Lesters Clamp Down on Runaway Daughter
Another update on the Katherine Lester Story. A judge seized her passport and sentenced her to counseling. Nice. Still no word on whether or not they made her give up the computer.
From the AP here:
DETROIT – Authorities filed a runaway juvenile petition against a Michigan teenager who flew to the Middle East to be with a man she met on the MySpace.com Internet site.
At a hearing Monday, Judge W. Wallace Kent Jr. ordered Lester to give up her passport and undergo counseling. He did not rule on the validity of the petition.
If the judge finds that Lester was a runaway, she could be placed under court supervision until she turns 18. Such supervision usually means she would be monitored by a probation officer and made to undergo counseling, Jaskula said. Further hearings have not been scheduled.
Lester, who turns 17 on Wednesday, was en route to a Tel Aviv, Israel, airport when she was intercepted in Amman, Jordan, by U.S. authorities who seized her passport and put her on a flight back to the United States.
She was traveling to be with Abdullah Jimzawi, a 20-year-old high school dropout who lives with his parents in Jericho, West Bank.
Reene said that in court, Lester had a positive attitude and appeared to be receptive to the efforts to help her. Counselors will explain to her the impact of leaving the country and talk about the different culture she would face in the West Bank, Reene said.
Will Katherine Lester pay attention to the different culture speech? I dunno. Michigan has a huge islamic influence and it is not politically correct to point out that women are property under islamic law.
I thought the FBI seized the computer?
Interesting tidbit…
The FBI has software that takes images of hard drives on location and then they are able to upload the data to a SAN as a secure facility where it is stripped and analyzed.
Also, Abdullah claims in other AP stories that he still spends five hours per day chatting with Katherine, even after she failed to make it to the West Bank.
I wonder about the validity of that claim. I mean are her parents really that stupid?
I have heard of parents being crazy permissive and they sometimes refuse to enforce basic groundrules. The parents are obviously gullible. Especially the mom. From the accounts I’ve read, it was the mom who okayed the passport. It was the Mom who gave permission for the Canada trip. I didnt see Dad anywhere in this picture until after the daughter flew the coop. Dad seems like an absent father who works all the time and the Mom is just someone who would rather be the kids’ best friends than their mother.
It is not all that far-fetched that they would feel that restricting the computer would be cruel to their little sweetheart. And think about it. They need a court order to keep their kid at home. Parents with a firmer grip would never have let the kid flee in the first place, and once home, the kid would be under constant supervision and courts would not need to be involved.
Stupid? Or is it that the parents have lost control? It all sounds a little Jerry Springer to me.