Kids Can Be Brats
Let’s face it. Kids can be brats sometimes. Whether you’re a parent, a sibling, or the guy glaring at the crying toddler on the train, kids are like little, annoying demons sometimes. But unlike bears, apes, guppies, or any of those other less-evolved freaks of nature, we can’t just eat our young if they tick us off, we gotta put them in timeout or ground them for a week instead. Kid gets a slap on the wrist and boom, life lesson learned right? Well, usually. But not in the case of our pal Jeremy from Reddit, who posted a multi-thread saga about a troubled kid, going to small claims court, and a custody battle that almost ripped his town in two.
Jeremy is a teen in high school and like many stories in the life of a teenage boy this one starts with some R-rated flicks, a Playstation, and of course, Grand Theft Auto 5.
No Games For Damien
So once upon a party at his home, Jeremy’s parents invite a bunch of family and friends over. It’s a typical get together, the adults sip bubbly in the living room laughing deliriously and the teens huddle together in Jeremy’s room, playing GTA and chatting. The night marches along until around 1:30 am when there is a knock on Jeremy’s bedroom door. It’s 12-year-old Damien, Karen’s son. Of course. What does this little dude want? He points to the monitor displaying Franklin from GTA blasting gangbangers away in Los Santos. Aw, little guy wants to play some violent video games.
Jeremy, knowing that Damien isn’t even old enough to even see a PG-13 movie by himself, says that it probably wouldn’t be appropriate for him to watch, let alone play. Plus they plan on watching some rather racy shows on Netflix later. Little Damien doesn’t take this very lightly and runs off screaming to mama Karen.
Jeremy facepalms. Just great.
Damien runs to his mom, who is slurring her words on the couch with a tall glass of vino sloshing around in her hand. Jeremy’s dad, Jon can’t help but agree with his son’s judgement. Probably not a good idea to let young Damien play GTA, but maybe he can just hang out with the other youngins.
“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Karen slurs.
Damien runs back up to Jeremy’s room.
Behave Yourself Kiddo
Thing is, Jeremy hadn’t really agreed to this agreement between he and his dad, nor did he have any idea that new terms had been agreed to. Damien bolts through the door, demanding to be allowed to watch them play their game and Jeremy tells him to leave again, barely even paying attention as he was more focused on the game. This totally infuriated Little Damien. It was almost as if this kid had never been told the word “no” before. As soon as he heard he wouldn’t be allowed to even watch the game, he proceeded to throw a humdinger of a tantrum, arms flailing, legs kicking, the whole shebang. Damien even tried hitting Jeremy and some of his friends, all the while cursing from the top of his lungs. All of this from a 12-year-old kid.
In his rage, Damien picks up a heavy jar of change, winds up, and lobs it like a brick. It’s unclear if he meant to do this or if it was just an accidental victim of the preteen’s rage, but the jar flew right into Jeremy’s $2,000 computer monitor. The whole thing clatters to the floor, shattered beyond repair. A quick note about this particular computer: not only did it have a hefty price tag, but it was filled with years and years worth of photos that had enormous sentimental value to him.
Amazing aim, kid. He hit the one thing in the room that was both expensive and irreplaceable.
Now it was Jeremy’s turn to rage.
He pulled Damien out of his room by the arm, shouting, and dragged him over to Karen. Karen, now more physically inebriated than before, about lost her mind. As soon as she saw Jeremy manhandling her boy, she began yelling at Jeremy, but who is really at fault here? Jeremy’s parents hear what happened and back up their son, but Karen and Damien didn’t stick around long enough to hear any attempts at logic. Instead, the duo left the party in a huff. It’s drama-fueled scene ripped from an episode of Real Housewives.
The next day, Jeremy’s family try to reach Karen about replacing the monitor or paying for costs, but in perfect Karen fashion, she blocked their numbers. Jeremy’s parents assure him that they are going to take legal action and purchase him a new monitor in the meantime.
It winds up being a long weekend, but if Jeremy thought he would just return to school and be able to forget the situation, he was sorely mistaken…
Things Didn’t Go Back To Normal
As it turns out, Damien also goes to the same school as Jeremy and by the time Monday rolls around, news of Damien’s freakout has spread like wildfire, thanks to the witnesses at the party who were also classmates of Jeremy’s. He, however, didn’t find any pleasure or notoriety in the rumors and trash talk that now surrounded Damien’s every move. In fact, it makes him feel kind of sad. Though Jeremy was the one with the smashed monitor, Damien is now the ostracized victim sadly.
It’s not like he was Mr. Popular before, but when news broke about his destructive, childish tantrum, he lost the very few friends that he’d had. “Damien is already alone,” explains Jeremy, “but this incident now leaves him without many friends and everyone scared to let him near their electronics, in fear of him breaking them.” To be fair to those other kids, electronics are expensive to replace and no one’s parents are happy to hear that the expensive Macbook/Nintendo DS/smartphone they bought their kid got broken by some brat. But still, Jeremy didn’t want this kid to be an outcast, no matter how much of a brat he’d been.
Jeremy’s growing sympathy for Damien was slightly spoiled by Karen’s ridiculousness, though.
For the cost of Jeremy’s smashed $2,000 computer monitor, the best Karen would offer was $100, despite the fact that she was living in a large house down the street.
Even though her son was clearly at fault, Karen refused to pay the full price for the destroyed monitor. In her own words: “$100 bucks is all I’m paying, it’s just a monitor, morons! Take it or leave it.”
Yikes.
During the next three weeks, Jeremy’s family tries their hardest to convince what used to be a family friend to just do the right thing, but she resisted the entire time. Finally, Jeremy’s family rolled up their sleeves and took Karen to court where she tries to fabricate a totally different story. In her version of the events from that fateful night, Karen says that Jeremy and his father got mad at Damien and threw the jar at him, which missed and smashed the monitor. Thing is, neither Karen or Jeremy’s father Jon were in the room that night. It also didn’t help that Karen’s son couldn’t help but tell the truth that he was the one who threw the jar of change because he was upset. Unsatisfied, Karen appealed for a second court session which only delayed the inevitable.
By the end of this kangaroo court, even the judge was fed up. He slammed his gavel and ordered Karen to pay for the cost of the monitor and extra for prolonging the process. Jeremy says that with the extra money, he is looking at buying another monitor. As Jeremy and his parents left the courtroom, it seemed as if justice was finally served. Unfortunately this was only for one side of the aisle that day. Karen, furious about her courtroom loss, would go to an extreme that not only worried Jeremy, but it caused some serious alarm bells to go off in the online community he’d turned to to share his story.
CPS Gets Involved
The next day Damien arrived at school…covered in bruises. It was obvious that Karen had done this to her son from her rage from losing in court. Jeremy realizes a sad fact about Damien’s life: he’s just a kid trapped in an abusive home. He may have been a brat and wrecked Jeremy’s things, but this was no way to treat a child. At the end of the day, Karen is the real antagonist. As the adult in the situation, she didn’t even want to pay her dues and snobbishly blocked their numbers when Jeremy’s family tried to get in contact with her over the monitor situation.
Jeremy did what he thought had to be done and told his friends and teachers about Damien’s situation: the party, the monitor, the trial, bruises and all. He lastly asked his own parents to call CPS, thanks to the advice he got from posting his story on an online forum.
The next day, Jeremy’s principal had Damien, Karen, and two CPS reps meet at the school. There was plenty of evidence of Damien’s bruises and red marks all over his body. As expected, Karen did not act rationally and said that her son deserved all the discipline and beatings he received for making her go through all the trouble of going to court and paying for the monitor. Jeremy, after hearing the hogwash that Karen spewed, let everyone in the room know that Karen had refused to pay for anything and pushed the situation into court by not cooperating.
The CPS workers shook their heads then asked Damien for his perspective. He just said that he loved his mom very much and that he inflicted the bruises himself because he was upset and stressed. He said that his mom would never do anything like this to him.
The CPS workers didn’t buy this story. The marks on Damien’s body were much larger than his own hands. Damien, 12-years-old, scared, confused, and without anyone else in the world was afraid to lose his mom.
“I felt so sorry for him,” Jeremy admits, “I forgave him when I saw what Karen had done to him.”
This was when the CPS workers told Damien that he could live with his father and sisters in Arizona. Then the tears began to flow.
Save Damien
Damien began to cry while his mother on the other hand went ballistic. She became livid and shouted at the principal and CPS workers. She produced a can a pepper spray from her purse, sprayed the principal in the face then bolted for the door. The CPS workers apprehended Karen and confiscated the spray. The principal covered his face, wincing in pain, and told Jeremy to call the police. But still stuck and crying in the middle of this was young Damien, a little boy caught in the winds of misfortune, unable to control any of the crazy events unfolding before him.
Karen was arrested that day and awaiting sentencing. After that day, the truth of Damien’s life came to light.
Jeremy learned that Damien was beaten daily by his mother. On any given day, his body would be covered in lacerations, welts, and bruises which his mother covered up with extensive make up. Damien was taken out of Karen’s custody and now resides with his father and sisters in Arizona, where he is undergoing therapy.
“I wish that I hadn’t seen the world in black and white,” Jeremy admits, “I honestly feel terrible, for Damien, for everyone involved.”
Jeremy’s story comes as a bit of a life lesson. Though young children can be the bane of our quiet adult lives or for Jeremy’s sake, a night of playing video games, we shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Beneath the surface of a troubled child could very well be a dark home. In Jeremy’s case, what was simply a bratty act by a child unwittingly revealed the secrets of a much more sinister situation at home.
Though Jeremy is glad that Damien is safe and has long since forgiven him, he shows no sympathy for Karen.
“Karen deserves worse than prison, she deserves to put in social isolation for the rest of her disgusting, pathetic life. To feel the pain that she inflicted on Damien,” he says. “If you’re reading this Damien, I hope that you’re getting better care in Arizona, I hope that you understand.”
Thanks to one young man’s empathy, another no longer has to live with a real life monster. What started as a tale of just another bratty kid turned into a heroic tale of one young man looking after a boy he hardly knew, and had good reason to hate, because he took the time to simply care for him in a way that the boy’s own mother didn’t.