Unbelievable

The town of Murphy, Texas is in the spotlight, again for all the wrong reasons:

In October 2007, Matthew Cantrell wandered outside and strangled himself in the net after his mother fell asleep. He died at a hospital days later.

In their first television interview since the 21-month-old died, his parents criticized 911 dispatchers for taking more than two minutes to transfer Ave Cantrell's call to an emergency medical technician.

On a recording of the 911 call, Ms. Cantrell repeatedly asks the dispatcher for instructions on how to help her child but gets no response.

"I could do CPR or something," she says. "Please tell me what I need to do."

Murphy police defended their response and said dispatchers are not supposed to give medical advice.

Once police did arrive, Ms. Cantrell said they put her and her other son in a bedroom while Matthew lay on a couch not breathing.

"I should have kicked the police officer out of the way to see if he was doing CPR on him," Ms. Cantrell said. "I figured they were doing something, but then we found out they didn't do anything."

Officer Kevin McGee left the boy there to meet the paramedics and initially blocked them from entering the home, which he said was a "crime scene," according to documents obtained by WFAA-TV (Channel 8).

"I advised him we needed to assess the child," a paramedic said in a written statement. "He responded, 'He is gone.' I told him the paramedics were the ones that would determine if he was alive."

A segment that local ABC affiliate WFAA did on the story is even more damning. Not mentioned in the print story above is the fact that Officer McGee was one of the officers who two years ago took part in the ridiculous Dateline/Perverted Justice "sting" on a local assistant district attorney that ended in the man's suicide, and McGee also has a suit filed against him in federal court for using excessive force against a minor.  Apparently there is no already horrible situation that the Murphy PD can't make worse.

Dateline, Murphy Cops in Trouble

Thanks to an Esquire expose and this blog, Dateline and the Murphy PD are coming under fire for their role in a "sting" operation to catch "predators" lured in by the diligent vigilantes at Perverted Justice:

A lengthy Esquire magazine account of the episode is to hit newsstands today. It assails Dateline for overstepping the bounds of newsgathering, and quotes Collin County District Attorney John Roach blasting Murphy police for being there "like potted plants, to make the scenery."

Now a Dateline competitor, ABC's 20/20, is investigating. A film crew cornered Murphy Police Chief Billy Myrick last week for an interview in the City Hall parking lot.

Along with the media scrutiny, Dateline is the target of lawsuits. In one, the dead prosecutor's sister blames the show for her brother's suicide. In another, a former Dateline producer accuses the network of firing her because she questioned the show's ethics.

Unfortunately, no one appears to be suing Perverted Justice just yet. But there's time.

Perverted Journalism

Via Foreign Policy's blog there's this story of an Assistant District Attorney who kills himself when he's confronted by police after being lured into online conversations with what he thought was a teenage boy. About nobody comes off well in this story. The behavior of the jackals at Dateline who employ "Perverted Justice" and local cops for dramatic effect and ratings is the least surprising element of this story. The former DA of Kaufman County refers to the Terrell Police Department-which sends a SWAT team to raid the suspect's home-as "the most incompetent bunch of buffoons you've ever seen" and the Murphy PD comes off as even worse than that. But a triple heaping of scorn should be piled on the heads of the self-righteous vigilantes at Perverted Justice, who seem to think they're are carrying out valuable law enforcement work even as they're being paid a "consultenting fee" by Dateline to do so:

All the members of Perverted Justice have fake names. For example, the person who spent the last two weeks conducting an on-again, off-again chat-room relationship with Bill Conradt calls himself Jay Alternative, though his real name is Greg Brainer. Ostensibly the members of Perverted Justice adopt these fake names so that the men they trap do not seek them out in the real world, but the cartoony, superherolike aspect of most of their aliases perhaps also says something about the way the members of Perverted Justice perceive themselves. Online, Jay Alternative is a faceless crusader patrolling the dark side of the Internet. Offline, Greg Brainer is a middle-aged man who lives in Milford, Michigan, and spends upwards of forty hours a week sitting at a computer pretending to be a sexually available boy. Sometimes the fake names become real. A few years ago, Phillip John Eide, the founder of Perverted Justice, legally changed his name to that of his alter ego, Xavier Von Erck.

Forty hours a week, pretending to be a young boy and engaging in sexual conversations with older men. There's nothing normal about that, and it indicates that some of the guys have an inflated sense of their purpose in life and their "mission". In the article, von Erck expresses remorse only for the fact that their suspect killed himself before he could be brought to justice, even though there's little evidence that the man was the kind of predator that Perverted Justice purports to be trying to stop. I assume "Von Erck" chose the ridiculous name he did for his organization because their supposed purpose is to bring perverts to justice. It could just as easily be said that they themselves pervert the justice they seek to dispense.