Yet another child not missed for far too long

ABC 7 out of Denver reports that Juanita Kinzie has been charged with the murder of her three-year-old son, Caleb Pacheco. Caleb’s other relatives last saw him last January. His aunt had been taking care of him, but then Social Services made her give him back to Juanita. The family got really concerned and set up a Facebook page about Caleb this month, although they weren’t able to report him missing because the police couldn’t verify his mother’s whereabouts to do a welfare check and confirm he was missing.

Well, it turns out Caleb was wrapped in a blanket and hidden under his mom’s trailer. And since the police found skeletal remains, chances are he’s been dead for months. I don’t think they know the cause of death yet, but it’s highly unlikely to be natural.

Kinzie became involved in drugs several years ago. “Methamphetamine is probably the key drug involved,” [her brother] said. […] 7NEWS found that Kinzie has a prior criminal history, including arrests for domestic violence, violating a protection order, car burglary, damaging property and possession of burglary tools, according to a state arrest database. In 2006, Kinzie pleaded guilty to domestic violence and harassment in Logan County and was given a deferred sentence of 18 months probation, according to court records. But that sentence was revoked when she violated a protection order in March 2007, and she was sentenced to two months in jail, court records said. She also pleaded guilty to… violating the protection order and was sentenced to three months in jail, 48 hours of community service and two years unsupervised probation. In August 2011, Kinzie was arrested in Lakewood on charges of auto burglary, possession of burglary tools and damaging property, court records said. In June 2010, she pleaded guilty in Denver to false reporting on a mortgage loan transaction and was sentenced to 40 days in jail.

Yeah, sounds like a great mom. Social Services could totally not have predicted that she might neglect or abuse her child. I don’t know what the rest of the family is like, but it sounds like they cared about little Caleb a lot more than his mother did.

My question: she was jailed in August 2011. She was, at the time, supposed to be looking after Caleb. Um, didn’t someone inquire as to who would take care of her kid while she was in jail? After all, Social Services knew he was with her, or supposed to be with her. It seems like someone ought to have realized something was wrong when Juanita waltzed into jail to serve her time without requesting foster care assistance or whatever for Caleb.

It’s such a shame. What else is there to say?

Oscar Emeasoba article

The Washington Examiner, which occasionally covers little-known cases in the DC area, has written an article about Oscar Emeasoba, who was abducted by his father nearly twenty years ago from Silver Spring, Maryland. He’ll be 23 in March.

The article doesn’t have much detail but does mention the father’s nationality. From the name I figured he must be African, but I didn’t know from what country. Turns out he’s Nigerian. He might have taken Oscar to Nigeria, or they might still be living not too far from where the little boy was taken.

FINALLY updated MP of the week

For the first time in yonks, I finally changed my missing person of the week. It is now Diana Isabel Gonzalez, a teen who ran off with a man more than twice her age back in 2005. They’re probably in Mexico.

For the past several weeks I’d been either too sick/tired or too forgetful to change it in time. Someone finally complained.

Dermot Kelly article

A reporter I’ve been in touch with recently has run a very good article on the disappearance of Dermot Kelly; he disappeared forty years ago yesterday, at the age of sixteen.

What I hadn’t known before I spoke to this reporter is that his disappearance may very well be a simple drowning accident or suicide. The Chicago Tribune piece I’d read about his disappearance, written two years after he vanished, said nothing about it, and even the NCMEC didn’t know. But they found Dermot’s shoes and jacket on the banks of a semi-frozen river, a set of bare footprints leading across the ice, and no returning set. And they found a rifle, probably his, under the ice. (If he did die there, I’d be inclined towards accident; if he wanted to kill himself why not use the rifle?)

However, it would be highly unusual for this body to NEVER be found, and Dermot’s parents later decided he’d staged his disappearance or something and ran away. He was declared legally dead in 1992, but in his mom’s obit last year he was listed as having survived her.

I doubt we will ever know what really happened here.

Conviction in Onyango case

Ernest Troy Freeby has been convicted in the murder of his wife, Edwina Onyango, an immigrant from Kenya who disappeared in December 2007 from Pennsylvania. The case was strong because, even though there was no body, they found quite a lot of Edwina’s blood in Ernest’s basement and coal bin and he had no explanation for it. Their marriage was apparently mostly for convenience, so Edwina could get a green card and get on the path to citizenship.

Ernest’s defense was that Edwina wasn’t really dead and instead had just dropped out of sight for reasons of her own; he claimed to have heard from her as recently as July 2009, eighteen months after she vanished. The prosecution pointed out that Ernest couldn’t prove his claims and they could find no one else who claimed to have seen or heard from Edwina. They flew her dad all the way over from Kenya to testify that Edwina had been in regular contact with her family back in the old country, and this contact had abruptly ceased in late 2007.

This Morning Call article provides a good summary of the case, as does WFMZ-TV. No word on how much time Ernest Freeby is expected to get.

Edwina was 34 years old when she died. One of her relatives said, “She was killed. She was killed for apparently stupid reasons.”

Through with Day 2 of I-Match, and I have learned something

So, yesterday we got orientated. There are two other people, both much older women, in my week besides me. Later we will meet with the people ahead of us. I already met one casually in the lobby, who came all the way from ALASKA to go through this. I told her about my friend who lives in a yurt in Alaska and gave birth to her first child there, miles from civilization, with only her mom in attendance.

We each saw the doctor both yesterday and today. She wanted to mess with my crazymeds (there are certain anti-depressants that reduce chronic pain but I’m not taking any of those at present) and I was like HELL no. It took years to get me on the cocktail I’m on now, which has (headache aside) made me feel better than I have in perhaps forever. I don’t want to screw that up. She said she understood, and just prescribed a beta blocker. Today she brought up the subject again and persuaded me to let her make one small change: extended-release Depakote, which I need to take only once a day, as opposed to regular Depakote which I have to take three times a day. She assured me that there is no other difference.

The first day I saw a physical therapist, and today started an exercise regimen. And also got infused for several hours. One of the drugs left a horrible taste in my mouth but otherwise it was all right. I had my laptop with me and surfed the net, so I was not bored.

Today in the group headache education meeting thingy I talked about my frustration and annoyance at my utterly ridiculous diagnosis. The psychologist in charge of the group said no one knows anything about New Daily Persistent Headache. He has a 1400-page textbook dedicated exclusively to headaches, and all of 1.5 pages are devoted to NDPH. There’s not much of an incentive to study it: it doesn’t kill you, it’s very rare, and because it’s pretty much a diagnosis of exclusion, screening for the study would take forever and cost untold millions.

He did share an interesting tidbit of information, however: although no one knows or can prove pretty much anything, the prevailing theory is that NDPH is caused by a viral infection. The majority of sufferers report that, shortly before their headache began, they got a virus and had a fever or whatever for a few days. Then they get better, and then the headache starts. The idea is that the virus causes damage to the nerves that cause headache, and even after the immune system kicks out the virus, the nerve damage remains. Of course, it’s got to be more than that, because (A) Not every NDPH sufferer says they had a virus beforehand and (B) Why does it only happen to a very few people and not others? But the correlation is very strong and they believe they’re on to something.

That theory applies to me just about perfectly: on September 17, 2010, I caught stomach flu from my boyfriend. I puked and was generally miserable for a few days, then recovered and went on with life. Then on October 13, I woke up with a terrific headache…

The $64,000 question, then: why, if Michael and I got the same virus, am I the only one with NDPH? Well, most NDPH sufferers have a history of other kinds of headaches — in my case, migraines afflicted me as a child, and have cursed every female on my mom’s side of the family for at least three generations. That might have something to do with it as well. Michael has no such history in himself or his family.

Of course, this is still just supposition and correlation and so on, not proof. It’s just a theory that happens to make a lot of sense. It certainly doesn’t help me any, even if I were to know for sure that this is what caused this to happen.

I talked about how, last year around this time, when I was desperately looking for answers, how devastated I was when my MRI came out clean. When I got the results I broke down and cried, because I had been so hoping it would show something that would explain what I was going through. I would have almost been relieved to find out I had a brain tumor. (I was quite sure, even before the MRI, that I didn’t, since I had no neurological symptoms besides pain.) I just wanted to have something you could see, something I could point to on the scan and say “Here, there’s the headache, right there.” Instead this is an invisible and elusive enemy I’m fighting. The other women in my group (who don’t have NDPH, incidentally, but other kinds of chronic headache) expressed similar sentiments.

I think the program, so far for me, is doing what it is designed to do. They outright said they could not cure me and could not promise any pain relief at all. But I am being educated and enlightened and learning coping skills and all that stuff.

Fun anecdote: when they asked me this morning how bad the pain was, I said it hurt pretty bad and felt like something was pulling on my hair. A short time later I had a sudden thought and realized that something was pulling on my hair: my headband was too small, too tight for me. I pulled it off and immediately felt much better.