Thestory is infuriating and disgusting, but Tracie Lee Dean of Decatur GA comes across as an absolutely wonderful person who makes me wish the USA gave out baronets.
Tracie Lee Dean was traveling through Alabama when she stopped at a gas station off of I-65 in Evergreen (a town of 3500 60 miles south of Montgomery). She saw a little girl walking alone in the store and acting very scared and “odd” who tried to leave the store with her. The girl’s father acted even odder. She was so disturbed that she got the tag number of his Suburban outside and called the state FBI to report it. (They told her that she was wrong because that tag was from a Honda.)
For several days she obsessed over this, found girls who matched the one she saw’s description on missing child databases, called authorities from Ohio to Alabama, called John Walsh’s offices and various news agencies and child welfare agencies and got nowhere. She then called the gas station and asked to see their security camera tape (which the law enforcement had told her non-chalantly “you have to have a court order for that” and didn’t pursue) and the station manager let her, so she drove the 4 hours back to Evergreen.
While she was in the store, strictly as happenstance, a county sheriff walked in and got really interested. Between the two of them they followed up. Long story short,
The man and his “wife” (or daughter, not sure which) had the two children living in their trailer. Stirling characters both- they gave several false names, have taken money for victims of both Hurricane Ivan & Hurricane Katrina, have outstanding warrants under more than one name each, etc… The woman is in jail too, both of them with multimillion dollar bails.
It’s infuriating that nobody would listen, but Yahweh how I would love to drive to Atlanta and hug Tracie Lee. Thou art a woman of virtue.
Wow! That’s heartening, to think that one persistant person can actually get through the maze we call a system and bring about help/justice in time, despite stumbling blocks.
I am really impressed by her determination. I hope that if any of the rest of us end up crossing paths with a child in danger like that we’ll remember this story and be as persistent. It is pretty sickening that so many child molestors get away with their crimes because people don’t want to get involved.
What’s incredible to me is that this woman who saw the child for less than five minutes knew instantly something was badly wrong, but people who worked in stores the kid came to all the time and even the guy who owned the trailer they lived in never did. (Their landlord, who saw them constantly, is somebody who needs to be investigated- I’m not saying that he was party to the molestation, but I think there’s enough justification to question him.)
Maybe the people who saw the child everyday were “numbed” to such things, so tuned it out and didn’t pick up how bad it was? Or, it could be “mind your own businessitis”.
There’s a bit more info on the couple arrested (including an article and some video here). My sister remembers seeing the man in her drugstore in south Alabama shortly after Katrina where he used a Medicaid card to fill a prescription that’s in a name other than Jack Wiley (she called the sheriff’s department to give them the info). This sounds like just the epitome of scum for a family, though the man is much better spoken than you’d expect from a guy begging handouts from churches and living in a dilapidated trailer borrowed from a casual acquaintance in a state to which he has no apparent connection.
The woman (still being identified as his sister, daughter, wife, companion or other) is evidently singing like Al Jolson, having copped to molesting a 12 year old boy in Kentucky as well as both of the kids in their custody. They’re being held on a total of $5 million bond which I’m somehow guessing they’re not gonna raise.
According to “Wiley”,
He’s also quoted as saying "If I could get… a good attorney, not some backwards high school dropout public defender, I believe I could win my story”. Well, you’re off to a good start on a good working relationship with your defense team.
*****Thanks to CNN for specifying who this Manson fellow he was referring to is.
