The letters of protest started popping into our e-mail almost as soon as the lawsuit was announced. The message were all the same: It's outrageous that Donna Trevino, birth mother to Marcus Fiesel, is trying to profit from the horrible death of her 3-year-old autistic son.

David and Liz Carroll, Marcus' foster parents, are charged in his death, accused of binding the boy up in a blanket and leaving him to die in a sweltering closet last month while they left town for a few days.

It's horrible and people should pay - the killers, the social service agencies that put Marcus in the hands of such people.

But should anyone pay Donna Trevino? This is a woman whose parenting skills were so wretched that Marcus - bruised, filthy and neglected - was taken away from her. So were her other two children. As the angry letter writers note, had she been a fit mother, Marcus never would have ended up with the Carrolls. And now she wants $5 million.

On Tuesday she sued almost everyone who had a role in Marcus' care: the Carrolls; the couple's live-in girlfriend, Amy Baker; Lifeway for Youth, the agency that placed Marcus with the Carrolls; Butler County Children Services, which contracted with Lifeway; and the Butler County Commission.

"We feel Marcus Fiesel was let down," said Kevin D. Hughes, Trevino's attorney.

The only "caregiver" left off the list of defendants was Trevino. But nothing said in the suit, or in the press conference she and her attorneys held in announcing the price tag they put on her grief, indicates she sees any connection between her own behavior and what happened to her son. She had kept her children in filthy, flea-ridden squalor. Police were called to her Middletown home several times. Their reports said there was little food in the apartment, the children slept on dirty floor mats and feces were smeared about.

Some of Trevino's critics say she should not be allowed to sue. That's wrong. Our legal system gives anyone the right to claim they have been wronged.

Whether Trevino has the "right" to collect from Marcus' death is another story. Butler County should let the case go to trial and let a jury decide how much Donna Trevino deserves.