Thursday, March 21, almost 2 months after 8 year old Sandra Cantu went missing, her alleged killer was charged with 3 new crimes. Melissa Huckaby is due in a San Joaquin County courtroom today to hear these 3 felony counts. Huckaby will be charged with a single count of child endangerment and two felony counts of furnishing a harmful substance, poisoning. She is alleged to have poisoned an unidentified 7 year old girl and an adult man. Both of them recovered. The poisoning of the little girl was to have occurred on Jan. 17 2009, and even though it was reported to the Tracy police, it was unfortunately dismissed.
The adult male, the other alleged poisoning victim, is Daniel Plowman, and currently can't be located. With the judge's gag order placed on this trial, even if Daniel Plowman was located, he is not allowed to comment on his experience.
So far each chapter in this horrible story raises more questions than answers. Why would a single mother and Sunday school teacher be poisoning a playmate of her daughter and a male neighbor? Was Melissa Huckaby's own daughter abused by her? If a thorough investigation of the poisoning of the unidentified 7 year old, had been completed, would Sandra Cantu still be alive? Why did Huckaby kidnap and rape Sandra Cantu and dump her body in a pond? How could we have prevented this from happening?
It's highly likely that with an insanity defense Melissa Huckaby will not be sentenced to death. I hope that we can use the remainder of her life to study exactly what went wrong, so that nothing like this will ever happen again.
2 comments:
I hate when I hear stories about something happening when there's a possibility that it could have been avoided had "authorities" taken action sooner on a related incident....
i.e. child being abused...police and social workers let it go...child turns up dead a year later due to parents hitting her too hard, etc.
Drives my nuts...what do you have to do to a child in order for someone to take action and not let it go??
I used to work with abused children in a group home setting. And unfortunately, by the time these children are removed from their homes, the damage to their psyches is almost beyond repair. So the interest in this story is not just morbid fascination, I am emotionally invested.
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