After having transcribed the short probable cause hearing today I realized that it was not just the poor and shoddy reporting that phone calls were labeled as "threatening"..
The D.A.'s office stated that when Angela was on her way home "that she received a mysterious phone call from her residence with a woman making 'threatening' remarks towards her son{JF}"..
This is what makes me so angry. If LE admits that there were threatening phone calls made to the mother from inside her own house about JF just prior to her discovery of his disappearance, why on earth didn't they suspect foul play immediately and begin canvassing the neighborhood? Without the phone calls, I can see why LE hesitated. But if AD told them about the phone calls, there is no excuse for not taking this seriously!! The calls indicate a threat to a child by an unidentified adult who is inside the home of a child who is supposed to be home alone. There are horror films based on this type of scenario!!!
I can't help but wonder that if the call had come in from one of Houston's more affluent suburbs, LE would have responded more quickly.
I suspect it would have, especially a child of 12 disappearing on Christmas eve. Of all days of the year for a child to disappear voluntarily it is that day.
Even if they didn't think it was an abduction, surely surely at the least they should have thought he went out and got locked in somewhere, perhaps a shed, fell off something and was to injured to go for help, all sorts of non crime but equally important reasons to work hard and fast to find a child. There should have been a big search that night and since obviously its short staffed then let the public join the search too.
If there is one thing that I am absolutely furious about with LE, it is the 3 days of having it handled by juvenile detectives aka runaway rather than as abduction (if threats were told and i see no reason why not). Whether they believed it or not doesn't mean that a full scale search right that day wasn't important.
Yes I think a child from a wealthy or even well educated background (i.e family who is able to handle LE etc with no checkered history) would have had a whole different response with a missing child christmas eve.
Of all days kids don't runaway!!!!!
We know now they couldn't have saved him but that is not the criteria for searching hard and early. Holidays only make it more likely something seriously bad happened, accident or foul play.
ETA. That whole area should have been ablaze with lights and searchers, the apartment complexes and the streets on Christmas Eve. Media would have had it as front page headlines locally for sure and probably nationally as it is a slow news time by the 25th. And i will repeat, it doesn't matter what they believed about the parents, i cannot think of one scenario that justifies not going all out that evening.
They did a magnificent job once the video fell into their laps after the body was found. The first three days? not so sure. Hope some cops in juvenile division are feeling very sad about their response
