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Archives > Volume 7 Issue 49 - September 9, 2009 Boy found in secret room at Grandma's...A boy allegedly abducted in a custody dispute nearly two years ago has turned up alive, hiding with his mother in a small, specially built secret room behind a false wall at his grandmother's Illinois home, investigators said. CBS News story here 
Richard "Ricky" Chekevdia, who turns 7 on September 14, was in good spirits and physically fit after being found Friday by investigators with a court order to search the two-story rural home in southern Illinois' Franklin County, about 120 miles southeast of St. Louis.
"Basically," Illinois State Police Master Sergeant Stan Diggs told CBS News, "it was a hidden compartment. You move a panel" and the room is revealed. Ricky's mother, 30-year-old Shannon Wilfong, is charged with felony child abduction. His grandmother, 51-year-old Diane Dobbs, is charged with aiding and abetting. Wilfong was jailed on $42,500 bond in Benton, Illinois, where Dobbs was being held on $1,000 bond. Ricky is now staying with one of his father's relatives, reports CBS News Correspondent Bianca Solorzano, because authorities "want to move slowly" in reuniting father and son. Chekevdia won temporary custody of his son shortly before the boy and his mother - Chekevdia's former girlfriend - disappeared in November 2007. Chekevdia says he long suspected his son was being stowed by Dobbs, although there were no signs of the boy at her home when it was searched with her consent after his disappearance. Wilfong was charged in December 2007 with abducting the boy but couldn't be found. Chekevdia told CBS News the ordeal began when "I gave him back to his mother, and never saw him again." For much of the time since, Chekevdia said, the windows of Dobbs' home were blocked off by drawn shades or other items, presumably to prevent anyone from peeking inside. Police say the boy was only allowed outside at night. "I had a firm belief he was in there, and ... it was confirmed," Chekevdia said. Investigators, during a news conference Friday, didn't detail what led sheriff's deputies and federal marshals with a search warrant to Dobbs' house Friday, when they found the boy and his mother in a hideaway roughly 5 feet by 12 feet and about the height of a washing machine. "We let him out of the (patrol) car and he ran around like he'd never seen outdoors. It was actually very sad," Sgt. Diggs said. "He was very happy to be outside. He said he never goes outside." "Surprisingly," Diggs added, "Ricky is in very good spirits. For someone who's been isolated in that house with no other outside beings, he's a very social, very polite, very talkative little boy." Judge Kyle Vantrease set a November 23 hearing on the custody issue. Before then, the judge says he expects the father to have some visits with the boy and for the child to have counseling. CBS News story here The judge didn't grant visitation to the child's mother, who sobbed during the hearing and interrupted to insist she'd done nothing wrong. See more pictures at CBS photo essay. Kidnap suspect has history of drug use, violence... Attending high school in a rural suburb east of San Francisco, Phillip Garrido stood apart from the crowd that studied hard, played sports, basked in popularity and set sights on college. MSNBC News story here 
Feeling the drumbeat of the 1960s San Francisco acid rock scene, he was one of the first to let his hair grow long and to smoke marijuana. With a few friends, he formed a band that played hit songs from the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Credence Clearwater Revival. And he painted his bedroom black, covered the walls with psychedelic music posters and illuminated them with black lights.
The clean-shaven young man with flowing hair and a nice smile began violent sexual attacks in the 1970s and is now accused along with his wife of kidnapping, raping and imprisoning Jaycee Lee Dugard for 18 years in his backyard. Both have pleaded not guilty. His father blamed drugs and a head injury from a motorcycle accident. During his 1977 rape trial, Garrido blamed drugs and a lack of discipline at home. But psychiatrists concluded his problems were more complex than that. He was arrested in 1972 on suspicion of drugging and raping a 14-year-old girl in Antioch, California, a case dropped after the victim declined to testify. By 1977, he was serving a 50-year federal prison sentence for the kidnapping of a casino worker in Nevada. He was convicted in Nevada state court of raping the same woman after taking her to a storage facility, which an investigator described as a "sex palace" with stage lights, a bed, pornographic pictures and wine. Three decades later, on August 26, the registered sex offender was arrested in connection with Dugard's abduction from a South Lake Tahoe bus stop in 1991. Authorities said he had fathered two daughters with Dugard during her years of confinement in a makeshift compound in the backyard of Garrido's home in Antioch. See vol7_iss48 for more. Meanwhile, even though Jaycee Dugard, her two daughters and their family are said to be overjoyed to be back together, the horrible ordeal Jaycee and the girls went through will probably "overwhelm" them when it all starts to sink in, and take years to recover from, according to one expert. CBS News story here And keeping them away from the media would be a huge help, the expert says. Police say Jaycee, 29, was held captive and repeatedly raped in sheds and tents in the backyard of Phillip and Nancy Garrido's Antioch, California home. Authorities say Phillip snatched Jaycee off the streets of South Lake Tahoe, California 18 years ago. Jaycee and her two daughters, 15 and 11, both of whom police say were fathered by Garrido, were freed last week. CBS photo essay here In other related stories ABC News reports Garrido's wife kept Jaycee hostage 5 months while he was in jail; Former prosecutor Wendy Murphy tells MSNBC we should be marching in the streets; CNN looks at Jaycee's reunion with extended family; Prime News has a video story on brainwashing; CBS News, John Walsh and Mark Lunsford look at sex offender monitoring; CBS reports Garrido offered child abduction safety tips; and LA Times reports bone found near Garrido home is likely human. In other news... 
A state review team is looking at a possible breakdown in the way Texas Child Protective Services follows up on its own abuse investigations after three Houston-area children died despite the agency's intervention. Houston Chronicle story here "I wanted to take a good look at investigations," Anne Heiligenstein, Texas Department of Family and Protective Services commissioner, said Friday of her decision to send a review team to Houston. Three children - Katy infant Amber Maccurdy, 3-year-old David Tijerina of Conroe and 4-year-old Emma Thompson of Spring - have died of abuse since April despite the fact that all three had been reported to CPS as possible child abuse victims. Emma and Amber died even though both were seen within weeks of their deaths by CPS investigators. David, who died on Monday from blunt trauma to his abdomen, was seen by a CPS worker just six days before he died. On Friday, a man considered the boy's "uncle," Noah Herrera, 30, was charged with capital murder in the child's death. Three others, including David's grandmother, aunt and a family friend, have been charged with injury to a child. The Austin team will review a random sample of nearly 200 open cases being handled in the Houston CPS district, which includes Harris and 12 surrounding counties. The state team, which arrived in Houston late Thursday and will be here until October, will also take a look at how CPS investigators hand off their cases to its Family-Based Safety Services staff once the investigation is completed, and how their caseworkers follow up with those families.
A Roman Catholic diocese in Connecticut has invoked the First Amendment's separation of church and state in a request to the US Supreme Court to let it keep clergy sexual abuse documents under seal, a move that appeared to contradict the church's recent pledges of openness. Boston Globe story here Last Thursday, two days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg denied the Diocese of Bridgeport's request to keep the documents under wraps despite a recent ruling by the Connecticut Supreme Court, the diocese said the dispute raises fundamental constitutional issues and asked the full US Supreme Court to review the case. The dispute concerns 12,675 pages of documents from 23 lawsuits, settled out of court in 2001, that accused the diocese of negligently assigning six priests who allegedly committed sexual abuse. The documents could shed light on how Cardinal Edward M. Egan, retired archbishop of New York, handled the allegations when he was bishop of Bridgeport from 1988 to 2000. Following the Ginsburg decision, the diocese specifically asked Justice Antonin Scalia to keep the documents under seal until the full high court decides on whether to take up the review.
Two UK brothers aged 10 and 12 who tortured and sexually humiliated two boys were spared trial for attempted murder yesterday when prosecutors decided to accept their guilty pleas to lesser charges. Times of London story here The brothers pleaded guilty to robbing, sexually abusing and intentionally causing grievous bodily harm to their victims, aged 9 and 11, during a pre-planned attack of extreme, sadistic violence that has drawn parallels with the murder of James Bulger, and to assaulting another boy a week earlier. The Crown Prosecution Service said that it had accepted the lesser charges to save the victims from having to relive their ordeal in court and said that the brothers would still face the same maximum term of life imprisonment. The nine-year-old victim raised the alarm after being found wandering the streets barefoot and dazed and covered in mud and blood. His 11-year-old friend was found a short time later at the foot of a steep ravine. He was unconscious, naked from the waist down and half-submerged in water. He had been left for dead after a sink was smashed down on his head. The court heard that the younger boy had tried to kill himself on the instructions of his attackers by shoving a sharpened stick down his throat after having the same stick driven into his arm and a lit cigarette pushed into the wound. The brothers had burnt his ears and eyelids. On the day of the attack the brothers had been due to attend a police station to be questioned about an assault on an 11-year-old boy a week earlier. His mother had reported the incident immediately. The police have been criticized for not acting more urgently.
In a pep talk that kept clear of politics, President Barack Obama on Tuesday challenged the nation's students to take pride in their education - and stick with it even if they don't like every class or must overcome tough circumstances at home. AP News story here "Every single one of you has something that you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer," Obama told students at Wakefield High School in suburban Arlington, Virginia, and children watching his speech on television in schools across the country. "And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is." He preceded his broad-scale talk by meeting with about 40 Wakefield students in a school library, where at one point he advised them to "be careful what you post on Facebook. Whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life."
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