| Mojougwe |
Apr 5, 2006 12:58 PM |
Mama's Intuition > Entire Police Force
I don't see a thread on this yet, but here goes.
There's a pretty interesting read from the nytimes.com about a Mexican Mother who is sleuthing out info to get her 36yr old son back: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/04/wo...idnapping.html
Quote:
MEXICO CITY, March 28 — María Isabel Miranda never wanted to be a detective. She was a former teacher who worked as a consultant to schools and led a comfortable, quiet life with her husband and her only son.
Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
María Isabel Miranda decided the police were ineffective in seeking her son, Hugo Alberto Wallace, who was kidnapped in July. So she did her own search, using ads, leading to eight arrests.
Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
All that changed when her son, Hugo Alberto Wallace, a 36-year-old divorced entrepreneur, was kidnapped on July 11, 2005, as he left a movie theater. Four months later, the state and federal police had made no progress in finding his abductors. So Ms. Miranda took matters in her own hands.
She tracked the gang members down one by one, finding witnesses, getting names and staking out their houses. She led the police to five of the alleged conspirators in her son's abduction, and they were arrested. She even, in a brazen bluff, faced down one of the gang's ringleaders as he held a gun on her, telling him the house was surrounded.
"It was like a jigsaw puzzle, and I went around putting together the story," she said in an interview. "Without wanting to, I have turned into a detective. But I don't like the work."
Ms. Miranda's story reflects a cruel reality in Mexico. Not only are kidnappings rampant among middle-class and wealthy people, but the Mexican police in most cases do such a poor job of investigating them that a majority go unsolved, anticrime advocates say.
José Antonio Ortega Sánchez, the head of the Citizen's Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice, said most kidnappings went unreported not just because people do not trust the police.
"First, the police are negligent in most cases, and, second, some police officers are colluding with the kidnappers," he said.
Ms. Miranda's dogged determination to find her son, who the police believe is dead, has made her something of a celebrity in Mexico, and it has placed her in so much danger that the federal government now provides her with bodyguards.
"Señora Miranda effectively has brought us most of the information for the arrests of these people," said José Luis Manjarrez, a spokesman for the attorney general's office.
Mr. Wallace's ordeal began when the son of someone he had once bought property from approached him and said he knew a lovely girl who wanted to meet him, Ms. Miranda said.
Two days later, the acquaintance, Jacobo Tagler Dobín, introduced Mr. Wallace to a winsome dancer, Juana Hilda González, who danced for a rock group called Climax.
They invited Mr. Wallace to the movies on July 11. As he left the theater, at about 9:30 p.m., two men forced him into his Jeep Cherokee at gunpoint and drove him to a house in the Extremadura section of the capital, hustling into a building on Perugina Street, Ms. Miranda said.
Mr. Wallace, a burly man who played amateur American football and collected Harley Davidson motorcycles, fought with his abductors, investigators say. A neighbor called the police. Officers arrived at the residence, but then went away after one of the gang members convinced them that nothing was wrong. Later that night, the kidnappers moved Mr. Wallace to another location. He has not been seen since.
A month after the abduction, Ms. Miranda received a letter with photographs of her son and a demand for a large sum of money. She said she dutifully turned it over to the city police.
A week later, a second letter said she should not have given the police the photos and threatened to kill her and her son. She knew at once that there was a leak in the police department, she said.
So she sent a message to the kidnappers through a newspaper advertisement and an Internet page, saying she was willing to negotiate, she said. A third letter arrived. The kidnappers insisted on the original ransom and again threatened to kill Mr. Wallace. She sent another message saying she was willing to pay the ransom. Then she heard nothing more.
"I entered a panic thinking about what they had done to my son," she said. "I decided to go full out, in the street, doing investigations myself."
Her son's car, which had a special antitheft device that shuts an engine down, had been left around the corner from the house on Perugina Street. It was there that Ms. Miranda began her investigation.
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