Mom Left Girls Home Alone for Eight Days, Police Say

A Storm Lake woman accused of leaving her 11- and 13-year-old daughters unsupervised for eight days told police she thought the girls were old enough to care for themselves while she went on a cross-country road trip.

Cynthia Ann Lumsden, 38, faces two counts of child endangerment for allegedly abandoning her two middle-school-age students on Aug. 27. She was arrested Friday, apparently after returning from a trucking trip with a male companion, police said.

How times change! Boys Life carried a story about two boys (I think aged 13 and 8) who in the 1910's were allowed to travel by horseback from Oklahoma to New York City to retreive an automobile, then drive it back. They were hailed by society for their independence, and met President Theodore Roosevelt. No charges were filed against their custodial grandfather who sent them on the trip.

Now, letting on average older children take care of themselves for a little over a week while in electronic communication with a parent is criminal abandonment. Some details of the story suggest negligence (lack of a key, only milk and juice in the fridge), but we do not know whether the neighborhood where the home was located is generally regarded as safe enough that residents don't bother to lock their doors (yes, there still are neighborhoods like that out here in the plains) and we don't know whether the girls had money and a food store or take-out restaraunt within a safe walk.

I left my son home alone overnight for the first time when he was 17. He was going to take care of my 84-year old father.

I was a wreck - called home to make sure everything was all right.

He laughed at me. LOL!

How a "mother" could do this to her kids is beyond me. Ti ask a MAN whom she has known for only a short time to "check in" on the GIRLS, and take off for parts unknown is totally beyond me.

The man, identified in police reports as Ted Wesslemann, told police he did not know the mother's last name and had known her only a few weeks. He said she had given him a ride to work and mentioned Aug. 26 that she might have to drive to Kentucky for a few days. Wesslemann said he told Lumsden he would check on the girls and, if possible, try to spend the night while she was gone if she needed to take the trip.

SPEND THE NIGHT? With two young girls by a man that there mother only met in passing? Honestly, I'm glad that the girls were taken away from this moronic piece of flotsam whose only claim to motherhood is purely genetic. I know that the anti-CPS's crowd will be on this thread shortly to sympathize with the mother and castigate the neighbors and government "busy-bodies" who turned her in. TOUGH.

What if Ted was a pedophile or was into young girls? What is his background? Doesn't the mother have family or a known friend who could have watched the girls? I would never, ever leave my 13-year-old son alone for over a week with only a hitch-hiker that I had met in passing to "look in on him!"

I hope that they throw the book at this woman. I also pray that the girls learn that this is not normal, responsible behavior for a mother towards her children...

The world is a very different place than it was in 1910, it was wrong for this mother to leave them like that. Especialy asking a near total-stranger to look in on them, and being OK with him 'spending the night' there with her daughters. She foolishly put her own daughters at risk for no other reason it seems than to temporarily shack up with a trucker.

Sooo... they'll be much better off in foster care... right? Maybe there's something to this, but without the whole story, I'm pretty much giving this a big ho-hum. The girls were 13 and 11. The older one big enough to be a baby-sitter herself for goodness sake. The empty fridge may have been a sign of neglect, but did they have money, and access to a store/restaurant? Also, the guy checking on them only stopped after he had a seizure problem, so I'm betting he'd agreed to watch them until mom got home. Not exactly mother of the year, but probably better than the hell of foster homes.

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