When I first glanced up and saw this story about fat Shaquan Duley on TV, I thought I was watching the movie Precious. The stories are the same- Fat, black, raised in a welfare home by an overbearing Mom- can’t get a job, no hope, no future- Only in Duley’s story, she somehow managed to ensnare a man or three to produce her three children. Two of them she suffocated with her gigantic fatty hands and then tried to “Susan Smith” them in a South Carolina river. But her lawyer warns us to “Keep an Open Mind” about her story.
From the AP here by way of Trench:
Broke, jobless and berated by her mother for her failings, Shaquan Duley killed her young sons, then strapped their lifeless bodies into their car seats before rolling the vehicle into a South Carolina river in a desperate cover-up attempt.
Duley’s attorney, Carl B. Grant, said Wednesday morning he hasn’t had the opportunity to review any of the evidence against her. “We want everybody to keep an open mind and to understand that they don’t know the whole story,” said Grant.
Duley said her sons, ages 2 years and 18 months, drowned after her car plunged into a river. She ultimately confessed to killing the toddlers, they say — not by dumping them in the water but by suffocating them earlier with her own hands.
“She truly felt, ‘If I don’t have these toddlers, I can be free,’ ” Orangeburg County Sheriff Larry Williams said at a news conference Tuesday. “I think she was fed up with her mother telling her she couldn’t take care of the children, or she wasn’t taking care of the children and just wanted to be free.”
Coroner Samuetta Marshall told several media outlets Tuesday the older boy had defensive wounds that suggested he had been in a struggle.
Duley lived with her sons, a 5-year-old daughter and her mother in a rented home along a street filled with boarded-up, abandoned houses in Orangeburg, about 35 miles south of Columbia, South Carolina’s capital. Out of work and estranged from the children’s father, Duley relied on her mother to support her and her children.
Duley told investigators her mother constantly harangued her about her failures as a mother and inability to provide for her family financially.
Leaving her daughter at the house after a night of arguing with her mother Sunday, Duley strapped 2-year-old Devean C. Duley and 18-month-old Ja’van T. Duley into their car seats and drove the boys to an Orangeburg motel several miles from where she lived.
Late that night, in a corner room tucked at the back of the rundown, one-story motel complex, Duley suffocated the boys with her hands.
Distraught and not knowing what to do, Duley strapped the boys into their car seats and drove to a boat ramp some 10 miles away. They said Duley rolled her car into the water, watching as it sank into the slow-moving current, then took off on foot.
Duley is reported to be mostly in shock that her foodstamps and WIC peanut butter and cheese have now been cut off. Poor thing may starve in jail. But don’t judge a family who lives generation to generation on the government dole. A family that can’t keep a man around because the welfare culture doesn’t require it. If you criticize, they call you racist.
