One for the “trust but verify” file
BAKERSFIELD - While authorities in two states searched for a young boy they thought had been abducted, 9-year-old Zane Newton was buried under an accidental collapse of dirt near his home. His body was found “completely covered” in dirt in a lot hours after the reported kidnapping, police said.
Newton’s playmate told police that the 9-year-old was abducted midmorning Wednesday as the two were playing outside. A masked man pulled up in a black car and opened fire on them, the boy said, adding Newton might have been wounded before the man took him.
In reality, police said, the boys were playing in a lot when Newton fell into a hole and was buried when it collapsed around him.
I guess it just made a better story.
March 22nd, 2008 at 8:15 am
I feel for the family, but I also feel for that 9-year-old friend. I expect that once he grows old enough, the “white lie” he told, though understandable for a 9-year-old boy, will haunt him. My best fiend was hit by a car and killed when I was in 3rd grade (how old was I then?) I felt guilty for a long time even though I was no-where near the accident - I still cringe, thinking it was somehow my fault - though I know better. I can’t imagine being that boy in this news story and having made up a story (out of fear and anxiety, no doubt) that caused such a news story. I hope he realizes that his actions & reactions were completely understandable.
March 29th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
bummer days. fear produces tragedy in most cases. but not all.
at about the same age as these two boys, back on the farm, my cousin and I were digging a well with a hand auger (just to do it, you know, to find water behind the chicken house) and we lost the auger head down in the hole. Jim (not his real name) decided to go in head-first to retrieve it and got stuck, only his ankles and feet protruding above the plain. I couldn’t pull him out as the soft earth held him fast.
now my uncle was a stern fellow and tended toward the belt as remedy for infraction so the thought of abandoning Jim figured prominently in my mind and I almost did just walk away, despite the fact that he was family and my closest friend. but in the Bible Belt, Hell was even more fearsome than my uncle’s wrath (you go to Hell when you succumb to the temptation of cowardice, or so the story goes) so I called out for help and got it (from the hired man) and Jim was saved. of course the beating I received from my uncle proceeded close on the heels of Jim’s salvation but as my consignment to Hell had been temporarily suspended (I had “done the right thing”) I considered the welts a bargain. Jim, as victim of our collective stupidity, was of course spared any abuse; this unfairness (and the fact that Jim never owned up to his complicity in the narrowly-averted tragedy) remained a sore spot with me for many years thereafter of course.
life is not always fair.
yeah, I think I get what happened here. kids, just like too many adults, are not well prepared to manage crisis and will too often succumb to denial in many cases.
the result is just way too sad, man. the cosmological truth of it is that everybody can run, but nobody can hide, especially from yourself. inescapable.
I hope this kid’s folks do the right thing and get him the help he is going to need.
jt