I didn't think anything could be worse than my Friday post but this takes the cake:

Children fed 'silly pills,' forced to perform sex shows

• Story Highlights
• Defendants convicted of grooming kids for sex shows in "kindergarten" classes
  
• They gave Vicodin to the kids and called the drugs "silly pills"
  
• Residents thought there were swinger parties going on; didn't know children involved
  
• The kids are now in therapy, a Texas Child Protective Services caseworker says
  

MINEOLA, Texas (AP) -- In the windowless front rooms of a former day care center in a tiny Texas community, children as young as 5 were fed powerful painkillers they knew as "silly pills" and forced to perform sex shows for a crowd of adults.

Two people have already been convicted in the case. Now a third person with ties to the club, previously known in town only as a swingers group, is set to go on trial Monday not far from Mineola, population 5,100.

"This really shook this town," said Shirley Chadwick, a longtime resident of Mineola. "This was horrible."

Patrick Kelly, 41, is charged with aggravated sexual assault of a child, tampering with physical evidence and engaging in organized criminal activity.

In all, six adults have been charged in connection with the case, including a parent of the three siblings involved.

Jurors this year deliberated less than five minutes before returning guilty verdicts against the first two defendants, who were accused of grooming the kids for sex shows in "kindergarten" classes and passing off Vicodin as "silly pills" to help the children perform.

Jamie Pittman and Shauntel Mayo were sentenced to life in prison. Kelly also faces a life sentence if convicted, and Smith County prosecutors hope for another swift verdict.

Thad Davidson, Kelly's attorney, said his client passed a lie-detector test proving his innocence and worries about getting a fair trial in Tyler, 25 miles southeast of Mineola, which is in Wood County.

"I think it's impossible to get a fair trial within 80 miles of Smith County," Davidson said.

Mineola, about 80 miles east of Dallas, is a close-knit, conservative bean-processing town of with more than 30 churches. Residents there want to put the scandal behind them as quickly as possible.

The one-story building where prosecutors say four children -- the three siblings, now ages 12, 10 and 7, and their 10-year-old aunt -- were trained to perform in front of an audience of 50 to 100 once a week has been vacant since the landlord ousted the alleged organizers in 2004.

Down a slight hill is a retirement home, and even closer is the office of the local newspaper. Doris Newman, editor of The Mineola Monitor, said rumors of swinger parties spread around town but that no one mentioned children being involved.

Newman, who can see the building from her office window, said she remembers the parking lot filling up with more than a dozen cars at night.

In August 2004, an editorial under the headline "Sex In the City" opined that if the swingers left quietly, "we'll try and forget they've infiltrated our town with their set of moral standards."

"It's not that we're trying to look the other way," Newman said. "But there's a lot more to Mineola than that."

According to a Mineola police report, the department first investigated a complaint in June 2005 in which the siblings' foster mother said one of the girls described dancing toward men and another child saying that "everybody does nasty stuff in there."

In the second trial, Child Protective Services caseworker Kristi Hachtel testified, "I've seen a lot and I never in my wildest dreams imagined this. They were preyed upon in probably one of the most heinous ways possible."

The children are now doing better, the welfare agency said.

"Through counseling and therapy sessions, these children are now finally feeling secure and safe," agency spokeswoman Shari Pulliam wrote in an e-mail.

Permanent custody of the three siblings was given to John and Margie Cantrell. This week, prosecutors in California charged John Cantrell with sexually assaulting a child in the state 18 years ago. Margie Cantrell said her husband is innocent.

Kelly's attorney moved Friday asking to postpone the trial in light of the allegations against Cantrell, a state witness. Texas Child Protective Services said it would be "common" for the agency to investigate.

The Rev. Tim Letsch is opening a church in the yellow-plastered building where the children were abused. He acknowledges that building a congregation might be difficult because of the stigma attached to the property.

"You got to decide whether you're willing to forgive those kind of things," Letsch said. "It's a hard deal. Especially for a spiritual person to walk in and say, 'This happened here."'

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Is there a special place in hell for people like this? I mean REALLY now people. This world is going to hell in a hand basket. I have several problems with this situation.

1. That parents pimped their kids for this
2. That ADULTS paid to watch this
3. That parents got paid for their kids to do this
4. That these children were DRUGGED with Vicodin
5. That ADULTS paid to watch this AND not one thought it was wrong and went to the police

I'm just very angry and saddened. It's like a blow to the spirit. If Jesus showed up tomorrow, I would not be surprised.

A Friday WTF Moment

I read the following article and I had to pause. Enough so that I wanted to actually blog about it. i mean it broke me of my addiction to social networks.

Mass. girls may have made pact to get pregnant
By MELISSA TRUJILLO, Associated Press Writer

The girls showed up repeatedly at the high school health clinic, asking for pregnancy tests. But their reactions to the test results were puzzling: high-fives if they were expecting, long faces if they weren't.

School officials in this hard-luck New England fishing town say an alarming 17 girls — four times the usual number — became pregnant this year. And even more disturbing: Some of the girls may have made a pact to have babies and raise them together.

"A typical girl you would think would say, `Oh my God! What am I going to do now? How am I going to support this baby? How am I going to finish school?'" Superintendent Christopher Farmer said. "These young women clearly have not seen that."

The story exploded after Joseph Sullivan, the principal of Gloucester High School, was quoted by Time magazine this week as saying the girls confessed to making such a pact. Sullivan was on vacation Friday and did not return calls for comment.

The superintendent said he had no independent confirmation of a pact. But he added: "What we do know is there was a group of students being tested for pregnancy on a regular basis, which would suggest they were not taking steps to avoid becoming pregnant, and that when some of them had their babies, they appeared to be very pleased."

None of the girls or their families have come forward to confirm any type of pact, and school and health officials have not identified any of the youngsters.

The girls are all 16 or under, nearly all of them sophomores. The superintendent said they have been reluctant to identify the fathers, many of whom are older. But one of them "is a 24-year-old homeless guy," the principal was quoted as telling Time.

City and school officials in this town of about 30,000 people 30 miles north of Boston have been struggling for months to explain and deal with the pregnancies, where on average only four girls a year at the 1,200-student high school become pregnant.

Just last month, two officials at the high school health center resigned to protest the local hospital's refusal to support a proposal to distribute contraceptives to youngsters at the school without parental consent. The hospital controls the clinic's funding.

Mayor Carolyn Kirk said Friday there are many contributing factors to what she called a "blip" in the pregnancy rate, from glamorization of teen pregnancy in pop culture to cuts in funding that have reduced teachers and health classes in Gloucester.

"We have fallen on hard times," Kirk said of her city, which has suffered in recent decades with the decline in the fishing industry that has defined Gloucester since the colonial era.

Gloucester is the town that lost six fishermen in the 1991 shipwreck that inspired the book and movie "The Perfect Storm." Its high school teams are known as the Fighting Fishermen.

Student Council member Emily Spreer said many of the girls came from difficult socioeconomic circumstances: "Their circle or clique, they're not the most fortunate family-wise."

"If you're a young person who really is struggling to find an identity for herself, absent the support and the guidance, it can become almost a default option for some to become a mom," said Patricia Quinn, executive director of the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy. "We need to do more for young people and show them more paths."

Gloucester — a heavily Roman Catholic town with a large Italian and Portuguese population — has long been supportive of teen mothers. The high school has a day care center for students and employees.

Christen Callahan, a former Gloucester High student who had a child when she was 15, said on NBC's "Today" show that some of the girls would ask her about her own pregnancy. "They would say stuff like, `Oh, I think my parents would be fine with it and they would help me,' stuff like that," Callahan said.

Sarah Brown, chief executive of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, suggested some of the blame lies with the nation's Hollywood-obsessed culture, in which stories about pregnant celebrities abound.

Just this week, 17-year-old TV star Jamie Lynn Spears, the unmarried sister of Britney Spears, gave birth. "Juno," a wry comedy about a 16-year-old girl who gets pregnant, was one of the most acclaimed movies of the year.

"Baby bumps get written about the same way designer handbags do. It's just one more lifestyle choice, just another personal expression: these shoes, this bump and that handbag," Brown said. "It's not surprising that teenage girls can get confused or even seduced by the allure of celebrity pregnancy."
---
AP reporters Pauline Arrillaga in Phoenix and Nancy Kelsey and Karen Testa in Boston contributed to this report.

I don't know if these girls really know what they are getting into. Having a baby is easy - raising a baby is a different story. What would you do if your found out your daughter was trying to get pregnant on purpose and couldn't even legally drive a car? Here is my train of thought:

1. She isn't allowed to get an abortion. She got pregnant on purpose she gets to see the pregnancy through to the end. But - would you let her put the baby up for adoption?
2. I'm split on adoption. One part of me says that realistically, grandma would be raising the baby while my daughter tries to finish school and work (cause sister needs a job to buy diapers and clothes and pay for daycare). Another part of me thinks that someone else might be able to give the baby the love and care that he/she needs
3. My child would not know freedom any more - although with me she wouldn't have known it in the first place but she would be under even stricter who, what when and where's. As in who are you going with. What are you going to be doing? Where are you going to be and when will you be home? Plus surprise visits to verify her story
4. You have to finish school and you need to be working on college plans

That's it for now. This whole story makes my children's lives that much harder because I'm going to be even more vigilant.

Long Time, No Blog

It's been a while since I blogged about anything significant. I blame the following:

1. The Brook on ning.com
2. Illinisoul on ning.com
3. The Brook on ning.com
4. Illinisoul on ning.com
5. Mix in a little Facebook
6. This little thing called work

Essentially I have become addicted to a social network for people that grew up in my hometown and one for my alma mater. Pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. It's ridiculous. Now that the growth of the sites have slowed down - a little - I want to get back to blogging on the regular. I just need to decide what I want to talk about. I say this all the time but I REALLY mean it this time.