When police stumbled across the makeshift shelter in the Joshua Tree desert last week they made a shocking discovery: three children were living in a plywood box.
There appeared to be no electricity, no running water and not enough food but piles of rubbish and human feces, a scene of squalor and isolation. There was no record of the children attending school.
The parents, Mona Kirk, 51, and Daniel Panico, 73, were charged with three felony counts of child abuse and the children were put in care of social services.
California shuddered. Here, it seemed, was another horrific case of child abuse just weeks after police rescued the 13 Turpin siblings from a home in Perris, 80 miles to the west, where they were allegedly kept captive.
But then the narrative changed: friends of Kirk and Panico defended them as good, caring parents, guilty only of being poor.
“The story when it first came out, it was wrong. I just cried. This is not them, they’re really good people,” Jackie Klear, who has known the family for 10 years, said on Wednesday. “They’ve always put their kids first. They’re fed, well dressed, educated. They’re in my scout troop.”
Source:
theguardian
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