I was reading a news story, where a 13 year old boy was found murdered and buried in the back yard two years after he was killed by the father.
It seems the father had custody of his son and killed him. He buried the kid in the backyard and told everyone the kid went to live with the mother in California.
He got away with it as the mother was strung out on drugs and didn’t much care and the father would say things, “You can’t see the kid, 'cause it’s not a good environment to be sending the kid to visit a junkie.”
Anyway so when he was found, people were critical of social services for not investigating and critical of the neighbors for not questioning what happened to the kid and critical of the mother, who didn’t know much of what was going on as she was a junkie.
While it’s a tragic situation, I do think the guy came up with plausible reasons to explain. I don’t think I would’ve thought anything. Basically he said, the mother cleaned up her act and he sent the kid out of state to live with her. Sounds reasonable to me.
He told the mother you can’t see the kid till you clean up your act. Since she was a junkie shooting up and didn’t care about the kid anyway, sounds plausible to me.
Everyone likes to find a scapegoat, but I think this was sort of a unique case. By the way the guy was busted by an anonymous tip to the cops saying the son was buried in the back yard.
My question is, if something similar to this had happened and you were a neighbor or friend, would you have been suspicious?
From the way you describe it, no, I wouldn’t have been suspicious personally.
If social services were already involved, however (and it sounds like they certainly should have been), they should have followed up on the kid when he was sent to his supposedly cleaned-up Mom.
Yes, on the one hand, everyone expects the society to have a completely omniscient social organization such that things like this can never happen. When they do happen, someone (outside of the father) must be blamed and punished.
At the same time, we love to complain that our neighbors don’t mind their own business, and that the government is overreaching. We want to save our cake and eat it too.
I think in most societies, people can generally accept that unfortunately sometimes bad things happen and there’s nobody really to punish (beyond the father, in this case). But people in the U.S. seem to want to have a Teflon existence completely immune from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. When they do happen, we can’t accept it. We want some kind of money-back guarantee on life, or we want to keep our furniture forever wrapped in plastic.
If it was just ‘a neighbor’ I probably wouldn’t think much of it, and like SciFiSam said, if SS wasn’t previously involved in the case there wouldn’t really be much reason for them to get involved now. If they were already involved, then yes, I would assume part of the protocol would be to follow up on the well being of the child. I assume in a case like this they would contact CPS in the new location and have them check up on the kid. Especially if mom is a known junkie.
Of course this is assuming that no one had any reason to think differently. Also, part of the problem is that when the story hits the news, suddenly the public has all the pieces and it all makes sense. The public can sit in their arm chair and say “Well gee, he said he would never let mom have the kid as long as she was still doing drugs and she just tested positive last week for heroin. On top of that the dad and son haven’t been getting along well and dad’s been dating a new woman that said she doesn’t like kids. Oh and he rented that small auger etc…” But the problem is, that info may have come from 10 different neighbors that never discussed said data with each other and then was put together by detectives in a very matter of fact way, given to the media where the writers added a dramatic spin to it and all of a sudden the neighbors are a bunch of assholes for not calling the cops on this guy a month before it happened.
In this case there would be no invasion of privacy. Just one phone call to the mother would have settle things. I would argue that they should have checked to make sure the mother was clean as well.
I don’t really know the extent of Social Service’s involvement here, but if they were involved, then their real mistake was keeping the child in the father’s home, not whatever they did for the two years after the son died.
If my neighbor mentioned that his son had gone to live with his mother, then I wouldn’t question. Especially if I didn’t know the family well and thought I’d be stepping on feelings asking about his losing custody of his son. I would assume it was a source of pain for him, especially if he played me well enough to look grief stricken. If it were a family friend, of course, I’d be more inquiring. I also am making the assumption in my everyday life that I’m not friends with people that would bury their children in the yard, but I guess everyone has a quiet neighbor.
However, I do believe the social service agency has a responsibility to put eyes on a child and observe the kid is ok before they announce “case closed.” It’s their job - not the neighbors. I’d like to believe that we are all using the “takes a village” method but when the fingers start to point, I am pointing them at the agency whose sole purpose was to watch out for the welfare of the child. It would be nice if the neighbors had noticed something, and if they had they should have reported it - but it’s not ultimately their responsibility.
I would most likely not notice, but I think the third option makes more sense. It sounds like this guy was a good enough liar, but I could imagine a guy who was not. He feels too guilty and always talks about his grief about losing his son, and looks strange when anyone mentions it. Or he constantly talks about how easy it is to bury things in his back yard where no one will be able to find it. Stuff like that.
Had I known the family, I likely would have been suspicious. Also, I’m a mandated reporter.
Last year, my neighbor divorced (again). Her kids live with her first husband, their dad, and visit regularly. She married a man she did not know well who also had kids. We all have kids in the same age group who attend school together. These two are not stellar parents and I feel obligated to mind their business to a small degree. Plus we are friends and neighbors.
The second husband has two kids and has custody on one of them.
When she divorced this second husband, he took the child out of school and sent her to live with friends whom I had never met much less heard about while he lived in his truck around the neighborhood.
I followed up with him regularly asking how she was doing, asking for the phone number to speak with the daughter, and asking why I didn’t see her posting on Facebook. He stated she was being home schooled with the friends in a rural area, but I had doubts about her safety.
Eventually, I placed an investigation request to CPS and reported to the school that I suspected she was not attending anywhere. CPS sent me a note saying the saw no reason to investigate. The school actually called the dad while I was sitting in their office and questioned him, but the follow up was shoddy. They just required he come in an de-register her properly so she would not be marked as truant.
Eventually the child turned back up and she and the dad moved away. She was re-enrolled in school in the new area and seems to be doing OK, but the whole thing was very disconcerting.
I wonder about the schools. The child would have stopped coming to school and presumably there was no request that his school records be transferred to CA. Shouldn’t that have rung some bells for CPS?
ETA: Just saw the above post. So you just need to “de-register” your child? I wonder if the dad did that.
One Monday when we were in 11th grade, a classmate from Group A didn’t come to class, nor did his younger brother. People wondered about it, but it was explained quickly: they were spending a week in Barcelona, visiting their maternal grandmother. While it was an unusual time to do so, not being vacation, it wasn’t completely unbelievable (no tests due) so we figured it must have involved some sort of family celebration.
Next week they weren’t there yet - we got worried, neighbors got worried, someone at the father’s job (finance manager of a local farmer’s coop) tried to contact them and discovered that not only were they not at Grandma’s, they hadn’t been there since Christmas… and when the cops were called, they also discovered that there were over 300M Pta missing! (Make that about 3M USD of the time, this was the mid-80s)
A couple of weeks later, a postcard from the EAU confirmed that they were all in good health, in their way to “neener-neener I robbed you blind” exile in a different country with no extradition treaties with Spain. The postcard had been sent the Tuesday after they hadn’t come to class, nobody figured them “missing” at that point.
I wouldn’t think anything at all about that story during the school year. At the end of the summer, if it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen the kid around for a visit to his old man all summer, I would think that was weird enough to mention to someone. That’s a big if, though.