Posts
Tuesday's Trust
Betrayed by Authorities
When you're at your most vulnerable because of the severe threat of possibly losing your child to a violent crime committed against him, you're at your weakest point, you are barely functioning, and you would like to think you can trust the authorities to do their job. What is the job of law enforcement if not to investigate allegations of criminal acts, wrongful acts, even acts that could be affecting a whole group of our at-risk children, all of whom are citizens of the local county. If you have a child who is confiding in you, his mother, of criminal acts that have been done to him as well as to other teens in your community, and law enforcement chooses to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the allegations, not even interviewing your child whose life is hanging in the balance, then whom are you as a parent to trust?
Your child's case appears to be totally mishandled, or virtually, not handled at all... You as a child-loss parent can barely function amidst your child's devastating physical losses, and you are running up against people who have been elected into sacred positions of trust who are not even practicing the core protocols of investigations. What are you to do? What is your community to do? And what hope do the children-at-risk have if the powers-that-be choose not to intervene on their behalf? What if law enforcement chooses not to enforce the law, and chooses not to defend the teens from blatant criminal violations?
The system at that point is not working. Are there compromised people at its helm? Is there corruption within? Is it a case of total incompetence? What is it?
Your child by this time now succumbs to his injuries. You are now a child-loss parent. How are you as a child-loss parent supposed to figure out how to handle the improper legal proceedings when your whole world has been torn out from under you?
We went through some court proceedings with our child's death in a different state than our own. A grand jury was held, and duties were carried out. It was painful. Things were blatantly promised to us by the legal authorities that these officials did not fulfill. But we felt the grand jury was fair, and that their logic was reasonable. I cannot even imagine if all of these people had refused to carry out their jobs. It is unfathomable.
So when jobs are NOT being carried out, affecting the outcome of your child's case, and perhaps many more children in the same at-risk predicament as your child, what is a parent to do, and whom are they to trust? Apparently we have such a case going on in our community now. Our hearts go out to the child-loss mother as we watch her child's case be bungled at best, if not totally sabotaged... We helplessly stand by, signing petitions to the courts to please initiate a thorough investigation...
What about you? Did you have investigations and court proceedings? Were you treated fairly? Were you okay with the way things were handled? Were you okay with the outcome?
Did any of you feel betrayed by the very people you thought you could trust?
