I expected my daughter to tell me where she was going. If she did not, and failed to turn up as expected, I would have been concerned. If i woke up on a morning like this one to find her not at home I would certainly have been alarmed.
I would not have been so overcome with panic that I lost the ability to function or communicate.
On the flip side, when I was twelve I do not recall either my parents or my friends parents worrying over much about where we were. Our rule was to be out of sight (or we would get chores) and be home when the streetlights came on.
Do we know that mom had actually left? And even assuming she had, and he called her, it is further "evidence" of his innocence -- it is probably a reasonable conclusion that a guilty person would not want to call attention to his own crime.
In any case, a phone call asking where she is does not equal alarm. It is what it is, a request for information. Clearly he was not, at that point, alarmed.
Completely reasonable. You would be making calls including to the police. The point is not that a reasonable person would not be concerned -- they WOULD -- but that a reasonable and rational person would be able to continue functioning. Concerned is smart, concerned is reasonable... gibbering panic in which you are apparently physically incapable of action or communication is... dubious?
The point is that night is over. There IS activity. People are out and about. Finding your kid missing at 5am would be absolutely freaky, at 5am they are MISSING. At 5am you can assume, at the least, that they are doing something that they very much are not supposed to be doing. They snuck out, they ran away, they are in trouble. At 5am it is an emergency.
At 9am they are just missing -- no caps, no automatic emergency, no instant panic.
