If I were the police or the Army Ranger biological father, I would be asking some tough questions of the “hero”.
It’s 6:00 AM — who burgles a house at that time in the morning?
When you locked up the house the night before, did you know that your stepdaughter was not yet home?
Did you deliberately lock her out??
Why didn’t she have a key to the house???
Have you ever known her to enter the house through that basement window before??
Have you and her mother been having trouble with her, as in disputes over staying out past curfew??
There are many questions to ask about this story.
But, it’s possible that the stepdaughter snuck out of the house after the mother and stepfather went to sleep, in which case they wouldn’t have known that she’d gone out.
That doesn’t excuse the stepfather, of course. I’m just trying to figure out what happened here, too.
Maybe she was at home?
I know it's hard to believe, especially here on Free Republic where we all have perfect children, but sometimes teenage girls do crazy things like put on their jammies, say "goodnight mom and dad" and go to bed. And then later, much later, they wake up, put on something cute and sneak out of the house to do things they shouldn't be doing (but that their parents probably did when they were teenagers). And then a few hours later they sneak inside through a window so no one hears the door open, put their jammies back on, 'wake up' and say "good morning mom and dad!"
Crazy, I know.
Anyways. Sad story all around but a lesson to the rest of us (especially those parents who obviously don't post on Free Republic because they have teenage kids who do this kind of stuff): Know what you're shooting at before you pull the trigger and heartbreaking tragedies can be avoided.
She was 14. She probably left the same way she returned, and he likely had no clue she was even gone from the home. You’ve obviously never been a 14 year old girl.