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Neighbors react after mother, infant drown in bathtub: “I was heartbroken”

By CNN

Neighbors react to drowning of mother, baby in Waterford Township

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    Detroit (WWJ) — A Waterford Township, Michigan, community is still in shock after the tragic death of their neighbor and her 2-month-old son.

Police say the two drowned in a bathtub in their apartment just off Cooley Lake Road.

“Oh, I was heartbroken, heartbroken; she didn’t do that,” said resident Laurie Medaris.

People in the Whispering Woods Apartments still have more questions than answers after the sudden death of one of their neighbors, Desiree Wheeler. Laurie Medaris says their community is like a family and that Wheeler loved her children.

“She did everything with her kids, everything. She was always smiling, she was always happy,” said Medaris.

Waterford Township police and fire were called to the apartment complex around 10:30 p.m. on Friday. That’s when they found the 36-year-old single mother of three had drowned in a bathtub with her 2-month-old son.

“Her oldest is going to have to live with this for the rest of his life, I think the detectives need to do more research,” said Medaris.

Wheeler’s next-door neighbor, Sue Carey, saw Wheeler and two of her children hours before police showed up that night.

“Her and the 13-year-old and the baby came out, and she said, ‘Hey, neighbor.’ I said, ‘Hey, neighbor.’ I said, ‘How the baby doing?’ She said, ‘Good, fine,’ and they went in, and that was the last of her that we knew,” said Carey.

Carey says she saw police rush the mother and the baby out of the home, along with the Wheeler’s 13-year-old child, who she says was in shock.

“He couldn’t really mumble words to tell us what had happened and went on so,” said Carey.

She says it was when her family showed up later that night that they learned Wheeler and her baby did not make it.

“Really gut-wrenching to hear her family cry, and it just plays over and over in my head,” said Carey.

CBS News Detroit reached out to the Waterford Township Police Department and the fire department that responded on Friday. While no new information has been released on this investigation, police say they are awaiting toxicology results.

Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.

What Shall I Do With My Boy?

By CNN
Click here for updates on this story    August 4, 2026 (Houston Style Magazine) -- In 1836, four white apprentices beat Frederick Douglass nearly blind in a Baltimore shipyard.He named them years later. Ned North. Ned Hays. Bill Stewart. Tom Humphreys. One came at him with a brick. One swung a handspike into his head. Fifty white carpenters watched. None said stop.They said the Black caulkers were "eating the bread which should be eaten by American freemen." Douglass saw past that. The white man, he wrote, "is robbed by the slave system of the just results of his labor." The men who owned that system taught poor whites to fight poor Blacks. It kept them both poor.He escaped to New Bedford, a trained caulker in a free town of Quakers and abolitionists. A shipowner tried to hire him. Every white man on the vessel threatened to walk. He shoveled coal instead.Still no bench for him.In 1853 he asked Harriet Beecher Stowe to help him build a school where Black boys could learn a trade. There were fathers, he said, "whose minds are tossed by day and by night with the anxious enquiry, 'what shall I do with my boys?'"The school was never built. The question never went away.Ask it again now. Manufacturing jobs peaked in June 1979 and fell for forty years. In the 1950s, 98 of every 100 American men in their prime worked or looked for work. Today it is 89. Black men lived this first.Then we told every child that college was the only road. Georgetown researchers project only 42 percent of jobs will require a degree by 2031. We closed the shop classes and called it progress. The old track had sorted Black and brown children into dead ends. We did not fix the sorting. We tore out the ladder and left the wall.Now hear what we tell the boys. The Pentagon studied who could enlist. Seventy-seven percent of Americans aged 17 to 24 cannot qualify. Too heavy. A record. A pill. A test.Three out of four, told they are not wanted. Then the Army did something quiet. In 2022 it opened a course at Fort Jackson for the ones who failed the standards. It taught them until they met them. About 95 percent passed.Chaz Andrews had wanted to serve since he was 19. He failed the entrance test more than ten times. He was 29 when the course got him through. Nothing was wrong with Chaz Andrews.Hugh Price saw this coming. He helped start the National Guard Youth Challenge Program, which lifts dropouts' earnings 20 percent. The military, the former Urban League president wrote, "figured out long ago how to nurture the potential of aimless young people."He did not want to militarize childhood. He wanted the method. High expectations for everyone. A mentor who knows your name. A refusal to sort children into the ones worth teaching and the ones worth writing off.Charlie Rangel asked the other half. He came home to Harlem from Korea with a Purple Heart and pushed for universal national service. "If we are going to send our children to war," he wrote, "the governing principle must be shared sacrifice."Rangel answered who serves. Price answered how people are made.Maryland is testing both. Republican Larry Hogan dropped the degree requirement for most state jobs, and hiring without degrees rose 41 percent in four months. Democrat Wes Moore built the first statewide service year in America.That is real. So is this. Congress has not reauthorized the National Apprenticeship Act since 1937.Further along than we were. Nowhere near done.My father ran a Head Start center in San Diego in the late sixties. What surprised him was who objected. Not only men who hated Black children. Also, comfortable people who did not want anybody's poor children given a head start, white ones included.We would rather sort children than teach them.Douglass asked what he should do with his boys. We still owe him an answer.Ten years after Los Angeles burned, I stood backstage waiting to speak. Jack Kemp was at the lectern, pounding it. Our kids, he shouted. Our kids. Our kids.An elder from South Central asked me where he was from. Upstate New York, I said.Then whose kids is he talking about?All of them, ma'am. They are all American children.The notion stunned her. It should not stun anyone. It still does.A country is not a nation until it claims them all.photo Ben Jealous is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and former president and CEO of the NAACP. Please note: This story was provided to CNN Wire by an affiliate and does not contain original CNN reporting. This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.Kierra LeeKIELEESTYLE@GMAIL.COM4096658446
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