Most Ethics Alarms posts involve analysis of what I regard as ethical or unethical activity with larger lessons attached regarding society, organizations, institutions and prominent or influential individuals. Now and then I choose an incident where there is no dispute about whether the conduct was unethical, but it was just so unethical that I feel attention must be paid, if only to remind us how depraved and devoid of ethical instincts and values the people around us can be. An esteemed commenter recently complained about such a post.
My motivation for these no-doubters is usually what it is in this case: I want to know how such a thing could happen. What was the miscreant thinking? How could they ever believe that their conduct was acceptable? Where has our society and culture failed to the extent that an incident like this could ever occur?
Teresa Isabel Bernal, 33, was arrested this week for bringing jello shots to her daughter’s fifth grade Christmas party. The party was held on Dec. 20, 2024, at Jones Elementary in Tyler, Texas. Bernal told the Tyler Independent School District police officer that she didn’t know that the cups of jello contained liquor when she bought them, but the evidence indicates otherwise.
The owners of the sweets shop where the cups were purchased told police the shots contained vodka, but that Bernal had to have ordered alcoholic shots deliberately. The owners insisted that they had no knowledge that the order was for a child’s classroom party. They showed police a screen shot of a text from Bernal shortly after the classroom party started, asking if the jello contained alcohol. The owner replied that they did and asked why she had asked. Bernal texted back, “kids.” Despite the answer, the mother did not alert the teacher or the students.
After all, it’s kind of funny when the little tykes stagger around and start singing “Show Me The Way To Go Home”….
About 20 minutes after the text, two teachers tried a shot and notified the fifth-grade teacher that they believed the cups contained alcohol. Later a lab confirmed that indeed they did. Twenty minutes, however, was sufficient time for the kids to get smashed. The shots were inviting, containing blue, red or green Jell-O with whipped cream and strawberries on top. Almost all of the students reported having stomach aches and headaches following the party; one boy said he vomited twice and another said he passed out after slurping down six shots. (Watch that kid in the future.) Another student passed out when he got home after “behaving strangely” when his mother picked him up at the school.
Previous to the incident, Bernal was regarded as an attentive and involved parent. Now she’s out on $75,000 bail awaiting trial on multiple charges of inflicting reckless bodily injury on a child.
Ethics Alarms 
But don’t you have to TRY????
Jack asked, “But don’t you have to TRY????”
I think the most reasonable answer to your question is, no.
Remember, stupid is reasonably defined as a great lack of intelligence, which describes someone who has demonstrated a severe deficiency in cognitive abilities such as learning, reasoning and problem solving. In short; a stupid person is severely lacking the ability to learn and neither your or I cannot fix an inability to learn.
In my opinion, this statement alone (if accurate) completely justifies me labeling her as stupid, “Despite the answer, the mother did not alert the teacher or the students.”
I’m not too sure that I’m morally/ethically obligated to try to fix unfixable stupid people.
HA! Bad editing and proof reading left a double negative, “In short; a stupid person is severely lacking the ability to learn and neither your or I cannot fix an inability to learn.”
That sentence should be “In short; a stupid person is severely lacking the ability to learn and neither you or I can fix an inability to learn.”
Well, there are people who are ignorant of what we would think are commonsense facts.
For example, I remember when my adult cousin – who was in her twenties – a minister’s wife, no less, took my teenage sister out to lunch at Friday’s. They decided to just order Iced Tea. The waitress asked if Long Island Iced Tea was okay and they told her it was.
Neither of them knew that a Long Island Iced Tea had alcohol in it. When they realized the drinks tasted funny, they conferred with the waitress and much embarrassment ensued. My sister did not look like a minor (this was back in the ’80s).
Anyway, without seeing the website the mother ordered from, I suppose it’s possible for her to have missed that the shots were alcoholic. Another site said that the word Smirnoff appeared faintly on the order. If she’s not familiar with alcohol, she may not have known that Smirnoff is the name of a brand of vodka. (I didn’t know that until two weeks ago when I read a book on the history of booze and there was a chapter on Smirnoff!)
However, I am also willing to defer to the officers involved who believe that she had to have known she was providing alcoholic treats to the kids so there must have been some part of the ordering process where that was made clear.
Perhaps, her untimely text was an attempt to provide plausible deniability before the booziness was discovered? Did she mean to show the text to the school and say, “I didn’t know when I ordered them and only found out afterward?”
As for how people get like this…well…I guess we’re getting dumber.
I dunno, AM. I, being a fellow of the world, always assume that Jell-O shots contain alcohol. Thinking or believing they do not is a recipe for disaster, or in this case, felony charges. Steve W’s post above is succinct, to the point, and spot on – sometimes a meme is all it takes to point out how stupid something is.
When our son was in elementary and high school, any parties sponsored by the class or school had a “sign-up” sheet where the organizers posted things to bring. Parents would choose from the list (plates, napkins, cookies, etc.). I am trying to remember if Sr. Mary Margaret from third grade ever included Jell-O shots on her lists. Hmmm . . . Nope. I don’t remember that.* I can’t imagine a teacher thinking, “Red, green, and yellow Jell-O shots! How festive!”
The school took violations of the no drug and alcohol policies very seriously: A group of 8th graders – from very prominent families in the parish I might add – was expelled the month before their graduation because they were drinking vodka from their water bottles while in math class.
jvb
*Ed. Note: Just to check, I emailed Sr. Mary to verify. She called me back a few moments ago, confirming that Jell-O shots were never on her lists of approved items, though she said she would give the idea some thought and run it by the Pastor and the School Principal.
Makes sense. She could’ve accidentally ordered them and then panicked. It was a bad decision to make that kind of mistake, but I would see more culpability since she didn’t say or do anything once she found out.
A simple, “Hey everyone. I made a really dumb mistake. There’s alcohol in the jello shots. Let’s get them out now.”
Try to mitigate the damage as best you can.
Those in the picture look very much like the treats we occasionally can get from my track and field club but instead of alcohol ours contains a small chocolate. YUM!
This is probably going to be an unpopular comment, and I am not (ask Jack) racist or given to other types of stereotyping. But given her name, I am wondering if maybe English is not her first language, and maybe she just assumed that Jello-O, formerly a safe treat for children before rampant alcohol culture ruined it, would be ok. Maybe she doesn’t even KNOW about Jell-O shots and, as someone else noted, maybe she is unfamiliar with the fact that Smirnoff is a brand of vodka. Stupid? or culturally naive? Or maybe she’s just a psychopath? Who knows? Or, as characters in my favorite Western movie are wont to say, “Bad luck.” The Taoist says “Ah, so.”
Silverado. Kevin Klein. One of my favorites.
Watched it for the first time last Saturday night. Surprisingly good. What a cast, too! We enjoyed it just as we’d enjoyed “Tombstone” which we saw for the first time about two weeks before that.
This is so bizarre that I’m willing to at least entertain the possibility of some type of odd misunderstanding. I know that occasionally I will mishear or misread something and then wonder how in the world a mistake, that later seems so obvious, happened.
Speaking of odd (and where we might be if the democrats had their way)…
I’m currently in the Czech Republic, and when I google the story and click on a possible source, I get a page with this message:
“451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact xxxxxxxxxx or call xxxxxxxxx.”
The “General Data Protection Regulation” text is a link to this: https://gdpr-info.eu/ (None of the normal WordPress formatting or link options seem to be available, either.)
I will say that I’m more than twice as old as this parent, and I did not know that Jello shots typically had alcohol in them.
On the other hand, I’m not sure that I’d ever heard of Jello shots before this.
On the gripping hand, I might have some alcoholicky thoughts about a phrase that included the word ‘shots’.
I suppose this is what I get for not drinking alcohol for the last 30 or 40 years.
As one who may be further past twice this lady’s age than Diego, I have to question how someone gets that old and doesn’t relate “shot” to alcohol; its the standard serving size. And I can only imaging that a “Jell-o shot” might cost somewhat more than an equivalent amount of Jello would, and that should cause one to ask “that’s a lot for some jello”. Further, wouldn’t the liquor license of the “sweet shop” make one stop and think. Unless Texas doesn’t license businesses that serve/sell booze.
Without evidence, I think the lady believed this would be a cool prank….