The Illinois mother of a mentally disabled daughter drove to Tennessee so she could abandon the woman at a bar there–and because her daughter is older than 18, there is nothing police can do about it.
The mother, Eva Cameron, planned out her daughter’s abandonment carefully, CNN reported . She said she chose Tennessee because of its concentration of Baptists and because it has “No. 1 health care system in the United States of America,” and drove there June 28.
When her daughter, Lynn, asked to use the bathroom, Cameron drove to the Big Orange Bar in Carryville and let the girl out. But as Lynn stood by the side of the road Eva got in the car and drove back to Illinois, refusing to do anything with the severely challenged woman, police said.
“(Lynn) didn’t know her age, she didn’t know her address, she didn’t know her phone number and she didn’t even know her name,” Assistant Police Chief Stephanie Smith told CNN. The girl was taken to a hospital for evaluation, where doctors found she had a vocabulary of about 30 or 40 words.
It actually took police until this week to even learn Lynn’s identity, but after receiving an anonymous tip they found Eva and were able to bring her for a brief meeting with police. Even then she still wanted nothing to do with her daughter, signing a statement that Lynn was now a ward of Tennessee. Because Lynn is 19 and not assigned to a legal guardian, police could take no action against Eva for abandoning her daughter and said the action did not reach the level of abuse , CNN reported.
“She basically said, ‘I don’t want her and I don’t want to take her.’ Then she got in her car and she left,” Smith told CNN.
Because of her mental development, the abandoned daughter showed no signs of distress that her mother was gone, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported. Eva left the daughter with no money, identification or extra clothing, the report said.
“No. 1 health care system in the United States of America.”