Maybe we'd all have remembered Danieal Kelly if she'd managed to compete in a few beauty pageants like Jon-Benet.

But, instead of hypothetical creepy video of the disabled Philadelphia teen singing "Cowboy's Sweetheart" all I'm facing today is the death of a disabled girl who lived a crip's worst nightmare. It's not easy to look at, especially when, I, as a disabled blogger, let her fall through my mental cracks as well as anyone else had.
Although, admittedly, this blog is a sideline, and I write in it without a reporter's resources, although I do have a journalism degree moldering away in my grey cells somewhere so a reader's criticism hit me right in the...news judgment.I missed a story of horrific abuse and systemic indifference so endemic that social workers are charged with complicity in her death by forging reports. I only wish I could be more surprised. But it's the degree of the incidence that's boggling.

Many of us with significant disabilities try to hide from the fact of how fragile our independence really is. Maybe that's why I don't remember this case from two years ago. Maybe because it didn't make the national press because the Kellys are poor and black, and nobody wanted to interrupt the horse-race high of the midterm elections. Maybe I didn't want to face the fact that speaking two languages and having published fiction won't offer me lifetime protection from being left in my own piss. So far, I've been fortunate, but life can turn on a dime. Better to cling to my denial and try to make it look bohemian and arty, right? It would make members of the social-services community, should any be brave enough to come by here, feel better never to have to read that, to an extent, if something should happen to my mother, I fully expect to be forgotten and ignored by them, though not, obviously in the ways that marked the Kelly homicide.

I don't trust them, but I trust them more than that.

But that's all naked and icky and not-positive, isn't it? I have to admit sometimes I like to pretend we've won the war and it's all about victories and empowerment.

Sometimes, life doesn't give us that luxury.

I'm sorry, Danieal.

Rest in peace.

--Erika Jahneke