I feel for the Smrekars, I really do. I can hear my dad saying "You're dam---d if you do, and dam---d if you don't!" In earlier threads, there were posters wondering why none of the locals cared about Jayme enough to tell anything and everything they knew about the family on the chance that it might help save her.
I interview older people a lot in my work as a genealogist. I do my research first, then try to fill in the remaining blanks using family local knowledge. But it's delicate work, because people become flustered when asked questions they don't know the answer to. Especially when they know it's something they aught to know if they had been paying attention. (You would be surprised how many older people can't tell me what their grandmother's maiden name was.) Then they get defensive and try to explain why it's not their fault that they don't know.
This defensiveness is what I hear in the Smrekars' words. They didn't pay attention to their Closs neighbors, and now they are left sputtering. I feel like they are saying "We just didn't or couldn't see the Closs's activities." I don't think they meant, for instance, that the Closs' never worked outside or mowed the lawn. They're just saying that's an example of what they can't see through the tract of thick trees separating their homes.
I'm going to attach two street view screen-shots. One showing the area between the Closs and Smrekar homes. The Smrekar driveway down the road in the picture has a white sign of some kind near it (and a red dot by me.
The second image is what a person would see of the Closs home and yard when driving by. The view would be almond completely blocked when the trees are leafed out.
So my view of the Smrekars is that they tried to help.
