Kyron Horman, Missing Children, And Harassment

This is Kyron Horman's mom, Desiree Young, talking about the day her son disappeared from Skyline Elementary, in Portland Oregon, when he was in second grade. That was five years ago. During that time, she has worked hard to keep her child's case in the news, and to make everyone aware of child safety issues. Unfortunately, she has hecklers, ill wishers, and internet trolls, who do not appear to share her desire for the world to be a safer place for children. This trend, of heckling the parents of missing or murdered children is disturbing; Desiree is not the only parent to notice such individuals. It seems that any time tragedy strikes a family, and crime is suspected as the cause, the game of trolling the family seems irresistible for some. Why is that?

In Kyron Horman's case, IP numbers have been traced back to friends and relatives of Terri Horman, Kyron's sometime step-mother. In a spirit of defensiveness, they spam and comment-bomb anyone who merely shares Kyron's picture and contact information. There is a seventeen year old boy, named Colton Barrera, who disappeared in Kansas, in 2008. His case has hecklers, as well. Those are mostly the parents of young people rumored to have information about him. In an ongoing effort to silence any attempt to solve Colton's case, the parents of the persons of interest harass anyone who wants to know why Colton is missing. Law enforcement in Kansas is more worried about popularity than solving crimes, so Colton's case has not even been investigated. The forty year old missing persons case of Sheila and Katherine Lyon is another case that has attracted harassment from specific sources, directed at anyone who maintains and entertains a hope that the case will be solved. There is also a court date, on June 29, for the wife of a "person of interest". She took the whole thing a step further and actually lied to the grand jury about evidence in the case.

Even in a Kansas case that ended happily, with the missing child found, there was cover-up, in order to protect the criminality of a Frankfort teacher, and to cover the school's lack of protocol when a child disappears. Frankfort Kansas must really dislike No Child Left Behind, because Tom Schroeder left a child behind one day! The child's parents are still getting nasty emails from teachers at Frankfort High School and Tom Schroeder and his stupid frankfurter friends, defending his actions and lying for him. The only reason anyone would do this is, unfortunately, the same as the reason for harassing someone whose child is still missing or has been murdered: the perpetrator, along with any accomplices or enablers, wants to derail any chance of apprehension.

My Latest Troll

Not too long ago, someone asked me to whom the newest face on my "troll gadget", to the right, belongs. I looked at it, and realized that the latest addition is the face of a woman who lives in the same geographic area where I live, a postage stamp sized little town in Northeast Kansas, but unlike yours truly, she has lived here all of her life, and never leaves this town unless she experiences dire need to do so.  She amuses herself by bullying anyone she perceives as culturally different from herself, and she enhances her harassment efforts on Facebook and in person by engaging any and all who might enjoy mocking and threatening people they don't personally know, and these adults have all worked very hard to cause as much injury and unhappiness as possible to yours truly and and make my children miserable in school. My children were told by their children that the harassment would stop if they converted to christianity, and the faces of three or four trolls who have been involved in this are featured on that slideshow.

But what would make adults, in their fifties, act like fifth graders? Lets see: as nearly as I can tell, they do not like the fact that I married someone who lived here, already. They had no problem with my husband living here, but when I married him and we bought a house, they became nasty. The teachers at the school got angry because I insisted that my children, stepchildren, and an adopted child, get the same opportunities in school as all the other children. I insisted that the bullying stop. I got the ACLU to make them stop telling my children that they had to go to church. I became vocal both inside and outside the community when it came to my attention that children sometimes come up missing during the day at school, and there are no protocols to ensure that the children who are unaccounted for, after school events, are found. Because I reacted that way to the school, members of the local Catholic Church decided that they should protect their community by spreading as many unkind rumors about me as they could. They did not care what this would do to my children, my family, or my marriage; they just did it. It left me feeling very, very lucky that my family of origin is not christian. When my physician ordered me to take time away from work, the newest troll, and several of her teacher friends, harangued my children almost daily at school about how lazy their mother must be.......a couple of my children tried explaining life with severe anemia, (hemoglobin usually 6.5, hematocrit usually between 18 and 20, prior to diagnosis of the type of anemia) but one of them was insensitive enough to tell one of my daughters that "people like her mother" do not deserve blood transfusions"! So it appears that the impetus that makes an adult act like a fifth grade bully is the desire to pick on someone who does not attend his or her church, is more intellectually inclined than the bully, and is physically not as strong as the bully. And maybe Jesus factors in somewhere, too; but I am not sure exactly how. The trolls justify their crap to their own children by reiterating that Jesus hates people like me, and I can only look at the privileges I have enjoyed and the people I have loved over the course of my life and conclude that there is no such evil genie as Jesus, who hates my guts, as these people say. My trolls are not only immature, they are delusional.

Now let me address some of the concerns dwelt upon by the trolls in question. The newest one appears to think what she's told to think by her priest at the Catholic church and her small town neighbors. She's under no moral obligation to behave morally, because she can just go to confession. It doesn't matter if she drives drunk, or hurts someone doing the same....all she has to do is confess and try harder to conform. When conformity demands that she harm another, in order to make the christians at her church feel all warm and fuzzy, her priest tells her that it is good to hurt the families of those who are not christian. (Yes, he told me this; it was about an assault, though, not about a run-of-the-mill bully) After I got sick of her, and especially sick of trying to make friends with her and her ilk, I simply saved some of the more amazing examples of their bullying, electronic communiques and added their pictures to the "troll gadget" I created. Her dealio is that I criticize people who live in "her" town, and she and her little friends think that they should tell me not to live here, after buying a home and marrying. So does Mr. Catholic Priest. But the truth is, according to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, the United States grants me the right to live anywhere within it's borders that I damned well please, and I can bring my heritage, my culture, my complexion (if that's actually a problem for these morons) and my religion with me. I am under no obligation to be anything like these drunk religitards. I am also entitled to a public school that does not proselytize. There is no problem with their religion, either, but just as I ask my cat to excrete in the litter box, I ask them to excrete expressions of their religion privately, too. This brings me to the concern of a couple of the other trolls.....indeed; they are very, very concerned that I expect them to obey the law. My religion never should have mattered to them, and I actually don't think it does. They have some very valid reasons for not wanting to get to know anyone new, and those reasons have a lot more to do with THEM than with anyone who might move here. But why bring religion into it? Can't they stand on their own two feet without an imaginary accomplice?

A Few Kansans With Misplaced Priorities

A couple of trolls, who left tracks from a certain location in Northeast Kansas, seem to be very discontented with the fact that I support safe schools and background checks for teachers and others whose job descriptions involve contact with children. Very recently, a ten year old girl named Hailey Owens was forcibly kidnapped and murdered. The murder happened within the predicable time frame of three hours from the time of the kidnap. Yesterday, after finding that Hailey had been found deceased, I quoted an early article, on this site, identifying the perpetrator as a para professional and athletic coach at Hailey's school. It happened to be the article that I linked when I stated that the Amber Alert had been cancelled. Later on, it was discovered that while this man occasionally substituted at all the schools in the district, his duties as a para and as a coach were actually at the local middle school, not the elementary school attended by Hailey. While the statement probably deserves clarification, any inference that teachers and other school employees should undergo background checks is still spot on, and I will not back down from my statement that we need to be much more careful of who we trust to teach our children, here in the Midwest. But wouldn't you know it; one of the above mentioned trolls from Northeast Kansas had this to say:

"He was NOT a para or coach at her school. He was employed through another school and did not know her. You def. need to get your facts straight!"

As it happens, this troll is angry and upset because I won't shut up about a coach from Frankfort High School, in Northeast Kansas, who dropped my daughter off by herself four miles away from the school for cross country practice. I had already told him not to do this with my daughter, who was only fourteen years old at the time, because without adult supervision, any child who fell and suffered injuries or got stung by a bee and suffered an allergic reaction would have no available support. Cell phone signals are not the best in this area, and I have never heard of this practice in a public school. After refusing my offer to help supervise, as a volunteer, (only Christians are allowed to volunteer, Methodists and Catholics preferred; and I am not Christian) the coach promised me he would not do it again. A week later, he did it again, only this time, my daughter was all by herself, as the only girl who attended practice that day, and she got lost. When the coach person realized she was lost, he looked for her for awhile by himself, but did not call me, her her father, or the police. After school was over for the day, he went home and had dinner, and still had not told anyone my daughter was missing! Some folks who happened to be driving in the area where my daughter was lost gave her a ride home. Suppose it had been a dangerous person, instead? Coach person certainly was nowhere nearby, and did NOT know where my daughter was! He certainly had no control over who offered her a ride at that moment. It was a terrible chance to take with my child's life, and I certainly will never personally trust him again. I also resent the school's insistence, by keeping him on the payroll, that parents continue to trust this man.

Both the coach at Frankfort High, and the coach who kidnapped Hailey Owens are the type of school employees who should never be trusted with children. I'm so sorry if I read an article that had the wrong school listed as the place of employment. The particular school where he taught is not the point; the point is that he had access to children and children had seen him supervising games and classes, and therefore trusted him. He was not just any stranger; he was a teacher. My point was, and is, that we should not pay people who are obviously dangerous in one way or another to teach or care for our children. One way to weed out the bad ones is to perform background checks. What, pray tell, is wrong with reiterating that? How could such a statement provoke such ire? A background check probably would have weeded out the coach at the Missouri School, and the past use of terrible judgement would weed out the coach at Frankfort, Kansas. Really simple stuff; no need to become a rocket scientist first.

It's abundantly clear that the Frankfort Kansas crowd desires strongly that the incident involving my daughter and the errant coach be swept under the rug and forgotten. I will never do that for them, but here's a question: who benefits when criminal behavior is covered up and kept secret? The victims? Any potential or future victims? No, not at all. The people who benefit when crime is kept secret are criminals. Frankfort Kansas school employees and assorted others want me to stop talking about child safety and help them make their community a more welcome environment for crime against children.

Here's another group of Kansans who are upset that a nearby community is taking a serious look at child safety:

My daughter was missing just a little bit longer than Hailey Owens was missing. She is certainly very blessed and very lucky. Shut up, Frankfort Kansas!

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone! To friends, readers, and even to trolls! Have a productive and meaningful 2013!