FORT WAYNE, Ind. (AP) — To assist her dying father, Tarah Souders made a choice: She moved her three young girls to a run-down trailer park in rural Indiana to help take care of him as his lungs rotted from emphysema.
She knew it could be dangerous. The park of about two dozen homes was teeming with convicted sex offenders, with one living at nearly every address. She worried about neighbors with sex offense records who had been helping her father get by, according to trailer park residents. And before she arrived, she even asked her father if her children could be at risk for abuse from two specific men — including a suspect now accused in her daughter's death.
"He said, 'No. They will not touch your children. They're doing everything they're supposed to do,'" said Greg Shumaker, one of 15 convicted sex offenders who live at the park and the other man that Souders had inquired about.