news blues

the news has been plagued this week with the powell family tragedy, a story that truly bothers me to my core.  with every new day more information is released, and as the pieces are coming together it is one of the most horrific stories i've heard in a long time, and even worse, inescapable.

i remember first hearing about josh powell when his wife susan went "missing" 2 years ago.  he claimed that he had taken his 2 sons camping overnight during a blizzard, which i had thought was completely bizarre at the time, and something in my gut told me that if he hadn't murdered his wife, he at least had something to do with her disappearance.

as time progressed, the story got even weirder.  there seemed to be alot of discord and animosity between the powell family and susan's parents.  their already strained relationship seemed to suffer further when josh started saying that susan had run off with another man, and then josh powell's father, steven, expressed that he had had a sexual relationship with susan and had started to fall in love with her.  not long after that, steven was charged with child pornography and voyeurism.  josh's sons were then placed under the custody of susan's parents while josh was allowed supervised visits.

as if that wasn't bad enough, on sunday, days after a judge ruled that josh's sons were to remain under the custody of susan's parents until josh underwent a psych evaluation, he allegedly committed a murder-suicide by blowing up his own house with his 2 sons inside.  the social worker had just dropped off the boys for a visit when he locked her out.  the social worker smelled gas and called 911, but soon after the house exploded.

following the explosion, word came out that the boys had started to verbalize more about the night their mother went missing, saying that she had been in the trunk of the car and when their parents had gotten out of the car, their mother went missing.  there was also news about 911's poor response to the social worker's call resulting in a delay in sending police out to the house.

it is just a terrible story all around.  it even came up during dinner with a girlfriend last night, and we both agreed that the story needed to be told and rehashed because there has to be a way to learn from it to be able to prevent it from happening again in the future.

the sad thing is, despite the delayed response from police, it probably wouldn't have changed the outcome.  but even knowing that, i sincerely hope it is taken seriously by the powers that be.  i think at the very least, it should become an opportunity to find ways to answer the question: what could have been done better?