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An entreaty for prayers on behalf of a 22-month-old boy in critical condition after accidentally shooting himself in the chest with a nail gun first hit our inbox in August 2010, spread in large part by Facebook and Twitter postings. The appeal took on new life in August 2011 when it once again spread through Facebook postings and showed up yet again in August 2016: Our attempts to verify the existence of such a child back in 2010 were stymied because the name of the supposedly injured toddler was not included in the postings, and we received half a dozen different variants of the same message, each identifying the child's mother with a distinctly different name: In 2016 and in May 2017, entreaties for a parent named Micheal Bass (or Michael Bass) and his son Dakota (Miller) -- oftentimes the purported victim of a nail gun -- circulated widely on Facebook: For those keeping score, the name of the injured child's mother is Janet James, or Dedee Parsons Simpson, or Kayala (Kayla) Scott, or Teresa Lynch, or Cheryl Dewitts, or Terri Maczko, with the Kayala Scott version having become the predominant one. (The name Kay Hutson Bedenbaugh also pops up on some lists, and a father named Michael Bass or Micheal Bass on others.) The pattern suggested these were not the names of the injured child's putative mother, but rather of those who simply forwarded or reposted the message. On 9 August 2010, a person who stated he was the father of Hayden, the wounded child, posted the following account on an online prayer site (while someone else on a different forum posted a photograph purported to be a picture of a recovering Hayden and his mother): However, another poster in the prayer forum expressed skepticism after being unable to verify any of the details proffered by the person claiming to be Hayden's dad: It's highly unlikely that the same toddler (who wouldn't be a toddler by 2017 anyway) shot himself with a nail gun yet again five or six years later, or that the exact same accident would befall the child of a woman with one of the same names as a 2010 or 2011 version of the appeal. The Micheal Bass/Dakota/Dakota Miller iteration appeared to be a frankenrumor, with elements of the nail gun claim alongside details (such as life-flighting and seizures) present in a separate Prayers for Dakota e-mail and social media forward. But we were unable to locate a Michael/Micheal Bass or child named Dakota Miller injured by a nail gun. For what it's worth, medical literature does record at least one case of a toddler shooting herself in the heart with a nail gun; the unidentified 29-month-old was hospitalized after discharging the device into her body when she picked it up at a construction site: The little girl (not a little boy) survived, and was released from the hospital without incident. No prayers were reported.
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