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"It's mind-boggling to hide someone that easily in plain sight," Craig Akers said. "It's hard to believe that someone could be that brazen. We've lost our sense of community."

This from the stepfather of Shawn Hornbeck, the child kidnap victim who went missing for 4 ½ years...and was found within 50 miles of his home.

We can sort through the sordid details later; what simply blows my mind is the fact that the kid, though 11, was held for four and a half years, with age-progression posters created and dissiminated by his tireless parents, and not a bit of attention was paid by the people living near...or in...the community. He was held in an apartment!
With no curtains!. It's not like Kirkwood is isolated.



The 'community' included a landlord seeing Shawn Hornbeck sleeping in the apartment when he fixed a plumbing problem.

Hornbeck also said he never went to school his entire time in captivity. But Craig Akers could not explain why his son did not escape when his captor went to work or why the boy never told a neighbor something was wrong.

There are reasons the kid was afraid to escape; I recall the Patty Hearst kidnapping and psychological torture that resulted in her brainwashing...and bank robbery.

The 300-pound pizza dude who kidnapped the kids was known to his neighbors...

Krista Jones, 25, who lives in an apartment across from Devlin, said he had a reputation for being a "road-rage weirdo" who constantly threatened to call the police on neighbors.

To sum this up, a quote from a Kirwood resident...

"We take it easy. We don't pay attention," Smith said. "Because we do pride ourselves (that) we're a quiet neighborhood. We're a loving family neighborhood. We have all middle class America here. I think that puts blinders on our eyes sometimes."

That is exactly the problem, not only in this thankfully-resolved kidnapping, but in our entire American Mindset. We are going along fat, dumb and happy, while around us, people see us as evil...and are planning to do somthing about it.