Mom Jailed for Letting 10-Year-Old Walk Alone to Town
It was dinnertime on October 30, 2024, when police handcuffed Brittany Patterson in front of three of her four children and drove her to the station in Fannin County, Georgia. She was then fingerprinted, photographed, and dressed in an orange jumpsuit.
Hours earlier, around noon, Patterson had driven her eldest son to a medical appointment. Her youngest son, 11-year-old Soren, intended to come along but wasn’t around when it was time to leave.
“I figured he was in the woods, or at grandma’s house,” says Patterson, who lives on 16 acres with her kids and her father. (Her husband works out of state). There is no shortage of family in the vicinity. Patterson’s mother and sisters live just two minutes away.
Soren, however, was not playing in the woods. He had decided to walk to downtown Mineral Bluff, a town of just 370 people. It’s not quite a mile from his house. A woman who saw him walking alongside the road—speed limit: 25 in some places, 35 in others—asked him if he was OK. He said yes.
Nevertheless, she called the police.
A female sheriff picked up the boy and called Patterson. “She asked me if I knew he was downtown and I said no,” says Patterson.
Patterson was upset that Soren had gone to town without letting anyone know, but says there was hardly reason to worry.
“I was not panicking as I know the roads and know he is mature enough to walk there without incident,” she says.
The sheriff disagreed.
“She kept mentioning how he could have been run over, or kidnapped or ‘anything’ could have happened,” recalls Patterson.
The sheriff drove Soren home and left him with his grandfather. After returning to the house, Patterson scolded her son—and that, she thought, was that.
But at 6:30 p.m. that night, the sheriff returned with another officer. They told Patterson to turn around and put her hands behind her back. As three of her kids watched, Patterson was handcuffed. The sheriff took her purse and phone, put her in the cruiser, and hauled her off to jail.
To Patterson, none of this made sense. She had grown up in the area with plenty of unsupervised time to wander and play and was raising her kids that way, too.
“The mentality here is more Free-Range,”
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