By: Jimmy Isaac
East Texas was the backdrop for the season finale of one of MTV’s most popular television series. When the finale of “16 and Pregnant” aired this month, it centered on Kristina Marie Robinson, a teen mother who gave birth to son Lukas Todd. Robinson lives in the northeastern Panola County community of DeBerry. Good Shepherd Medical Center spokeswoman Erin Suttin-Hassell confirmed that a film crew from “16 and Pregnant” spent several weeks at the hospital in September and October during the premature birth of her son, who spent three weeks in the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit. Robinson’s story was considered the saddest of the show’s fourth season, according to the Huffington Post. Her fiance, John Todd Hight, Jr., drowned while swimming with friends including Robinson at a Galveston Island beach on April 30. A lifeguard pulled Robinson to safety, but after the U.S. Coast Guard unsuccessfully searched for Hight, his body washed ashore five miles away on May 2. Hight, 19, of Waskom, was survived by Robinson, his parents, and brother and a sister. Robinson was two months pregnant when Hight passed away. In March, Robinson married her new beau, T.J. Head. According to Star Magazine, that prompted Hight’s surviving mother, Tina Hight, to post on Facebook that her son’s drowning in Galveston might not have been an accident. “They were so determined about that trip and I believe that none of them in that family intended to bring my baby boy home,” Tina Hight wrote on her son’s public Facebook wall on Feb. 26. “It was said by some that they were goin(sic) take the baby, (and) my son told them ‘Over his dead body,’ and they killed him, and it don’t bother ‘em at all.” Hight has since recanted her statement.
