fracas

Kaleb Owens Email

Last week’s Sunday Snopes feature dealt with a claim about lead in lipstick.

Anyone who uses email is bound to, at some point or another, receive an email containing a ‘warning’ about some terrible crime or event that they should beware of. These emails always tell the recipient to pass it along to everyone they know in order to warn others and ’save’ someone else from the same terrible fate. Most often, these emails contain some sort of claim relating the event or crime in the warning, to a specific location or police department in order to convince the recipient of its authenticity.

In mostly every case, these email warnings are hoaxes, nothing more than malicious chain letters that scare the uninformed into becoming pawns in the spamming of hundreds of thousands of people.

Snopes.com is a credible place to verify such stories you might receive. As a regular Sunday feature, fracas will highlight a different story each week to do our part in stopping or lessening the impact of the distribution of such stories.

Sunday Snopes Snippets

Sunday, April 22, 2007:

Claim: Kaleb Owens - Mother seeks medical help for her son 

Status: True.

As detailed in the link below, in October 2005, 8-year-old Kaleb Owens sustained a severe head injury when he fell off a wagon during a Sunday School hayride and was run over by one of the cart’s wheels.

Recently, his mother drafted an email that outlined Kaleb’s injuries and their family’s struggle. She hoped to find a medical research facility that will perform a deep brain stimulation procedure on her son, a technique that has been studied by researchers, but a technique that unfortunately, Kaleb is too young to qualify for the clinical trials for.

If you have received an email regarding this story (text of which is reproduced at the snopes link… highlighted in the green box on their page), know that this email is for real. Amy (Kaleb’s mom) is chronicling her (and Kaleb’s) story and progess on a section of the CaringBridge web site, where you will be able to verify it all.

Please click here to read the snopes.com write-up regarding this TRUE story.

Please bookmark fracas. Your next Sunday Snopes feature will be posted on Sunday, April 29, 2007!