such an awful story! Listening to her 911 tapes, she did such a good job explaining the situation and remaining calm. it sort of seems like maybe she was too calm and collected, accounting for the lack of urgency on the part of the 911 operator…? either that, or the guy was kind of brushing her off like some silly old lady. he had a condescending tone about him. 

Goodness knows the world is better off with the demise of this evil..evil son-of-a-bitch.

It’s the nature of the beast that they always seek to take the innocent with them.

I’m glad she was able to come out and speak for herself, for the most part no one else had been.  She has a tough and thankless job, and potentially dangerous (not just from this example).  If you’ve had a chance to listen to the unedited 911 tape, the dispatcher was completely confused but once he heard the words “children”, “could be life threatening”, and how just a couple days before he’d lost a custody hearing the dispatcher should have had a policy to send police right away.   To be honest, this social worker could have been more clear at the beginning of the 911 call but it is understandable she was upset, and 911 operators are trained to sift through excited speech.  I don’t mean to suggest the 911 operator is at fault.  I think he failed, but there were other failures here too.

That’s unfair to both.

Situations of this sort require complete calm. Anything other than that causes terrible inefficiency. In any emergency situation those who are most effective are those who gather their wits about them and carry on. The professionals who act in a professional manner deal with their pain and frustration after the fact, usually in the form of complete exhaustion.

There can be no explanation, no excuse for the act which led to the deaths of the children.

However, we probably need to try to understand what led to the state of mind that made this act seem somehow appropriate and reasonable to the despondent and demented Mr. Powell. He had been relentlessly hounded by law enforcement. Not only had charges never been filed, but he was never even named a suspect. Access to his children was granted to him only in the most humiliating of ways, again without any clear reason to do so. He had, in essence, become a prisoner, without even ever having been indicted. This is a real petri dish for the growth of paranoia. If law enforcement were going to subject him to this, for reasons none of us know, it most assuredly should have acted to deny any access to the children until there was some sort of exoneration. The system did not cause the criminal act, for which Mr. Powell alone is responsible, but it created an environment conducive to the act.

I agree with you. At some level, the people to whom we entrust our children, social workers, teachers and caregivers, are poorly compensated, subjected to grueling loads and long hours and paid embarrassingly poorly. The clearest example is teachers. Just look at how they are so routinely abused by the sorry likes of Scott Walker, John Kasich, Chris Christie, Rick Scott, Rick Perry. People like this have created a great hostility towards teachers for their own narrow political advantage. But, what we do without teachers? America is filled with the lousiest sort of parents who do nothing to support their children and depend on the schools as day care. Education doesn’t even enter into the picture. But, teachers are, in many ways treated even better than social workers. Teachers are simply the more visible and the more tempting targets. Until this attitude changes and until we begin to support these people in their work, we are just inviting even more disasters.

I know George Bush had a lot of respect for teachers, I don’t know the opinions of the current batch of Republicans, but I’m confident its not the teachers they despise, but the unions.  There are many great teachers, but also many poor ones (like the pedophiles in that LA school) and the ones in New York and elsewhere who are criminals, unable to be placed with children yet because of union rules they continue to receive a full salary.   If you got rid of the unions and transferred the ‘protections’ the unions provide to a third party the teachers would be protected from being taken advantage of, receive higher salaries, be rewarded for good performance and not rewarded or in extreme cases demoted or fired for poor performance.  In other words, treat them like private sector non-union employees.  They’d be better off from making more money, society would be better off from not being pillaged by the unions, and the children would be better off from having teachers concerned with doing their jobs instead of protecting their jobs.

Although this guy is a horrible, horrible person, I can’t help but to place some blame on the sensationalist media in this country: Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, HLN, all of them (Mediaite, at least, tends to stay away from such “national crime thrillers”). And this isn’t a conservative “I hate the MSM” thing. 

They ruin suspects’ lives before knowing all the facts. They basically eliminate the presumption of innocence this country is respected for and have the ability to turn an entire country against people who have not been proven guilty. It doesn’t matter if in some cases they may have been right. They can ruin peoples’ lives, yet they have little to no accountability for it. If this case wasn’t sensationalized so much, and the media hadn’t turned the entire country against this guy when he hadn’t even sat in front of a jury yet, maybe he wouldn’t have been pushed to such drastic levels, whether or not he was guilty.

We have a court system, flawed as it may be, for a reason. The media should not function as judge and jury.

This poor woman. I hope she can find peace one day. 

wow.  i totally agree with you. who woulda thought????

Where that analysis breaks down, Chuck, is in places like Texas and Florida where there are no teachers’ unions, only associations and in which there is no collective bargaining for teachers. That doesn’t make your analysis wrong, but it calls into question the motivation for this attack on teachers.

I’ve no doubt that officials leaned on this guy because they knew he was guilty and hoped he would break. 

God knows Powell proved them right and then some.

Who could have guessed that even a supervised visit would be a deadly risk to these boys.  Who could have guaged the sort of evil it takes to say, as your sons run to you, “I’ve got a surprise for you”, and then to hack at their necks with an ax right before you blow up the house.

Yeah, law enforcement is accountable for the responsibility that we give them, but who could have seen this.

There are monsters that can’t be fathomed by even the most trained and the most jaded among us.

I’m sure there will now be a flurry of accusations and CYA maneuvering.

Social workers and teachers are pikers at facing arm chair
quarterbacking and public opprobrium as compared with law enforcement officials.

yes, that’s why there is an investigation into the matter –  why he labeled the call *routine* instead of * emergency*, and why it took him 8 minutes to even dispatch help, which then took another 13 minutes.

what is unfair about what I said? (hint: nothing, you just insist on harassing me)

If law enforcement was so certain about the prior act, why didn’t it become more vigilant? Why didn’t it press onward? Powell may very well have killed his wife. On reflection, it seems more likely than not. But, if we’re wrong, the hounding was very dangerous, wasn’t it?

I basically agree with everything but your last sentence. Law enforcement tends to be given undue deference and adulation. It’s a contributing cause to so many of their failures. The cop on the beat is mythology in America.

I think she will, but we should all pray for her.

And, you are right about W. I took exception to some of his specific policies, but he did respect teachers and education. I suppose what I may notice more than you because I am in Texas, is the utter change in attitude from W to Tollbooth.

You should find out the whole story. He is no innocent.He bashed his own babies heads in before burning them up.All over him not being able to cope.COWARD.People have already made up their minds when this man killed his own babies. So sad for all who are left to deal with what this coward did.

The unfairness is inherent in your notion that the individuals didn’t seem to be adequately frantic, that they acted in what appears to be a calm, collected manner, when in fact, you and I know little about the attendant facts.

But, please, go ahead and flag me and complain to Alex about my harassing you. That’s the price for having an opinion different than yours. A price I am willing to pay.

Seriously dude?

This man was the last person to see his wife and the camping story was suspect.

According to the maternal grandparents the boys had begun to verbalize what happened that night so the dad killed them to keep them from exposing his guilt.

If you look at statistics it’s usually a spouse or a close aquantantance who has done the deed in a murder investigation.

Why is this woman being treated like a hero? Her job was to supervise these children and keep them safe and she let them enter that house without her. This psychopath didn’t pull the children from her. There was no struggle. She stood there and watched as he opened the door and then locked her out and didn’t even react by her own admission until she heard the child crying inside. Not to mention when she called 911 the first thing she did was ask the dispatcher “what should I do?” and couldn’t even tell them where she was for 2 whole minutes.  She messed this up just as badly as the dispatcher did. She knew exactly how evil this person was and claims that she loved these boys  but what she did was no better then what the dispatcher did. Do you think that dispatcher doesn’t have regrets either? There is plenty of blame to go around.

No, my point was that she was so calm and collected, doing an amazing job, that maybe the 911 guy didn’t fully understand how serious and frantic the situation actually was. Trying to give him a little benefit of doubt there, and congratulating her on her cool head.

But, I couldn’t help but notice that in the tape I heard, he did seem to be condescending. He took 8 minutes, going over mundane facts, instead of acting. 

There was nothing unfair about my comment. Yours however….

She was a hero!! She did what she could. It’s real shame that you believe that she has to have superhuman powers to be a hero. I don’t think she thought he was evil before the house exploded.  This was unusual situation that happen.  

The operator was at fault. He brushed her off right from the beginning. This is on his head as well.

Jesus, are you living in la la land or what?

Whatever ….

I never said she had to have super human powers to be a hero. I said she didn’t do her job. She was sent to supervise the children with their father. Her job was to not let them be alone with that man. Right off the bat she allows them to go running into the house without her. Regardless of if this is an unusual situation any CPS worker supervising a visitation is always told flat out do not allow the supervised party to get any opportunity to get the child alone/away from you. It doesn’t matter if the person is a suspected murder or simply an abusive parent. She acts like this is how she always lets visitations go, like it’s normal but it’s not. In doing this she is putting all the children under her care at risk.

You’re not very realistic.  You need to live in the real world.  The boys ran up to the door and the parent shut the door before she got to the door.  She called 911 like she was trained and like what a responsible person is suppose to do.  She can’t help it if the dispatcher was not doing his job.  A CPS worker doesn’t have superhuman powers to prevent what was going to happen. This could’ve happen to any CPS worker.  She is not a police officer.   

This CPS worker has blood on her hands.  If she can’t protect these boys then she shouldn’t be paid to do so.

The Child ”Protectives” system, the Courts, the Police…..in the military we’d call this SNAFU.

she called 911 10 minutes after the incident.  10 minutes.