Lisa Irwin is a 10-month-old baby who was supposedly snatched from her home a couple of days ago – link.
The father supposedly came home from work at 4 AM and found the baby (and cell phones) gone. It seems the mother was asleep. The door was unlocked, and a window open.
My wife was suspicious from the start due to an issue that no one publicly seemed to be asking – namely, **is it odd that neither the mother (nor the other two children) were awakened **as the alleged stranger entered the house, gathered the cell phones and the baby, and left?
Mrs. Map and I would like to know what y’all think about this…Lil’ Map is 11 months old, so we are anxious to hear more about this case (yes, we are aware that statistically it is very unlikely for something like this to happen to any family.)
Why is it strange. Presumably the kidnapper would be try to not wake people. I tend to go to sleep earlier than my wife. I am generally not woken up by her getting into bed with me. Someone who is quiet would have a good chance of being able to take stuff from my house without being found out.
True…my uncle once was robbed of his stereo (or maybe it was the TV) as he napped on the couch in the middle of the day!
But if the three cell phones were in different places, this does seem to point toward someone who knew the house well. (If the phones were in the same place, I guess it’s not so implausible that the intruder would see them and grab them without risking making too much more noise.)
I almost automatically assume the parent did it, but not because of any discrepancies in the alibi. Sure, it’s plausible that a kidnapper could get the baby without much noise. What’s not plausible is that it was a kidnapper.
If and when the parents are charged, they should be presumed innocent in a court of law. But I would still bet they did it, or knew who did.
Some one came in, grabbed the baby, wandered around the house turning lights on and stole three cell phones all conveniently on the kitchen counter. Uh-huh.
The police have ended their search, and called off the Amber alert. (I guess they’d have called of the alert by now anyway; it’s designed to spread the word quickly, but not to be an ongoing thing.)
If I’m the police, I’m taking a good, hard look at the mother right now.
What really pisses me off is the report that the parents gave the cops a list of nine or twenty people who might have done it, or who showed “excessive” interest in the baby. If you know twenty people that you think might kidnap your baby, you’re hanging out with the wrong crowd.
No, I don’t find that particularly strange. I mean, the whole thing is bizarre, but I think the fact that the intruder took the baby and their cell phones is far more unbelievable than the idea that someone snuck in and got the baby out without waking anyone, especially since the door was open. If the baby slept pretty soundly (which is certainly possible at 10 months), she might not even wake up.
I mean, if I broke into a strange house, I’d have a much easier time locating and removing a sleeping baby (Check the crib! In the nursery!) than multiple(!) cell phones. Either they’re on the bedside table, where you’d have to risk going into the parents’ room, or they’re pretty much *anywhere *else in the house. Why take them, anyway? To delay them from calling 911 for a few minutes until they run to the neighbor’s or whatever? Even if they just stumbled across them, surely someone who’s there to kidnap a baby isn’t going to be interested in stealing cell phones, and vice versa. And isn’t that also risking the cell phones being tracked? And even if someone wanted to take the cell phones, how would they even know how many there were? Why didn’t the dad have his with him at work?
Is that even what happened? The story says:
The word “revealed” doesn’t make sense to me. Do they mean “discovered”? Or did the police say, “Why didn’t you call 911 right away?” and they hemmed and hawed and later “revealed” that they couldn’t find their phones at the time? And are the phones still missing? Have they tried to track them?
This is the reporter wording that, not the parents themselves.
I’m not saying it’s not hinkey, but until I started using my phone as an alarm clock we had a charging station set up on the kitchen counter - every night we’d plug everything there, so the phones alone wouldn’t make me think that.
Right, I just mean that it’s unclear to me, from reading the article, what actually happened with the phones. Were they in fact stolen, or is it just that the parents couldn’t find them at the time and have since located them? Because if they were just misplaced, that’s still extremely suspicious, but less so (to me) than the idea that the were stolen.
I think it’s odd that the father was at work and didn’t have his cell phone with him. We weren’t allowed to have cell phones in the monitoring station at my last job, but I had it in my locker or in my car. What is the point of having a cell phone if it’s not with you?
Media reports can be misleading. The police have to consider the parents as suspects, unfortunately leading to an accusation based on the Sherlock Holmes principle in some cases. We’ll see better coverage of the story in the near future. In the mean time, it is all pretty fishy, but at the same time there’s no motive or evidence to indicate the parents did anything.
I remember the same sorts of accusations in the Danielle Van Dam case. How could the parents not have noticed someone breaking into the house. Those people had an “open” marriage the mother was not upset enough about the missing daughter. The evidence ultimately was very convincing that the neighbor David Westerfield kidnapped and murdered her.
I read it as ‘The parents revealed [to the reporter] that their cell phones were missing’. Just awkward editing IMO, but doesn’t make it any less bizarre.
As to someone coming in and kidnapping a child while the family sleeps nearby, just a few weeks ago a young boy about 3 was kidnapped from Sparwood, BC in the middle of the night. His whole family slept right through it (parents and three siblings, one of which shared his room). In that case the boy was returned in good health to his own home, again in the middle of the night (this time to an empty home) and the person responsible was arrested here in Alberta. So not impossible to do, but this one still sounds a bit hinky to me.
Okay, thanks, folks. Sounds like the fact that no one was awakened isn’t necessarily that odd, but that there are enough other odd things to make this case intriguing. It could very well turn out be one of those very rare “stranger intruding” cases, but there’s a pretty good chance (based on what little we know so far) one or both of the parents aren’t telling the whole story.
This won’t assuage Mrs. Map’s anxiety much, but thems the facts.
Oh, I didn’t know about the cell phones. I was believing them until now.
Perhaps they got rid of the phones to hide evidence of them texting one another about an accident or something. But phone records would show that they were texting? Or would they?
I think the parents are very suspicious. The cell phone bs, and the statement that this was the first time the husband had worked night shift and the first time the wife had left the door unlocked. In cases like this, it’s usually a family member who had something to do with it. I hope that’s not the case here, and that the parents are just coming off badly because they’re being too open with the press. They should have gotten an attorney before talking to the police, even if they are innocent. Details can get twisted around pretty wildly when there’s no one advocating for the family.
I dunno. After the whole Jon Benet thing, I’m not sure of what to think anymore.
I mean, I thought “Parents guilty!” because of the whole three-page ransom note written on a steno pad found in the house thing. What kidnapper is going to stick around writing some rambling screed when he’s just raped and killed a kid in the basement?
But then this and that previously unreleased fact showed up, and who knows what really happened?
The only thing this story needs to fit the standard template is the mother saying she saw a black guy snatching the child. Obviously not resolved, but this one smells like “the parents did it.”
