Dave Easterly’s Bravo Sierra Blog

The Christmas Day Tragedy

January 7, 2009 on 2:33 am | In General, Personal, Political Musings |
This post is utterly devoid of comments. :(

So I think it’s safe to say pretty much everyone knows about the events that happened just North of here on Christmas day… An 11 year old girl named Sage and her 12 year old brother Bear were sent walking in the middle of a snow storm 10 miles to their mother’s house after their father and uncle got their car stuck in a snow drift. The temperature when they set out on the 10 mile hike was in the mid-20s with a wind chill in the low single digits. They found the boy about 11 hours later in a rest area bathroom about 5 miles from where he and his sister started walking, delirious and suffering from hypothermia. A few hours later his dying sister was found partially buried in snow. She had turned back after a couple of miles and wanted to go back to the car but her brother wanted to press on so they went separate ways. The father and the uncle got the car unstuck and did what anyone would expect them to do… They turned around and went back home rather than going after the kids to pick them up and drive them the rest of the way to their mother’s or make sure they had arrived safely. Then after finding out they hadn’t made it to their mother’s they waited another FIVE HOURS to call for help.
Oh? That _ISN’T_ what you would have expected?!? Here is the timeline as reported by our local fish wrapper…

A timeline to tragedy

Dec. 25

9 a.m. – Vehicle became stuck in a snowdrift along West Magic Road, less than a mile from the Idaho Highway 75 turnoff, according to the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office.

10:30 to 11 a.m. – Children start walking, according to their uncle and passenger, Kenneth Quintana.

12 to 1 p.m. – The vehicle is unstuck, according to Quintana.

1 to 2 p.m. – Children’s mom, JoLeta Jenks, calls Aragon saying kids haven’t arrived, according to Quintana. Aragon and Quintana drive back to where the children began walking and go on foot to look for them, according to the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office.

7 p.m. – A friend of Jenks calls police saying the kids are missing. A Blaine County deputy and a snow plow head out to look for the kids, but they too become stuck after hitting a snow drift and slide off the road, according to the BCSO.

8:30 p.m. – Blaine County Search and Rescue set up on West Magic Road, one mile from the Highway 75, with one vehicle and two snowmobile teams, according to the BCSO.

Also, Quintana says he and Aragon stop their search for the children and meet up with police.

9:50 p.m. – The male child, Bear Aragon, is found in a Bureau of Land Management bathroom, near the intersection of West Magic Road and the Magic Dam Road in Camas County, 4.5 miles from where he began walking. He had hypothermia and was wearing only long underwear, having discarded his jacket, pants and shoes.

10:20 p.m. – Search dogs are deployed to look for the female child, Sage Aragon. The plan was to search from where Bear Aragon was found, back east towards Highway 75, after the boy told authorities he and his sister split up and she walked back to her dad’s car.

Dec. 26

2 a.m. – Sage is found unconscious and hypothermic next to a barbed wire fence on the south side of West Magic Road, mostly covered in snow and barely visible. She was wearing a down coat, black shirt, pajama pants and snow boots, according to the BCSO.

4:15 a.m. – Sage is pronounced dead at St. Luke’s Wood River Medical Center, according to the BCSO.

They also finally arrested the worthless uncle who was an accessory to this cruel act of murderous neglect. Just coincidentally, he was also busted with meth. Whodathunkit?

Now I’m never one to advocate the intervention of government in family affairs, BUT… When an agency exists – whose sole purpose it seems is to destroy families and wreck lives with an efficiency and prolificacy that may only be rivaled by the state-sponsored terrorist organization know as the IRS – that goes by the Orwellian name of “The Department of Health and Welfare” fails as COMPLETELY and UTTERLY as they did for Sage and Bear then one of two things clearly needs to happen. Either we abolish this worthless farce of an agency and send its tax-feeding reprobate “employees” in search of gainful work doing something OTHER than wrecking decent families while ignoring to the utter disinterest of those they’re supposed to “protect” reports of neglect that I suspect they received in abundance about this messed up family OR the public needs to DEMAND accountability for this agency to ignore the warning signs about families like this one that put their drugs or drinking or whatever before the well-being of their children.

Here’s what I had to say in the comments section of the local bird cage liner’s website after the arrest of the worthless and equally culpable uncle:

So has anyone at the Times News or the prosecutor’s office checked to see if there have been reports about neglect with Health & Welfare about these children? I would almost GUARANTEE that there’s a file as thick as business end of a Louisville Slugger of reports from teachers or others more concerned about the well-being of these children than their biological tissue contributors (i.e. people not worthy of being called “parents”). It is sad and unfortunate that these poor children had to be born to “parents” without enough sense to know that you don’t send a child out in an Idaho winter storm wearing nothing warmer than PAJAMA PANTS. We all know that the most likely reason they didn’t care enough to go FORWARD and make sure the children arrived safely at their destination was that there was something far more “important” (at least to them) waiting at home for the two men in that car, we just don’t know if it was in a bottle, a pipe, or a pill. I wonder when the last time this “good employee” passed a drug test was? Being in jail is too good for these people. I say jack up the jail and put them UNDER it.

We’ll see tomorrow if they actually pass it through their censors…

(UPDATE: As expected, my comment didn’t make it through the censors even though several later comments WERE posted.)