberly Tutko: “I never heard of mom. I always thought she was in a mental hospital.”
On Aaron: “We could see his rib cage. He looked real fragile.”
On Jarrod Tutko, Sr.: “His dad smacked him [Aaron]. You could see in his face he wanted to cry. He was scared. I was really upset to see somebody get hit for no reason.”
As with any situation like this, speculation is running wild, and there’s nothing to do but wait for more information about both Jarrod’s death and what culpability, if any, his parents bear for it.
Of all the kids, I think I am the saddest for Aaron. Descriptions of him remind me of some of the kids that I knew from similar homes: withdrawn, scared, and looking for a way out. It doesn’t seem like he’s lived a particularly great life up until this point and I hope that he will find some happiness in what’s left of his childhood.
(Image: Harrisburg Police)
