I am making a lot of assumptions here, of course.
Where I live, if you apply for welfare and have children, you must give the name of the father in order to get welfare because they go after him for money. If you claim you do not know, you are to start listing anyone it could be and they DNA test the guys in order to establish paternity. I cannot believe Texas does it any differently, but who knows.
Since she did not go for establishing paternity until 2009, that indicates to me that she did not live on welfare. Somehow she had enough income to live without the assistance and have health insurance as well to cover him.
It sounds to me like she did the right thing , but that may have left him vulnerable to daycare providers, coaches, teachers, neighbors, boyfriends, ? who did not have the best intentions for him. Statistics point out his vulnerablity to perverts.
Even at age 10 or so he was being inappropriate by talking about dropping acid. Maybe showing off, but that is something he thought was desireable to show off. He was a child and that would not have the same devious shock value that an older person would come up with.
Maybe people said he changed in the last year, but if he has not been in Boswell school since 2010, students were talking about how they were afraid of him there. So, there were issues far before last year.
I imagine her oarents lived rurally as they put a trailer in their yard. Perhaps Texas is different, but that would never be allowed in the cities where I live.
I wonder how they provided water and sewage to that trailer? Sounds like an expensive proposition to me.