Yes, kids slip away all the time.
The article, however, was a bit confusing. There's very little actual detail on Charlie Dunn's death, plus a lot of detail about a little girl named Monica who drowned in her neighbour's pool. At first, the article says she snuck off while her parents slept and climbed the neighbour's fence to get to the pool, and I was thinking, "Well, then, charging the parents isn't fair!" But then, further down, we get this detail...
"While Monica’s parents were devastated at the loss, neighbors say they were constantly sleeping and never paying any attention to their kids. Police had been to their home before after the children were found wandering around the neighborhood, reports Fox News."
Well, geez, this wasn't just a one time lapse of attention by exhausted parents. It was sustained inattention and they'd been warned!
So, back to Charlie... is this a freak accident, or parents with a history of ignoring the kid and letting him wander unsupervised? How long did it take them to notice he was gone? The article doesn't say.
We lost our kids, on more than one occasion. It happens. One parent thinks the other is watching and the child disappears in the blink of an eye. My daughter almost went out a window when she was two. At three, she'd deliberately sneak away and hide in department stores (eventually earning her one and only, totally ineffective, spanking). Yes, we failed to keep an eye on her 24/7, but at least we were trying.
Whereas, there was a five year old down the street who'd come by knocking on our windows well after dark, wanting to know if our kids could come out and play. (No, they could not, because our children were not allowed to wander around after dark.) And once we went camping, and discovered a four year old wandering freely all over the site and even up to the highway. My husband tried returning him once, only to have the kid's dad act completely unconcerned and uninterested in corralling the kid. And yes, the camp was on the edge of a lake!
Some parents are truly inattentive. It's a miracle their kids make it to adulthood. It's a tragedy when they don't.
Other parents try their best and just have kids whose secret mission in life is to kill themselves and make their mum and dad look like horrible, neglectful parents.
I don't know which kind of parents Charlie had. If the first, then the charges are fair. If the second, then they're not fair.