Aarone update

Aarone Thompson's father, Aaron Thompson, has been indicted.

What happens here doesn't stay here

Needless to say, this has been huge news here, and its gruesomeness put it on the national stage, I guess. Here is the photo of the couple. What makes news here, makes news everywhere. JonBenet, Columbine ... yup. But not Aarone Thompson, who is still missing after nearly a year, the trail completely cold, especially now that one of the people of interest in the case is dead. Shely Lowe died in May, and the stories about her death are the most recent ones I can find anywhere about the case. So sad.

Another Aarone update

So the big news in the Aarone Thompson case last week was that the case was going to a grand jury, and now that process likely will be slowed with her father's girlfriend's sudden death. I'm not sure if there ever will be justice for this poor little girl.

I guess that's not just Denver; I guess that's just life anywhere. This haunts me as did the case of Brittany Locklear, a girl in North Carolina who was abducted while waiting for her school bus and found dead several days later. This didn't make the national news either, and again, I can't shake the feeling that that would have been different if she had been white and not a member of the Lumbee tribe.

I wish the world didn't have to be so sad.

News of the West

Here's a little more background on the Aarone Thompson case, about which I have written before here at MHA. There will be "big developments" today -- we'll see what those are.

In other news, my friend, the bag designer and fashion marketer Brandi Shigley went to the immigration rally here in the city Monday (along with 74,999 other people) and took a great set of photos. Businesses were closed; traffic was a nightmare. I link to them here with her gracious permission.

Aarone update

Aarone's on the front page again. Regardless of the truth of this story, if her name stays on the lips and in the minds of the people, maybe pressure will mount to solve this case. And again, I'm getting a little tired of the smack-talking from Dan Oates.

Aarone

If Aarone Thompson had been a white girl, you would have heard of her by now. Her case is more chilling than that of Jonbenet Ramsey, the Denver area's winner and still champ in child cause celebre cases. I guess I don't need to keep on going about how there's a deep and disturbing racial divide here, more so than in the South. I started to write about this when Kathleen wrote so movingly about New York's reaction to the death of Nixzmary Brown. Unfortunately, the reaction here to Aarone Thompson has been more muted, in part because the case just isn't as clear-cut, in part because her brown face doesn't fit with Denver's image of itself as a playground for the upscale bourgeoisie.

Aarone (her name has an accent aigu on the "e," but I don't know how to do that with HTML) would be seven years old, if only anyone could find her. She lived with her father and his girlfriend in Aurora, a city next door to Denver, supposedly until the beginning of November. (Her mother, at least at the time, lived in a homeless shelter in Detroit.) For two days, news coverage here revolved around the massive hunt for the sweet-faced little girl who had allegedly wandered off from her home on a freezing cold afternoon, supposedly after a dispute with her father's girlfriend over a cookie.
Two days into the search, the police abruptly called it off. Then came the announcement: Aarone had been gone for a year and a half. She hadn't been seen by the other kids in the house, hadn't been seen by neighbors, hadn't ever been enrolled in school, nothing. A little girl had disappeared into the ether.
Nobody ever has been charged in Aarone's disappearance. Nothing was found in a grim search of her house and yard and surrounding areas for her remains. Friends of her family continued their door-to-door search for a live child. Nothing.
Now, four months later, the police and press have grown eerily quiet. Every once in a while, someone comes forward and swears they have seen Aarone -- getting on a city bus, walking down a sidewalk. For me, there is the equally horrific thought that, if she didn't meet a terrible end nearly two years ago, she's wandering around out there, somewhere in the world. I see her in my dreams sometimes, the little girl with braids and a wry smile. If I were the praying kind, I would do it for her.
This is the first mention of Aarone in the Denver Post in months. The Aurora police chief takes the occasion of the father's girlfriend's arrest on traffic charges to talk some smack about her. I'm going to take the politician's route and avoid saying whether I think this is deserved. Rather, I would ask him to focus his energy on finding this little girl, dead or alive, and rounding up the person or people who might have hurt her. There's always evidence. There's always a way to bring justice to the deserving.