Serenity Renfroe, not quite 2, spilled her cereal.
It scattered across the floor of the little house on Rail Splitter Road where Serenity lived with her mom and her mom’s new boyfriend. They mostly kept to themselves. Rail Splitter Road cuts through a sparsely populated area near Phil Campbell in the rural northwest corner of Alabama.
Her mother’s boyfriend, Shannon Gargis, 28, had moved in with them two months before.
It’s piece I wrote while participating in the USC Center for Health Journalism‘s Data Fellowship.