Questions, Anger Persist in Ricky Holland Case

From the moment the verdict hit the general public, people have been speaking out in the case of 7-year-old Ricky Holland, who was murdered by his adoptive parents.

Bloggers, people on message boards and news feeds, and the general public waited agitatedly while the jury deliberated for almost 2 days before finding Lisa Holland, Ricky's adoptive mother, guilty of first-degree felony murder and first-degree child abuse. The instant the verdict was out, the venom began.

People have been furious over what happened to Ricky Holland, and the way his adoptive parents preyed on the hearts, time, and energy of so many other people by declaring their dead son "missing", starting a community-wide hunt to find the special needs child who had allegedly run away from his adoptive home.

Most people agree that the fact that Ricky's murder was slow and that he suffered a great deal is what has ire up all over the world. Anger is also directed at the agency who failed to protect him, who placed him and several other children in harm's way by placing them with the Holland family.

Articles keep appearing in the local papers about the murder of Ricky Holland. People still have questions. The entire case leaves us all feeling unsettled.

Politicians are trying to use the case of Ricky, and the deaths of other children more recently, also in foster/adoptive placements, as a trump card against one another, particularly the republicans. Candidate for Governor, Dick DeVos, has repeatedly thrown up the deaths of children in the face of the sitting Governor, Jennifer Granholm. David Law, another republican, is also seeking more information about the Ricky Holland case to use against his opponent.

There is more speculation that people feel so ill-at-ease when thinking about the Ricky Holland case because nothing has been done to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. As we see in the cases of Isaac Lethbridge and Allison Newman, there is a lot of finger-pointing but children are still dying in foster homes. Allison Newman's foster parents were looking to adopt her, had she lived long enough for her mother's rights to be terminated. Instead, her foster mother faces charges of murder and child abuse for her traumatic head injury that led to her death on September 22nd of this year.

It is natural, when faced with something that we just can't stomach, for us to ask, "why?", and we feel uneasy when the answers aren't forthcoming. If we got some real answers, saw some real changes, then maybe we could stop being angry for Ricky's brutal murder and start to heal. As it stands now, the investigation paperwork that the Office of the Children's Ombudmsman is holding on to won't be released because there could still be more prosecutions in the case.

Instead, we're all left in the dark, and that is a very uncomfortable place to be.