We'll need los of this for that show. LOL
Posted on 07/21/2006 8:58:28 AM PDT by Liz
The parents of a Camden boy who died in the trunk of a parked car.....have filed a lawsuit against local officials and Toyota........David Agosto and his wife, Iraidia Roman-Santiago, are the second and third filed in the aftermath of the June 2005 tragedy. The three boys, Daniel Agosto, 6; Anibal Cruz, 11; and Jesstin Pagan, 5, disappeared from Cruz's backyard on June 20, 2005, setting off a massive search......About 48 hours after they disappeared, relatives looking for jumper cables found their bodies in the back of a broken-down Toyota Camry parked in the Cruz family's yard.
David Agosto opened the trunk and was one of the first to see the boys' bodies. He said yesterday it never occurred to him during the search that they might be so close. The police would have looked there already, he thought. "They had it under control," he said. Agosto, 40, initially said he did not want to take legal action.....But as he heard about problems with the search, Agosto changed his mind. "We can't fold our hands," he said, and let problems like this continue.
In her lawsuit, filed on behalf of her son and his two sisters, Roman-Santiago asserts that Toyota should be blamed, in part, for the deaths, because the company did not encourage owners of its cars to install a safety release inside the trunks. Under federal law, cars manufactured beginning with the 2002 model year must have the releases...............the suits blame Camden police for not checking the trunk sooner. Cruz's suit also blames several other government and police officials.
(Excerpt) Read more at nj.com ...
Blame everyone except the culpable parties! This is from their overwhelming guilt over their own responsibility for the deaths. And greedy money-grubbing law firms add to the problem, making all of us pay for other peoples' irresponsiblity.
That happened in Plymouth Connecticut, it was a mystery to me as well. We lived about 2 miles away at the time, I was 15, and to this day I don't get it.
That happened in Plymouth Connecticut, it was a mystery to me as well. We lived about 2 miles away at the time, I was 15, and to this day I don't get it.
That happened in Plymouth Connecticut, it was a mystery to me as well. We lived about 2 miles away at the time, I was 15, and to this day I don't get it.
We'll need los of this for that show. LOL
There have been other tragic stories that could apply here.
In one case, a little girl playing at the curbside, buried herself in autumn leaves; a car ran her over, not knowing she was in there.
Could be a car---or a snowplow---ran over the boy not knowing he had fallen or was playing in a snowbank.
Actually, they called police, who supposedly conducted a thorough search. At least one police officer "searched" the car, which consisted of looking in the windows, and nothing else (I think I even remember seeing actual video footage of this farce, but that's definitely how it was reported in the police department's own report on its investigation of the incident). Reasonable people who'd had multiple police officers scouring their property and the surrounding area for several hours would think they'd checked the trunk of any cars on the property. There was a lot of chaos at the scene, with family, neighbors, police officers all roaming around, so one family member could easily assume that police had gotten any keys they needed from another family member.
Exactly. On the other hand though, they see it as capitalism at work. How can I take this situation and make it financially profitable for me. I'm sorry the kids got locked in the trunk of the car and died. It's tragic. It would not have been tragic though, if it had happened to the parents.
He should sue himself for stupid or his parents for raising his doltness
Now I know why I let my butt grow so big...a safety device to prevent such accidents!
Moron. I guess while he stood there like an idiot, he expected the police to have looked in all his closets, under his beds, up in his attic and down in his basement.
I wonder that myself sometimes. I was watching that COPS wannabe about the Miami Beach PD (I think it's called Beach Patrol), and one of the cops on there (white guy) was so overweight, he had one of those gut aprons. It hung down over his knees. If you've seen the picture floating around on the net with the huge naked guy sitting in front of a computer surfing the net, you have a pretty good idea about how this cop was built. He wouldn't have been able to run one block to chase a perp down, I guarantee it.
>>But...like another poster pointed out...chances are good the kids would at least have already been unconscious by the time the police arrived - maybe even dead<<
What is usually the cause of death in such cases? Suffocation? Heat prostration? Asphyxiation (because of the build-up of carbon dioxide)?`I wouldn't have thought that the trunk of a car is that air-tight.
"One can hardly blame the police for assuming that the family loooked for the kids on their own property before calling 911 to report the kids missing.
From now on, Camden police will be forced to waste precious minutes searching the homes of missing children because parents are apparently incapable of looking in their own backyards."
I disagree with you 100%. My search and rescue team was on standby for this search. We were never activated in time because the police said they had enough people to handle it. The police are to blame.
We train twice a week to find missing persons. We are an all volunteer team. This is all we train to do. It's a lot harder than you think to run a search correctly. I can also tell you this. We would have looked in the trunk. We ALWAYS cover the PLS (place last seen) several times and with different people to get fresh eyes looking at the problem. This is because you know they were there, and they have a good chance of returning to that area. Also, you have to look for clues.
The police don't like to pay their people overtime, so they stop a search when it gets dark. We don't stop unless the police tell us to. We aren't paid, so we're doing this because we want to help people and we never give up because of darkness, especially when children are involved. We have enough resources to run a search 24/7.
Here's another thing we do. We NEVER trust the police, or anyone else when they say, "oh, we already looked there". A little over a year ago, we were called out to look for a possible suicide in a park. I was to lead a team into a large area of the park. The police saw where my team was to go, and insisted that they already looked there and why were we wasting time looking again? The officer's tone was a bit nasty. Would anyone care to guess what we found where the police had already looked? The police had been looking for this man for two weeks. From the time we got there, set up our command, and formed our strategy, it took us less than 4 hours to find him. The man was laying on his side out in the open. He wasn't hidden and could easily be seen from many yards away. After two weeks in the woods, you could smell him from a much farther distance.
I'd love to see the paperwork for this search, but I doubt it exists or if it does, I question its accuracy. Every task we send out is documented in detail (time; people; areas covered; etc).
Egos killed those kids. The police often view search teams as either unskilled, or they think that asking for help makes them look bad. We should be viewed as a tool in a toolkit rather than competition. This is a problem we run into again and again. As you can tell, I'm still infuriated.
"even if the release was there, those young children may not nave known to pull it, my guess is the children were already unconscious or dead when the parents realized they were missing, thus, the parents have no lawsuit."
The estimates that were given to me were that the kids were alive between 24 and 35 hours.
"What is usually the cause of death in such cases? Suffocation? Heat prostration? Asphyxiation (because of the build-up of carbon dioxide)?`I wouldn't have thought that the trunk of a car is that air-tight."
At the time the coronor did report answers to some of these questions, and I think he gave an estimate of the time it took for death to occur.
However my memory escapes me in recollecting what those facts are.
"Egos killed those kids. The police often view search teams as either unskilled, or they think that asking for help makes them look bad. We should be viewed as a tool in a toolkit rather than competition. This is a problem we run into again and again. As you can tell, I'm still infuriated."
This was the impression I got when I first read about those boys being found.
Certainly there is blame to go around, but when professionals are expected to conduct a thorough search and they declare a vehicle to have been "searched" - then yes...there is blame there too. Maybe not to the extent the lawsuit will seek - as that should be offset by the parent's culpability as well.
It's too bad your team never made it to the scene.
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