Amber Thompson is a mom in Arkansas. She was born in 1990, meaning she’s about 33–34 in this video (because it seems her birthday is August, and this happened in April), and she already has a seven-year-old, so I guess she was having kids mid-20s, if not sooner. Here’s the video we’re going to work off of:
If you watch that through, when the cops get to her house, it’s actually a pretty nice, large house with nice furnishings and a bunch of kids’ toys in the yard — so initially, you might think, “Oh, solid mom and family here.” In this specific case, you may or may not be right.
It seems like what happened is, the night before this incident, she had a little blow-up with her seven-year-old. The boy may have gone to bed without dinner. She had told him something like, “You’re big enough to get yourself to school,” so when she wasn’t awake in the morning, he got himself prepped and started walking to school. Thing is, the school was over seven miles away. Some farmer guy saw him (that’s the beginning of the above video) and called the cops. When the cops get to Amber’s house, as you can see in the right side of the thumbnail above, she was asleep.
People Magazine even covered this one.
If you look at her mugshot in that article, there’s a lot of pock-marks on her face. I don’t want to come out and insinuate potential drug usage, and the house in the video shows no evidence of it, but that's a potential angle, I suppose.
While you can’t see it on the video (or hear it, rather), she apparently told an officer that it “wasn’t her problem” that her son had to walk so far to school.
Nice.
It looks like she appeared in court on May 21, but it was deferred to August. Interestingly, there is another case in that county in August about landlord vs. tenant, and the name of the tenant is Amber Thompson, so perhaps they were renting said house and got booted. I cannot confirm that one, however.
Apparently her middle name is “Nicole,” and when searching “Amber Nicole Thompson,” you get about five-six hits in Craighead County, including this one about disorderly driving. That is about two years prior to the forcing-a-kid-to-walk thing, so if the kid was seven when that happened, she was driving around boozing and blaring music when she had a kindergartner.
I’m all for moms cutting loose, as I think motherhood is the hardest thing a woman probably ever undertakes (maybe labor, but that kinda goes hand-in-hand) and we don’t support moms very well, but this case seems a tiny bit unhinged.
Now, Amber does say in the video that “something like this has never happened before,” and perhaps (ideally) that’s true. Still, forcing your single-digit aged kid to walk seven miles solo is probably something that should happen zero times, not even once. I know life is hard, and Modernity is confusing as hell, but this seems like a basic commitment to raising ’em right.
I don’t know all the specifics of this case and the night before, and it seems like the legal part of it hasn’t wound its way through the circular Arkansas court system, so I can’t offer much more therein.
On the surface, it seems bad and negligent. But she could be an awesome mom and she’ll grab a plea and redouble her efforts as a parent. That’s the hope, right?
It's a good story. Mom seems to have lots of stuff. Just no common sense. Or interest in being a Mom. I used to think about this all time watching the TV show "Cops." You wake up or walk into your living room, there's a few policemen there, and it's no big deal. Both the cops and the "concerned citizen" seem like really solid dudes for trying to help the kid out. I cannot begin to imagine what being a policeman is like in 2024. Not easy.