by Diane Dimond on November 14, 2011
How Many Boys Were Sexually Abused?
Imagine an 11 year old boy from an underprivileged family who gets help from a local charity called The Second Mile so he can spend time with members of the exalted Penn State University football team.
This little boy is ushered onto campus and is introduced around by one of the team’s top coaches. He gets to work out with the players and see the action up close. This kid feels like a King! Boy, wait till he tells his buddies back in the housing project where he lives with his single mother.
But a part of the boy’s dream includes something he wishes he could forget. The coach that brought him to this wondrous place suggests a shower at the end of their special day and when they are both naked engages in sexually charged behavior with the child. [click to continue…]
by Diane Dimond on September 12, 2011
Store Surveillance of Mother With Baby in Bag
It has happened again and it breaks my heart.
A young mother in Hendersonville, North Carolina walked into a grocery store recently clutching her boyfriend’s hand on her left and a big heavy looking shoulder bag on her right – a bag that nearly scraped the ground as she walked.
The teenager headed straight for the store’s ladies’ room and stepped inside. When she re-appeared on the grocery’s surveillance video exactly four minutes later she had exchanged her red sun dress for a pair of slacks and a blouse. Her bag was casually slung over her shoulder looking a whole lot less heavy.
Within hours a store employee cleaning the restroom found a dead newborn baby in one of the stall’s trash cans. The 9-11 call to police was painful to listen to as another worker gasped between sobs and begged for help for the dead baby.
Whoever abandoned the little girl had just committed a felony. [click to continue…]
by Diane on April 25, 2011
Best Way to Curb Youth Crime - Get to 'Em Early
So often in this space I write about terrible things being done to – and sometimes by – the children of America. From sex trafficking to bullying, it is easy for a crime and justice writer to get mired in the all the negative surrounding our kids.
This time let’s concentrate on the positive.
Any child psychologist will tell you young people crave attention, structure and discipline. Any cop on the beat will tell you there are plenty of kids who just don’t get it at home. Their parents are either too busy working to pay the bills or their parents can’t pass it on because they never got it themselves. [click to continue…]
by Diane on February 28, 2011
Guns on College Campuses - Okay With You?
W hen your children go to college what do you pack to send with them?
You probably include their clothing, some sheets and towels, a laptop computer and maybe a small refrigerator or microwave.
But, how about a gun?
Don’t be shocked. It’s not that far fetched. And guns could be coming to a college campus near you.
In the aftermath of several campus shootings in recent years and the gun fueled violence in Arizona that killed 6, wounded 13 and incapacitated Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, there is a movement to give older college students and their professors the right to carry weapons onto campus.
It is already the law in Utah where students at all public colleges are allowed to carry a concealed gun if they have the [click to continue…]
by Diane on January 17, 2011
Tucson's Dead: Christina Taylor-Green, Dorothy Morris, Judge John Roll, Phyllis Schneck, Dorwin Stoddard, Gabe Zimmerman
Now what?
After the tragedy in Tucson, Arizona – 6 dead including a federal judge and 14 shot including a congresswoman left as a national martyr, a symbol of the evil people are capable of heaping on each other – now what do we do as a nation?
We’ve lived through more than a week of people throwing barbs tinged with poisonous political rhetoric at each other (Republican rantings made the gunman snap! No, it was the Tea Party! It was intolerant liberal politics that made him pull the trigger!) and now that the initial vomiting of invectives is over, can we please just take a breath?
We need to not be distracted from solving crimes and figuring out what drives people to mass murder.
Let’s logically look at the facts surrounding the history of 22 year old Jared Loughner and ignore those who would use this terrible calamity to advance their own political agendas. Examine what happened in Tucson on January 8th as a detective would who’s investigating a crime cops call Rampage Murder. [click to continue…]
by Diane on December 27, 2010
A Gift for All - Immigration Reform
Everyone – especially young people – wants that one special gift for Christmas. Well, this year there’s a group of kids that will remember the holiday as disappointing after the sins of their parents came back to haunt them. All these kids really wanted for Christmas was a helping hand onto the road to U.S. citizenship.
Their parents brought them to this country illegally, some of them as tiny infants, and although raised here in the United States of America – knowing loyalty to no other country but this one – they’ve been told their American dream stops now.
Our procrastinating Congress ended the first half of its 111th session by once again failing to pass the so-called Dream Act. The act could have become the first brave and concrete step on the arduous road to immigration reform. [click to continue…]
by Diane on October 11, 2010
Words Matter - Words Hurt
Has the internet made us more vicious? I ask because it sure seems to me that we are quickly becoming a people who have forgotten how to empathize with others. With our computer anonymity many of us have decided we can “say” things over the World Wide Web that we would never ever say to someone’s face. Cruel comments can be lobbed without personal risk so we send them out like invisible hand grenades, set to explode when opened.
Read some of the remarks others leave behind at your favorite news web site. [click to continue…]
by Diane on July 19, 2010
Did We Fail the 'Barefoot Bandit' Too?
Across the country these days – in every village, town, city and state – there is a collective effort to slash operating budgets. That’s probably a wise thing given the state of the economy. But as we make choices about what gets cut back and what doesn’t, I hope we remember the children.
19 year old Colton Harris-Moore underscores my point precisely. You may know him as the so-called Barefoot Bandit, the catchy little name the media applied to what is obviously a very troubled kid. If Colton’s home state of Washington had had enough money and determination to protect him from a sub-standard upbringing way back when, scores of people might never have been victimized by this kid.
His childhood reads like something out of Dickens. [click to continue…]
John Mark Karr in Custody - 2006
Today I want to ignite a nationwide manhunt. This guy has got to be located and stopped!
I’m sure you remember him: John Mark Karr, the slight, feminine looking man with the receding hairline who was extradited from Thailand to Colorado after he very publicly confessed to killing Jon Benet Ramsey.
Back in the fall of 2006, police in Boulder, Colorado declared Karr’s confession was phony when his DNA did not match what was recovered from the murdered beauty queen’s underwear. His handwriting didn’t match the ransom note. They realized he hadn’t even been in Boulder at the time of the murder. They sent Karr packing, despite the fact that his laptop was full of child pornography, and wrote him off as a delusional loon who’d confessed for the attention.
Well, John Mark Karr hasn’t stopped his weirdness and he’s now back on law enforcement’s radar. [click to continue…]
by Diane on March 8, 2010
Gina Gentile (L), Vanessa Dorwart (R)
Two beautiful teenagers died recently and I was there. I’ll never forget what happened.
I needed to get from New York to Washington, D.C. for a business meeting but a massive snow storm was set to slam into the Northeast. I thought the meeting would be canceled. It wasn’t, so a trip aboard Amtrak’s high speed Acela train seemed the best bet.
As two colleagues and I were strategizing we felt a bump and heard a cracking sound. There were murmurs of, “We must have hit a patch of ice,” and “I think it was a big tree branch on the track.” Then the train stopped dead.
There we sat for two hours in Norwood, Pennsylvania watching the snow fall outside our windows. [click to continue…]
