Yes, these children's lives ended at their mother's hands. The tragedy is unimaginable. They were loved. They were cherished. They weren't children enduring years of neglect or abuse at the hands of a mother who didn't care about them. If anything, Lindsay Clancy was obsessively worried about them. And eventually, something in her brain, the physical organ responsible for interpreting reality, malfunctioned. So imagine, for a moment, that this family is traveling in a car. One day, the car makes an unusual sound when Lindsay applies the brakes. She takes it to a mechanic. The mechanic examines it and says there's nothing seriously wrong. Maybe it needs an oil change. So they change the oil. But the noise persists. Maybe it even gets louder. The family relies on this car. Their children ride in this car. They need to know that it's safe. So they take it somewhere else. The second mechanic finds something different. He makes an adjustment, and for a few days, things seem better. Then the noise comes back. And now the steering wheel is shaking. So they try another mechanic. And another. Everybody has a slightly different explanation. Everybody has a slightly different solution. And the family follows them. New tires? Done. Alignment? Done. Replace the brake pads? Done. Bring it back in 2 weeks? Absolutely. Stop driving it for a few days? Of course. They're not ignoring the warning signs. They're not procrastinating. They're not refusing repairs. They're going from professional to professional saying, Something is wrong with this car. Please help us figure out what it is. But nobody can tell them what's actually happening. Eventually, the professionals keep sending the car home. So what is the family supposed to conclude? They know something isn't right. But they aren't mechanics. They don't have the vocabulary to identify the failing component. They don't have the equipment to diagnose it. And they certainly don't have the expertise to repair it themselves. All they can do is recognize the symptoms, report them accurately, seek professional help, and follow the instructions they're given. And they do. Again. And again. And again. Until one ordinary day, they're driving home with their children buckled in the back seat. Everybody in the proper car seat for their age. Lindsay presses the brake pedal. And this time, it goes all the way to the floor. The car doesn't stop. It sails through the guardrail and over the side of a cliff. Three children are dead. Their mother survives. Afterward, everyone looks at the wreckage and asks: How could a mother put her children in that car? Look at all those warning signs. Listen to all those strange noises. She knew something was wrong. She should have known the brakes might fail. She should have protected her children. But that's looking backward from the bottom of the cliff. Before the crash, she was trying to protect them. She took the car to the mechanic. Then another. Then another. She reported every new symptom. She followed the recommendations. She made the repairs. She kept asking the people who were supposed to understand the machinery whether the car was safe. And they kept sending her home in it. The fact that we can identify the catastrophic failure after the crash doesn't mean Lindsay had the ability to diagnose it before the crash. And that's the part I think gets lost when we talk about the Clancy children. Acknowledging that Lindsay's hands were involved in their deaths does not require us to pretend that her brain was functioning normally when it happened. Those are two different questions. The children can be innocent victims of an unimaginable tragedy AND Lindsay can have been suffering from a catastrophic malfunction of the organ responsible for judgment, perception, fear, impulse, and reality itself. Understanding the second does not diminish the first. It may be essential to understanding how the first became possible.