From: Jasper
Date: Saturday, April 14, 2007
Time: 02:49:22 AM
Noname, …..Where in Justme’s courageous post do you see a massive cover-up in the O.J. case involving hundreds of people? I saw painful personal experiences that speak to the question of understanding Fred Goldman’s pain and learning from first-hand experience that the authorities don’t always do their jobs. You don’t need a giant conspiracy to get bad guys to lie and cheat and “good guys” to help them in order to cover their own butts for not doing what they were supposed to do. ……………Sometimes you don’t even need a bad guy. …………. Back in 2003 (I think) my 9-year-old granddaughter and a friend disappeared from school. The school administrators called the police and the parents. The police interviewed everyone who had last seen the kids. They got conflicting stories. So did the parents. The administrators skewed their stories to appear blameless. The kids said all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. Few of them told the whole truth. Several of them lied. There was no conspiracy. There was, however, a common denominator: Wherever MOST of the people involved thought they had a good reason to hide the truth, they did. ………… The families searched on their own and tried to coordinate what they learned with the school, the cops and each other. We kept getting reports that the girls were seen in distant parts of the city at the same time. I knew that none of these stories could be right because I knocked on doors and found a trail of witnesses from block to block for miles down a street in a different direction. I went back to the school and reported what I found to the cop in charge. I gave him the names, address and phone numbers of the people I talked to. Instead of following up on it he asked the cops who were supposed to have done what I did. They said they did it. The people I talked to either never saw the cops or saw them driving by slowly and looking out of their widows. Those cops lied. Other cops covered for them. …………. The girls were found many miles away when two suburban women in a downtown restaurant saw them with a homeless woman who tried to use them to panhandle. The suburban women questioned the girls who were well dressed and well groom and the homeless woman who was not. One of them retained the woman. The other called the police. The police brought the girls to the nearest police station and called the parents to pick them up. They put the homeless woman in jail until they could figure out what happened. Only one cop I talked to seemed to want to know the truth. ………… The girls told a convincing story of being kidnapped by the homeless woman and forced to panhandle. There were problems with the story. My son gently picked at it until if fell apart. The girls lied. They just decided on a whim to go exploring and walked, and walked and walked until they ended up where they were found with no idea where they were. They lied because they were afraid of getting into trouble. So did the cops. …………..The moral of the story is that all kinds of people lie for many reasons and if you want the truth, you sometimes have to dig for it. –Jasper