The kid’s safe and that’s what matters. Now what the hell happened?
Let’s FastForward to the ending to the story…
Three suspects charged in Pittsylvania Co. teen’s abduction
Now here’s the sort-of-beginning to the story…
Police looking for missing juvenile
I mentioned this briefly in a RandomThoughts! article last week. If the kid is missing on Monday, why does it takes until the overnight hours on Thursday morning to get a press release out on the situation so that people could possibly be on the lookout for the kid? In about a day, the accurate word on the street was that the kid was with his non-custodial mother. If the word on the street was already out there, I’d have assumed that the police working this case would have known that by now as well. Wouldn’t it have been useful for a follow-up advisory to update the public on what’s going on?
Saturday night, the Amber alert system is activated for a green Jeep and everybody’s arrested in North Carolina on Sunday morning with the kid being safe. So what happened and what was it all about? The state police news release said that the kid was in “extreme danger”. How so? When did this “danger” become “extreme”?
I’ve been doing the news and opinion beat for a while now and I’ve grown quite cynical of these “missing child – be on the lookout” stories that always end up with “The child has been found and is safe.” outcomes that never explain what happened. It almost always turns out to be “Kid got into an argument with parents and went to a friend’s house”. This one had a non-custodial parent involved, and these type of incidents have never involved any harm to the child because extremely few parents are going to hurt the child that they took desperate measures to take in the first place.
We’ll follow up on this case and these abduction charges as much as we can. The thing that makes it all worse is that the public never gets the full set of answers on what really happened. I know that the public doesn’t have a “right to know” what the case was all about due to privacy concerns, but it’s only natural for people to want to know the whole story once it’s concluded. It’s sad as hell that I’ve grown cynical on pretty much all of these types of incidents now. I’m ashamed of that and I wonder if law enforcement feels the same way at times. What do you think about it?
Okay, so this is parental abduction. That means custody is with someone else. That could be a dad, a different relative, or DSS through a placement with a foster home. The foster home seems most likely here because often if this stuff is in the family it wouldn’t go so far as making news and resulting in charges — hypothetically if a grandma has custody and a mom who is a drug user grabs her teen, grandma calls mom and gets it fixed. Most estranged mother/father pairs still wouldn’t go to the extreme of Amber Alert, either. I don’t know of any group home or therapeutic programs in Gretna, which is why I don’t really include that as an option.
The biggest question here to me is when was this disappearance reported to police? If there were a delay, why? If the sheriff delayed, why?