I saw the article.  I want to say…  loudly …

WHO CARES ANYMORE??  

Father, two boys found dead (video)

Who is the “loco” in “In Loco Parentis” courts, again, this time?

March 30, 2009 (WLS) — McLean County authorities say Michael Connolly and his two young sons have been found dead in rural Putnam County.

“Nine-year-old Duncan and 7-year-old Jack were the focus of an Amber Alert issued earlier this month.”

My commentary.  9 yr old and 7 yr old Jack did NOTHING in this case but submit to court-ordered visitation with their already violent father (see restraining order), after which someone killed them and stuffed them in their father’s car.  They are (er, WERE), minors. Putting them as the subject of a sentence in this reporting just sounds dishonest.  The Subject is grammatically responsible for the action of the verb.  In this case, the dramatic “verb” is “were found.”  See “The Grammar of Male Violence” (and reporting on it).  

Yes, they “were.”  They were #1 born.  #2 into violent family #3 became the subject of a restraining order, I bet, along with their mother, who they probably witnessed being assaulted by their Dad, or the effects of it.  Bad boys.  They WERE, obviously, the sons of a woman who complied with court orders, because their Dad got them for that weekend.  Bad boys.  Next, they WERE kidnapped (in most states this is a felony crime).  Then they WERE found, dead.  

I’ve taught lots of children of this age range, and by and large, I would not call most of the little boys passive.  Typically, they are quite active.  Sometimes, I hear, enough so to require Ritalin, etc.  

OK, Suppose we don’t know WHO killed them yet.  Let’s Get Honest about REPORTING, folks.  Maybe after that, something might happen to address the dishonesty of “family court” or “restraining orders” in combination with Visitation, PERIOD.  

I am so sick of hearing stories like this.  Should I just never read the news again, and hope it’s not my kids?

My kids were stolen on an overnight visitation too. I warned the police too, and not just once.  I warned everyone that was involved.   That includes police, friends, family members (4 of whom I later learned were endorsing and approving this; there WERE no legal grounds to switch custody suddenly, so the hired thug (my ex) just did it (with help from woman#2) and not in a vacuum.  My written documentation of concern about this goes back two years before it happened.  My daughter diaried, one year in advance, and left it out plainly, in my own journal, that she’d feel more comfortable if she knew a code language.  Stupid me, I focused more on the preventing the event than the developing of such a code language).  I placed her in front of counselor experienced in DV, for a safe confidante (as the entire family was already split along the fault line of “but he’s a nice guy?” analogy, primarily). (Nice guys don’t assault pregnant wives, folks.  Not repeatedly. The action means you lost the appellation “nice” or should).  

FOLKS, IN LOCO PARENTIS IS NUTS!  The key to knowing is CARING. More about the life of the children, physical lives, physical safety, than the “rights” of the perpetrator.  That is what someone committing violence against an intimate should be called, until the behavior, attitude is changed and reparations made.  This almost never happens, so let the name STICK, and stop trying to ice over the cracks in the family cake; it shows through. 

I would like to remind the general public of something.  We have a serious problem in the Family Courts of the United States. KNOWING is driven by CARING.  Pronouncing one cares is not an indicator.  LISTENING is.

I have so experienced this I do not know myself anymore, some days.  I know that my (absent, FYI), daughters do not know me any more, and the very little I’ve seen them, they are changed, absent the buffering I provided to the shut-down of their lives.  There are so many verbal/mental/land mines they (and I, now als0) must avoid that, someone, one is really tempted to adjust personality to accommodate.

I will yell, jump, do circus tricks, if it will make a difference.  Speaking in a reasonable tone, complying with all court orders, and telling the truth as a mother’s instinct reported, did not save:  Connolly, Castillo, Freeman (Australia), or many many others.  

The courts are punishing Moms for caring.  THIS is partly now.  Damn!  !!!

The three-week-old search ended in tragedy about 100 miles south of Chicago.

[As I point out elsewhere on my blog, generic non-person, irrelevant detail nouns take on a life of their own, distracting from the central matter.  A judge, somewhere, probably listened to a mediator or custody evaluator, SOMEwhere, follow their prescriptions, per policies set in place in the late 1980s / early 1990s and funded to this day, to enforce the theology that a child without a father is a fish without water.

It is up to the larger public NOT in these courts –either as litigants or married to one, or employed by them, or having a profession sustained by them (now WHAT % of the populace does this leave unaffected?) to make itself actually not only larger (which it is), but VOCAL, and INVOLVED, and LEARNED in the vocabulary principals and players.  AND then do something appropriate.  At some point, the “at least that’s not My neighborhood, family, kids, wife, police officer, lawsuit, judicial district, etc. ”  the “it’s not my business” theology needs to be confronted.  Please help, I say.  Stop picking up the broken souls floating downstream in “social programs” and stop the breaking which is starting FAR, far closer to the top than imaginable.  

Michael Connolly, 40, failed to return the boys to their mother – his ex-wife – on Sunday, March 8.

Initially, investigators thought Connolly might be in the Chicago area where his relatives live in southwest suburban Oak Lawn.  But now, authorities say they found bodies matching the descriptions of the two missing Leroy, Illinois, brothers and cancelled the Amber Alert.

Authorities say the children’s bodies were found Sunday inside a car registered to Michael Connolly. Police happened upon the 1991 Dodge Dynasty after receiving a call about a suspicious vehicle in a secluded area. At around 6 p.m. Sunday, investigators examined the vehicle and found two deceased boys in the back seat area. The body of a man matching Michael Connolly’s description was found about 60 feet west of the car. Autopsies have been scheduled.

The sheriff has not said if there were any obvious signs of trauma or if a weapon was recovered.

On the day that the boys disappeared, there was a restraining order in place against Michael Connolly because authorities say he continued to harass his ex-wife. The two had divorced in 2007 after 13 years of marriage.

Let’s talk about this.  The restraining order folk is ONE foot of a large, virtual, giant marching across the land.  The “but kids need their Dads” (symbolized primarily by family courts) is the other large, stomping foot.  Clunk, Clunk Clunk across the land, and in circles, gradually clearing the territory of live, untraumatized people. Stomp, Stomp, Stomp down the decades.  These feet are connected at the Head.  The Head believes itself to know what’s best for the people below (who are relatively speaking, ants).  The legs above the feet are unequal, moreover one foot faces  forward, and the other backward.  This is why it is so HARD to get free from abuse.  The restraining order purports to confront, protect, and separate.  The family court purports to, and presumes this is advisable and possible, reunite, supervise, reform, and modify a relationship that JUST SPLIT.  

It’s mowing down families.  As we speak, this appears to be another one (details unclear yet)(2 adult males & 2 handguns inside, I DNK if this was DV related or not.  DK it was not the kids’ fault…..):

 

6 Killed In California Home Shooting

At Least 3 Of Victims Children In Murder-Suicide In Silicon Valley

SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 30, 2009

Santa Clara police officer stand watch outside the crime scene where six people, including at least three children, were killed and one was critically injured late Sunday night in an apparent murder-suicide at a townhome development in Santa Clara, Calif., on Monday, March 30, 2009.  (AP Photo/Tony Avelar)

MORE STORIES

• Gunman Stopped By Single Bullet To Chest
• Suspect’s Estranged Wife Worked At N.C. Nursing Home Where 8 Were Killed Before Lone Police Officer Intervened.

  ??? “Where gunman killed 7 elderly patients, 1 male nurse attempting to intervene until someone with a gun showed up and stopped the shooter.”

Passive tense.  The spin, obviously is on the guns, and the body count, not the criminal behavior:

“Investigators are looking into whether Stewart may have targeted the facility because his estranged wife worked there, police said Monday.  [Why doesn’t this surprise me?]

McKenzie said investigators are looking at whether what he called domestic issues may have been the motive for Stewart to open fire on his defenseless victims. Investigators said multiple weapons were recovered at the scene.   [HEY!  I have and had “domestic issues.”  I never yet took up a gun to solve them. It ain’t the “domestic issues”].   

McKenzie said the woman – whom he did not name – worked at the nursing home. He said he believed that the couple was recently separated but that he did not have any other details. He was not sure if the woman was at the nursing home at the time of the shootings. “

• Heroic Nurse, Shot 27 Times, Saved Lives

Incidentally, re:  Heroic Nurse, yes, the nurse WAS heroic.  Not mentioned in THIS title is that a gunman was going after his ex-wife, and she happened to work in a nursing home.  It “bled” so it “led,” but a choice was made to discuss the hero rather than the “villain” in this one.  

Maybe we should just outlaw divorce (which appears to be dangerous).  Knowing this, many women would probably just not marry, or even attempt to fully intimately bond with a partner, or for that matter, their kids.  We ARE headed that way, right?  

• “Sue Griffin … said she was an ex-wife of Stewart’s who hadn’t spoken with him since their 2001 divorce, told reporters that in the past Stewart had exhibited “violent tendencies” from time to time. 
• “He’d get mad because of things that didn’t go his way. He never really hurt me, but he would get mad and blow up,” she said. 
• Griffin, who divorced Stewart after 15 years of marriage, said he had been trying to reach her during the past week through family members. 
• She said Stewart claimed to have cancer and needed to go away. But he gave no hint of the violence he had planned for this quiet Carolina town. “

BACK to the FATHER ON WEEKEND VISITATION WITH TWO SONS….

Joint custody with a batterer is unsafe and impossible.  It hurts the kids.  They will sooner or later HAVE to pick a side.  It also hurts the communities surrounding these two people.  They’re SPLIT, dammit!    Make a fair judgment based on whatever brought them into court to start with, based on any criminal behaviors.  Apart from criminal behaviors, leave them alone.

Stop hiring more experts to create more names to reframe existing, graphically uncomfortable to describe behavior that, done by a stranger, would be cause for arrest.  STOP the thought crime, the behavior crimes, the NOT being dependent on social services crime (among which is  homeschooling, or being a successful single parent, I found out), and the other such like.

I think the 10 commandments are JUST fine, including not only the one the Catholics tend to omit (#2), the one the Protestants and the Catholics, generally speaking violate weekly (#4, as I recall, it’s the sabbath), and the one the state habitually violates (Honor your mother and father), along with the don’t commit adultery, perjury (“bear false witness”) and #s 1 & 10 which, if one does NOT violate, it’s hard to live a reasonable life in this republic.  The first relates to not having other Gods before this one (which is generally looked on askance around these parts) and “thou shalt not covet,” which is related.  Accordingly, we have to consume, be consumers, and raise  our children to be good little materialistic consumers, because of the economy.  This is more likelyo what (I feel) the womb to tomb concept of “public education” (etc.) is about.  How complex is that, really?

The Chicago-area family of the two missing brothers had pleaded with the boys’ father to bring them home.  

(Well — see below– the father had already made it clear his intent was to punish his ex-wife.  FYI, pleading with some in on the position to extort you (i.e.,hostages taken) doesn’t generally work.  Trust me.)

“We love the boys so much. We want them back. We want everybody back. We want our family back together,” said Joyce Connolly, Michael Connolly’s aunt.

The boys’ mother, Amy Leichtenberg, said she warned a judge her ex-husband might take off with the children.

“I told him he was a flight risk. My attorney told him he was a flight risk. Nobody believed me,” said Leichtenberg.

[That was the Amber alert, coming from someone who was paying attention.]

Police had said there was reason to be worried about the boys.

“We are concerned because we’ve had some incidents in the past with Mr. Connolly that indicate he is not a stable individual and that he makes verbal threats towards himself, the children and his ex-wife,” Chief Gordon Beck, LeRoy Police Department, said during the search.

ALL of this behavior is self-explanatory in a “Conduit System” frozen in its rigidity.  Major players in the situation KNEW that this man was a risk for kid-snatching.  The fact a domestic violence restraining order was actually necessary (presumed in that it was granted), is itself a danger sign. I feel that not to jump, shout, make a stink and in short react in a Non-Numb manner is necessary at times to counter then Numb-Dumb responses of the “that’s just waht you said” mentality, driven by “children need their fathers, we are a fatherless nation, Dads Count too, and so forth” grants system driving the mentality of the court system which is driving families into the ground, sometimes more than literally, as in this case.  I happen to listen to and know women who have lost their children to batterers, and we repeat this experience so often — kids being abused, children being stolen by the father on an overnight, sometimes out of state, or in my case, in-state (meaning Amber Alert didn’t even squeak, police wouldn’t act, and judge, thereafter, refused to give a factual and legal basis for (her) decision.))  

If I’m run-on, it’s intentional, maybe to counter the Shut-Up system that continues to function in it’s blunderbuss manner to smack at families, emotionally, after someone has filed a “restraining order,” and generally after plenty of previous smacking around, intimately-speaking (“IPV”).  I am about to blow the calm and light-hearted demeanor of this blog with the severity of what’s up.  I have spent decades (two, so far) with this issue, and attempted to live my life around it, leave with my heart in my mouth, raise our daughters and work around it.  In the process, and I’m not at all the only one, I have been after abuse exposed to the worst of the worst of the system, it seems, in the highest reaches of its authority, and sometimes within my own family.

 

“He has always told me,

cause I took the kids from him,

that I would suffer just like he did,” said Leichtenberg (Mother).

Well, he was a man of his word.