The wealthy Pennsylvania couple accused of abandoning their disabled son were at their wits end when they left him at a hospital with a note saying they could no longer care for him, an uncle said yesterday.
“It was an act of desperation. They reached the end of their rope,” said 74-year-old Glover Crouch. “They were desperate, and the desperation seems to speak for itself.”
Dawn and Richard Kelso were charged with child abandonment Monday, the day after they left their 10-year-old son, Steven, who suffers from cerebral palsy, at a Delaware children’s hospital.
The Exton, Pa., couple, who drove to police headquarters in separate BMWs when they turned themselves in, left a note saying they could not care for the disabled boy, who breathes through a tube and uses a wheelchair.
Crouch, who lives in Manhattan and is Dawn Kelso’s uncle, said the couple were left without nursing care over Christmas and were forced to sleep in shifts to care for their son.
The couple has a contract with a nursing service to provide 24-hour care, but the service told them it would not be able to provide nurses over the holiday, he said.
“This was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” Crouch said. “Stephen’s care requires that an adult be with him in the room. He may get a seizure that may require immediate attention.”
“Dawn must have thought, ‘How much longer can this last?’ She has felt this surely in the past,” he said.
Steven was left at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, Del., with toys, medicine and boxes of his medical equipment.
Crouch took issue with the idea the boy had been abandoned, saying the hospital was like a second home for Steven.
“He has lived 120 months, and in those 120 months, he has undergone 130 operations,” he said. “There are two places he knows. He knows home, and he knows the hospital. That is his other home.”
Richard Kelso, 62, is the chief executive of a $500 million-a-year chemical company, while his 45-year-old wife serves on a state advisory council for people with disabilities.
Crouch hopes the courts will restore Steven to them.
“I can’t believe either of them thought this was a lasting solution. There was no thought of what came after.” he said. “When you are desperate, you don’t think about the future.”