Michael Devlin - How Many More Are Out There?

"He was just a normal nice guy, I would have never guessed that he would do something like this." This is the typical line that people say that were acquainted with someone that ends up on the news for some heinous crime. We see it all the time. Someone does something atrocious, and the people that knew the person explain how they had no idea. I don't think that I have ever heard someone say, "He was kind of a creepy person. I am not surprised at all." The question is, why is this the case? Why is it that people have such a hard time discerning when someone they know might be doing something evil in their private lives?

Should we always think the best of people? I believe we should not. We should have a healthy suspicion of other people. The reason for doing this is so that instances like that which happened with Michael Devlin will not keep flying under everyone's radar. If people were paying attention, or even being slightly suspicious, something like this could have been prevented.

If you have not heard already, Michael Devlin kidnapped a young boy, Ben Ownby. They found Ben about a week later, and another boy, Sean Hornbeck, that had been missing for around 4 years. Devlin had kidnapped Hornbeck and kept him for years. How does something like, a child missing for 4 years, go unnoticed by anyone.

Devlin lived in a busy suburb outside St. Louis. Many people knew of him and of they even knew of Sean. Most people said that they just figured that Shawn was his son. No one asked if this was his son or why his "son" never went to school. Perhaps had some people been suspicious, they might have known that a kidnapped child was right under their nose. How many others are out there like this?

Furthermore, people need to be suspicious of other people. This has nothing to do with making racist, elitist, or other derogatory judgments in one's head about other people. Doing that does not actually confront the suspicious person anyways.

What I am talking about is people need to question other people, or at the very least, consider that they are not just a "nice person." Considering all of the prominent government officials, priests, celebrities, and other well known people in society that have committed sex crimes, we should start considering that people we know, and even people that we respect could be doing awful things.

Call me skeptical or call me a realist, but this is something that I do. I don't spend all of my life trying to figure out whether someone is a sex criminal or not, but I don't just assume that they are probably normal.

My friend once thought that someone down the street might be a pedophile because he was really nice, but also very mysterious in that he was weird about allowing people to go into certain parts of his house, and he had kids over sometimes that he claimed were his sister's. He was also a single male. As my friend was starting to get suspicious, not longer than a couple weeks did this guy get taken to jail on pedophile charges. It was not because of my friend, but thankfully someone said something about this guy.

Being suspicious will not solve every problem, but it seems ridiculous that there was a missing child living in a busy suburb, and no one seemed to pick up on it at all.