
What. The. Fuck?
(CNN) — Authorities in Kansas are looking for a boy who disappeared about a decade ago, but was not reported missing until a few weeks ago.
“We don’t know what happened to Adam Herrman past ’99, when he was last seen,” Butler County Sheriff Craig Murphy said at a news conference in El Dorado.
“Is he alive, is he dead? That one I can’t answer because we don’t know,” he added.
Adam was 11 or 12 when he was last seen, Murphy said. At the time, he was living in a mobile home park in Towanda, a small town in southern Kansas, with his adoptive parents, Doug and Valerie Herrman. The couple did not report him missing, Murphy said.
A few weeks ago, a person notified Sedgwick County Exploited and Missing Children’s Unit of a “concern” regarding Adam, Murphy said.
The agency did not immediately return CNN’s phone call seeking additional information.
Wichita attorney Warner Eisenbise, who is representing Adam’s adoptive parents, said the couple “really rue the fact that they didn’t” report the boy missing.
“They feel very guilty” about not doing that, he said in a telephone interview. The couple told him the boy had run away frequently, he said, and they believed him to be either with his biological parents or homeless.
Although the Herrmans did not report him missing, “they were very worried about him,” he said.
Authorities have searched the Pine Ridge Mobile Home Park, where the family had lived, and discovered an “answer” to one of their questions, Murphy said, without explaining.
“We did find one of the answers we were looking for, but I am holding that one very tightly,” he said.
Eisenbise said authorities also executed a search warrant on December 15 at the Herrmans’ home in Derby, a town just outside of Wichita. They took the couple’s computer, he said.
Murphy said the couple is cooperating and had not been charged with anything.
Citing a relative, the Wichita Eagle reported the Herrmans had taken Adam into foster care and later adopted him.
Michelle Ponce of the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services, which oversees adoption and foster care, said she could not release any details regard Adam’s case, and could confirm only that he had been in foster care at some point, but was no longer in foster care in 1999.
His adoptive parents felt guilty? Guilty? Erm, they fucking didn’t, or if they had, they’d have reported him missing to begin with.
The authorities gave this boy to a couple who didn’t have the sense to know that if a child goes missing, you need to report it? Nobody checked on him in all that time to see how he was doing?
I’ll say it again, What. The. Fuck?
So, either these people were two of the most stupidest people who have ever walked the earth, or they did something to that little boy.
I know which option I’m going with.
Thanks to Ann Bruce for the heads up.