Let's hope it's a lie.
As police continue to investigate the circumstances surrounding the alleged abduction and rape of a 13-year-old Detroit student, cops are starting to raise some serious suspicions about the veracity of the young man's story. Not coincidentally, the story also has quietly eased its way off the front pages of the local press after a hasty clamor.
But even if all or parts of the boy's tale aren't true -- and I'd much rather this be a case of the city having to deal with a troubled kid's fabrications than the prospect of real child rapists haunting local school grounds — there's still plenty troubling about the truth we do know.
Whether the chid was abducted or walked off on his own, as police and Detroit school officials now appear to suspect, the fact remains that a child left school an elementary grounds--either alone or accompanied--without administrators or security personnel being any the wiser.
Further, the tools that should have been in place, if not to deter such actions then to at least help figure out what happened after the fact, failed horribly. As reported in the Detroit News:
On Thursday, a DPS Police official said there is no surveillance footage of the alleged abduction because some security cameras at the school weren't working.
The boy told police two men knocked on a locked door at the school. He told investigators when he opened it, the men yanked him outside, forced him to an undisclosed location, bound him with tape and raped him, the police source said.
DPS Police Inspector Mike Walsh said Thursday the school has two video surveillance systems. The indoor system was operational, but the outdoor system hasn't worked in years, he said.
An outdoor camera at the main entrance of Lakepointe Street was facing upward, away from the doorway and the path of the school. Waltec Technologies, the company that maintains the surveillance equipment, was at the school Thursday morning.
Again, nobody knows for sure what happened to this child. Was he really abducted and raped? Did he go home with guardians and, perhaps, was somehow abused? Did he make the whole thing up out of thin air?
If this were a lie, of course, it would be infuriating to those who've spent so much time and effort taking the child's claims seriously and sorting out the facts here. Still, it'd be a relief to know for sure that the city isn't being terrorized by some child molesting body snatchers.
But regardless, the boy's tale exposed some very discomfiting security shortcomings at his elementary school, underscoring yet again just how vulnerable our children can be and just how shoddy a job so many of the people who get paid to protect them are doing.
And that is a frightening truth indeed.