Elizabeth Smart found alive

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/12/national/12WIRE-SMART.html

http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/West/03/12/smart.kidnapping/index.html

"So, Elizabeth, how was your trip?"

 

Hey, I was gonna post that first....

It's great to hear though. It's about time some good news started happening....

 

Sorry, you beat me by a minute.

This is what the "Current Events" forum was made for!

 

There's already another Smart thread. What jackass is running this forum?

 

Threads merged. You peckers are more trouble than you're worth.

 

wow, nine months later and she is alive...unreal.

i guess sometimes miracles do happen.

welcome home elizabeth...

 

Indeed. Indeed.

 

Good News

 

I thought for sure she was dead.

Fantastic news that she was found.

 

Spooky....Smart photographed in September?!?




http://kutv.com/specialsection/local_story_071193346.html

Elizabeth Smart may have been photographed at a party in Salt Lake City last September with transient street preacher Brian David Mitchell.

A photo taken last September at a party by Dan Gorder and e-mailed to 2News showed Brian David Mitchell and two women in veils. It reveals a picture that may be Elizabeth Smart.

Smart was found with Mitchell Wednesday in Sandy. Police had been searching for Mitchell after Elizabeth’s sister said he may be the man who took the girl from her bedroom last June.

Mitchell worked at the Smart home briefly before Elizabeth was taken from her home.

The party was on 10th East and 2nd South in Salt Lake City. Mitchell and the women just walked into the party, according to Gorder.

 

Are we also concerned about the thousand of other missing children out there? Or is this one different because of the media coverage?

 

I could answer this honestly, but my answer would have to do with the white upper-middle class suburban attractiveness of the Smart family and that demographic's appeal to the media, and that would likely push what is otherwise an interesting but inocuous story to the Politics forum. So let's just say that it has a happy ending and be done with it.

 

You'd be right, for what it's worth.

 

Weird, weird stuff.

http://www.drudgereport.com/smart.htm

'YOU THINK I AM THE GIRL WHO RAN AWAY,' SMART TOLD COP

"You guys think I'm that Elizabeth Smart girl who ran away," Elizabeth Smart challenged police officer Bill O'Neal the moment she was found by authorities.

Smart's startling words have ignited a firestorm around Salt Lake City: Was the teen unknowingly conveying the unthinkable -- she deliberately ran away from home?!

While local and federal authorities work on the likely premise the girl was taken by force and later brainwashed, questions of a possible runaway scenario began to creep into the picture, sources said late Thursday.

One top federal source said the case remains "utterly baffling."

 

http://www.msnbc.com/news/884413.asp

Questions raised after teen’s ordeal

SALT LAKE CITY, March 13 — Elizabeth Smart was home Thursday, playing the harp and watching her favorite movie, “The Trouble with Angels,” the day after she was rescued from a terrifying ordeal that lasted nine months. Police and FBI sources told NBC News that on the night she was abducted from her bedroom in June, Elizabeth was “married” in a bizarre religious ceremony to the drifter with whom she was found Wednesday.

“ELIZABETH IS HAPPY, she is well, and we are so happy to have her back in our arms,” her beaming father, Ed Smart, said Thursday afternoon.

Amid the joyful reunion a growing list of questions arose: Why did it take so long for police to find Brian David Mitchell, the shaggy-haired drifter accused of kidnapping Elizabeth? And what happened to her during the nine months she was gone, during which she turned 15?

 

Stockholm Syndrome?

 

Manchurian Candidate.

Besides married at 15, this is Utah we are talking about. Nothing surprising there.

 

What does everybody think of the police chief blurting out that Elizabeth's hot?

 

I dont know but I think there is more to this story. I think she befriended Mitchell when he worked on their house and he later came up with the kidnapping plan. She was pissed off at her parents over something like teenagers do and wanted to run away.
Just my theory. Either way Mitchell and the wife will be put away for a while.

 

The other thing to keep in mind is that this family was upper middle class and for whatever reason knew how to run a media campaign. I assume they hired a PR firm to handle things. If not, they were extremely accesible to the press, and didn't think of them as vultures, or at least they thought of it as a net positive in the cost-benefit analysis, which turned out to be right. I actually don't fault this being a big story locally, b/c it has the snatched from the house by a stranger angle, which is not a normal child abduction. However as a national story it was absolutely ridiculous.

All that being said, you're right, it helps that it was an affluent, white couple. NIghtline id a story about this when the child kidnappings "rash" was going on last year. It also helps to have a telegenic child.

 

Leave it to Big Soccer to put a negative spin on such a positive story. Have a child and then see how you think. If you do have a child and you still think that way, you should be relieved of that responsibility.