After 2-year-old Aiden McCarthy’s parents were killed in a mass shooting on the 4th of July in Highland Park, Illinois, the boy, according to his maternal grandfather, asked, “Are mommy and daddy coming soon?”
“He doesn’t know,” Michael Levberg said in the days after the shooting. “He doesn’t realize it.”
That very question — whether to tell Aiden what happened to his parents — became the focus of a debate among the relatives taking care of the boy, who recently turned 3. One psychologist recommended telling him, while another recommended waiting until he asked.
