A boy in north Georgia went for a walk down the road. It landed his mother in jail

By Thomas Lake, CNN

(CNN) — It was near the end of an unusual day for the four Patterson children when the deputies came to arrest their mother.

The sheriff’s deputies approached the house, a tidy split-level outside Blue Ridge, Georgia, with chickens roaming the front yard and yellow flowers blooming along the front steps. What happened next was captured on a body-worn camera.

Deputy Kaylee Robertson knocked on the glass. She wore an army-green vest over her short-sleeved uniform shirt. Visible on her left arm was the tattoo of a cartoon character: Blossom, leader of the Powerpuff Girls, who use their superpowers to fight crime. The door creaked open.

“Hey Brittany,” the deputy said, making a come-here motion with her left hand, “I need you to come out here.”

Still on the phone, Brittany Patterson apparently asked for more time.

“No,” the deputy said with authority. “Not ‘one second.’ I need you to come out here.”

Patterson was a 41-year-old real-estate agent. She stepped outside, into the autumn twilight.

“Okay,” the deputy said. “Turn around for me.”

“Why?” Patterson said.

“Because you’re under arrest,” the deputy said.

“For what,” Patterson said, her tone soft and incredulous.

“For the incident we talked about earlier today,” Robertson said.

This incident would soon make national headlines. It would draw indignant comments about parental rights and governmental overreach. It would lead one local columnist to suggest that safety-obsessed adults might as well be shrouding children in bubble wrap. And it would raise an uncomfortable question: Can it be a crime not to know where your children are?

A CNN review of police documents, body-camera videos, and a 911 call sheds new light on a case that could make parents think twice about letting their children run free.

“What am I under arrest for?” Patterson said.

“For reckless endangerment,” the deputy said.

This was not quite correct. The charge on the warrant was misdemeanor reckless conduct, under a Georgia law that functions as a catch-all for a wide range of allegedly criminal behavior. A defense attorney told CNN this charge is rarely used in cases that center on child safety.

“And how was I recklessly endangering my child?” Patterson said.

The other deputy cut in.

“Turn around,” he said to Patterson. “We’re not — we’re not talking about it.”

Patterson turned around and offered her hands. As the deputies fastened the cuffs, she looked in through the doorway at her 10-year-old son.

She told him to call his grandmother, and to tell her “they’re taking me to jail because you decided to walk down the street.”

How parents — and the law — define the word ‘missing’

This punchy summary of the case — they’re taking me to jail because you decided to walk down the street — is accurate to a point, if oversimplified.

What it really comes down to is the word missing, and how one defines it, and whether Patterson’s son was actually missing when she left the home. And, if so, whether that decision constitutes the sort of criminal conduct that could put someone in jail for up to 12 months.

The Pattersons live in the hills of Appalachia, about 100 miles north of Atlanta. This incident began around lunchtime on a Wednesday in late October, when the children were 16, 14, 12 and 10. Patterson’s older son had an appointment with a chiropractor. No one else was home except Patterson’s father, who lives in the basement. Patterson’s husband has a job in another state. Her younger son is home-schooled. She had just seen him a few minutes earlier, in his room, looking for his belt. Now, ready to leave, she called for him. He did not answer.

In an interview with CNN, Patterson said she and her husband had decided long ago to give their children a fair amount of both freedom and responsibility.

“There’s no freeloaders allowed in my house,” she said. The children cut the grass. They keep the wood stove burning. They take turns doing the laundry. And they roam around the woods.

Patterson said she grew up with similar freedom. Her own mother lives nearby, and sometimes questions her daughter’s choices. Patterson says she feels as if “my house is never clean enough, my kids are never well-enough behaved.” But Patterson roamed all around Daytona Beach, Florida, when she was a kid, and sometimes she reminds her mother of this.

“I’m like, ‘Mom, you never knew where I was.’”

So, even though her 10-year-old wasn’t answering, Patterson wasn’t worried. She figured he’d gone to the place in the woods where he sometimes liked to be alone. Later, she found out that he had indeed gone to the woods, to a vantage point from which he could see her drive away.

A while later, at the chiropractor’s office in nearby Ellijay, Patterson got a phone call. She sent it to voicemail. When the same number called again, she answered. The call was recorded.

“Hello, this is Brit,” she said.

“Hey,” a woman said. “This is Deputy Robertson, Fannin County Sheriff’s Office.”

A concerned citizen saw the boy walking alone and called 911

Patterson still doesn’t know why her son walked a mile down the road to Mineral Bluff. Sometimes boys just do things.

Was it a dangerous walk? This, too, was subjective. The prosecutor, Emma Harper, certainly thought so. Later, in a phone call to Patterson’s attorney, David DeLugas, which DeLugas legally recorded and shared with CNN, the prosecutor called it “a busy highway with no sidewalk” and said, “It’s not walkable. It’s not safe … That’s not a thing that you do here. Because you’re gonna get hit by a car.”

Harper did not return a phone call from CNN. Nor did her boss, District Attorney Frank Wood. According to Google Street View, the speed limit along the route in question is 35 or 25 mph. There is no sidewalk, but Patterson says her son walked part of the way on a dirt path behind a guardrail.

He was not hit by a car.

Nevertheless, someone called 911.

On the recording, the woman said she was at the fire station on Mineral Bluff Highway. She had recently seen a boy, “about 6 or 8 years old,” walking alone.

“I stopped to ask him if he was okay and he needed help, and he lied, and said that his mother works here at the post office,” the caller said. “And then he just took off away from me.”

Deputy Robertson found him on Railroad Avenue. On her body camera, he sat in the back of the cruiser, half-shrouded in darkness, eyes shadowed beneath the brim of his Atlanta Braves cap. He wore jeans and a blue-and-gray T-shirt.

Robertson called the boy’s mother and tried to get some answers. Patterson explained what happened: the chiropractor appointment, the kid she couldn’t find, the assumption that he’d walked into the woods.

“Okay,” Robertson said. “You didn’t think to call us?”

“Well, no, because I figured he’d come home. He’s done this before. Walk back in the woods when he gets mad or frustrated, and then he’ll come home like an hour later. So, he’s never walked all the way to Mineral Bluff, though.”

She continued.

“And honestly, I didn’t know I could just call you guys when I wasn’t 100 percent sure he was missing.”

“Okay, um,” Robertson said, looking for the right words, “I mean, yeah, that’s kinda important, uh, to, to let us know if you can’t find your child.”

Any parent will tell you that children go missing all the time. They climb trees. They hide behind couches. They go into closets and fall asleep. None of this means they are missing in the sense of a missing-persons report.

Later, with some time to think about this distinction, Patterson was even more displeased with the deputy. She imagined what would have happened if she had called the sheriff’s office a few minutes after she’d last seen her son.

“What do you think they would have done?” she said. “Nothing.”

Fannin County Sheriff Dane Kirby did not respond to interview requests for this story. When a CNN reporter called to ask for an interview with Deputy Robertson, Major Keith Bosen said, “And unfortunately, our policy’s not going to allow her to speak about an ongoing investigation.”

A closer look at Georgia’s reckless conduct statute

The deputies brought the boy home to his grandfather. The boy’s mother got home. She gave him a talking-to for walking to town without asking permission first. She said he would have to lose some privileges and do some extra chores.

“There was already discipline taking place,” she said.

There would be more.

Parenting and law enforcement are alike in some ways. Both are inexact sciences, driven by split-second decisions and subjective interpretations of a malleable set of standards. When can children be left alone? The state of Georgia has guidelines, and even those guidelines are vague. Sometimes you just don’t like a thing someone did, even when it’s hard to find the rule or law they broke.

Georgia’s reckless conduct statute covers a lot of ground. In a breathtaking 67-word sentence, it reads, “A person who causes bodily harm to or endangers the bodily safety of another person by consciously disregarding a substantial and unjustifiable risk that his or her act or omission will cause harm or endanger the safety of the other person and the disregard constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of care which a reasonable person would exercise in the situation is guilty of a misdemeanor.”

Michael Bixon, a longtime Atlanta defense attorney who is not affiliated with the Patterson case, said he sees the reckless-conduct law most often applied in cases of gunfire or the conscious spread of HIV. In a phone interview, he said the Patterson case was “a complete misuse and a stretch of the statute.”

It was not the first time authorities used this law in relation to parenting.

In 1997, the Georgia Supreme Court heard the case of Rosalind Hall, a woman in west-central Georgia who left her 11-year-old son to watch three younger children. The 3-year-old died of a head injury. Hall was charged with and convicted of reckless conduct. But in a 4-3 opinion, the high court overturned the conviction. The justices wrote that the statute as applied in that case “lacks definite and explicit standards to guide its enforcement, thereby making it susceptible to arbitrary and selective enforcement by police, prosecutors, and juries.”

One day 27 years later, roughly five hours after she found the boy in Mineral Bluff, Deputy Kaylee Robertson went to a magistrate and swore out a warrant for Brittany Patterson. She said Patterson committed reckless conduct for “knowingly leaving the residence” while her son “was missing from the residence and did not report it to law enforcement.”

Minutes after that, with daylight fading, she knocked on the door of the Patterson house.

‘They’re takin’ me to jail’

While handcuffed outside her house, Patterson told the deputy that she didn’t think it was illegal “for a kid to walk to the store.”

“It is when they’re 10 years old,” Deputy Robertson said.

Patterson was astounded.

“It is?” she said.

“Yes,” said Robertson.

“Okay,” Patterson said. “I’d like to see that on the books.”

“Okay,” Robertson said. “Well, you’ll see it on your warrant.”

Nothing like this was actually on the warrant. But Patterson had no way of knowing that, and no way out of the handcuffs, so she complied. She called to her son, the one whose spontaneous walk had started all this, and told him to call her mother. The boy did as he was told. He stood in the doorway, called his grandmother and put her on speakerphone. With hands cuffed behind her back, Patterson leaned toward the phone.

“Uh, the police are here and they’re taking me to jail,” she said. “So I need you to come stay with the kids.”

Her mother said she’d be there in five minutes.

Patterson was angry and confused, but she knew that making a scene wouldn’t help her kids. So she decided to play it cool. When a daughter appeared, Patterson said, “They’re takin’ me to jail.” She said it as casually as if she were leaving for the grocery store.

“I love you,” the girl said, and gave her mother a kiss.

Sound of crickets, falling dusk, orange leaves, pale sunset. Another child appeared.

“Call Daddy and tell him they’re takin’ me to jail,” Patterson said. “Marmie’ll be here in a minute.”

She seemed to almost smile as she walked toward the cruisers. One of the kids asked when she would be back.

“Who knows,” Patterson said, in a tone that suggested this might be an adventure.

Deputy Henry led her to the back of his cruiser. Then he buckled her seat belt, as a parent would do for a small child.

She resents the implication that she’s a bad mother

At the jail in Blue Ridge, she had to change into orange scrubs and submit to fingerprinting. But she was only there for about an hour. The sheriff called and said she could leave on a $500 property bond. Her mother and sister picked her up. She went home and hugged her children.

It’s not clear what will happen next in the case, though it seems unlikely she’ll be sent back to jail. On the recorded call, the prosecutor said, “I wasn’t planning on filing an accusation because DFCS is putting a safety plan in place.”

But that proposal from the Georgia Division of Family & Children Services would require Patterson to put an app on her son’s phone to monitor his location. She does not intend to do that.

Her attorney, David DeLugas, is executive director of ParentsUSA, a nonprofit that advocates for parents’ rights. He says that in this case, simply dropping the charge won’t be enough. He wants a full exoneration.

Patterson has had several weeks to think about the incident. Aside from the criminal accusation, there was also the subtext. The implication that she was a bad mother. And that hurt.

For the last 16 years, she said, most of the time of most of her days had been devoted to her children. She had sacrificed her career. Missed out on time alone with her husband. Turned down invitations to visit with friends or go to parties. So much of her life was driving. Wrestling matches. Gymnastics competitions. Band concerts. She lived for those kids.

As her attorney gathered investigative materials to prepare her defense, Patterson got a rare opportunity. On the body-camera footage, she got to see what her own mother said about her when she wasn’t around.

Her mother had been critical of her in the past — house not clean enough, kids not well-behaved enough — and now, moments after the arrest, she stood before Deputy Robertson without knowing she was being recorded.

“Well,” Patterson’s mother said, “she could lose her way of making of living by being arrested, you do realize that.”

“Okay, that’s not my concern,” the deputy said. “My concern is the children.”

“Yeah,” the grandmother said. “The children are fine. The children have a good mother.”

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