If I may make a comment about deactivating the comments on this story. As this story had made the news and information about what happened was disclosed the Sun's commenters were busy speculating on what happened. Very quickly they started making assumptions that this might have to do with drugs, debt and the abductors weren't necessarily pedophiles. As the morning progressed it looked as if the commenters were correct. The comments were getting interesting, totalled 35. I wanted to read those comments because I assumed there was some good stuff in them. I couldn't because the Sun deleted them. Some of you reporters have no skin.

PH: We disabled the comments section because too many violated standards. Many speculated on the background of the parents, or cast accusations that could not be backed up, were libelous and racist. We encourage people to remain civil.

Respectfully, I was one of those posters. If was obvious from the start that the tilt of the story was towards Amber Alerts and all things pedophilic, when any dope with a line on the Maryland Judiciary website would see that Mom is pretty much a citizen, albeit with a history with badboys, Dad's a criminal, but that neither had much motive, and that Raheem Taylor, one of the named persons of interest, was a drug thug, but not a baby raper.

While it doesn't take much to see that this was drug related, and probably awfully ill-planned, the Sun's article noting that this wasn't a family on the police's radar speaks more to the low power of said radar, rather than where interest should have been directed from the start.

Its not that we're all CSI obsessed, its just that its sometimes frustrating to read the result of undermanned and, perhaps, under-engaged journalism. What few folks under 70 who still read newspapers are as a group pretty information empowered. Yeah, that can produce an awful lot of meddlers, but somewhere in there are smart folks who have the luxury of time and resources to think about crime and the persons who commit them.

Maybe you have to consider crowd-sourcing the investigative process when the police are overtaxed and investigative journalism is increasingly an oxymoron.

---
There's a disconnect here. You can look up people in case search and deduce that it's drug related, or draw whatever other conclusions you want from what you may encounter on the World Wide Web, but there's a big difference between what we can report. We reported the drug angle when we were able to verify it, and even that was through sources and not officially put out by the department. Making assumptions based on websites hits is a start, but it's not good enough.
Let's be clear though: when Peter speaks of terms of service violations, he does not mean research by our readers, but vulgar or defamatory comments. -JF
Furthermore, the notion that an Amber Alert correlates to pedophilia is almost bizarre. Amber Alerts are for child abductions, plain and simple. You will recall an Ambert Alert went out three years ago when reputed drug kingpin Steven Blackwell's twin brothers were abducted, and held for ransom. Any implications of pedophilia are your own, as we merely reported the child had been snatched up. It was fairly easy to deduce drugs were possibly involved, simply given the area and the number of drug-related crimes that occur across the city, but we needed to wait for factual information.

Thanks JF and PH for making the comments you made and clarifying the Amber Alert assumptions being made. And agreed about the assumptions part - I look at the MD case search site - I see they both, the abductee and the abductor, live on the same street, same block. While I want to quickly jump to a conclusion that that tells me something, in an of itself it is **nothing** without facts about motives. Otherwise, then the only thing to go on from the "web" is they are neighbors. So thanks for reporting and keeping the discussions above the fray here. I don't need to read about "monkeys" and "savages" etc. from hateful, myopic people.

Thank you, Author Wiggin, for giving me a hint to what was in the comments. If I may make a comment about what JF and Peter Hermann have added. You guys make great journalists, and you play right by the book. But when all citizens have access to the Judiciary Case Search it becomes apparent that the average citizen is sometimes able to see the rest of the story that you don't report. I'd like to focus on one small statement that Author Wiggin made as an example, "moms a citizen but with a history of bad boys". That gives me so much information and puts the family in a different light than if I had just believed what the two of you told us. Women with a history of bad boys tend to turn into crime victims. Patsy Person, homicide victim #109, also is a complainant to an assault in 2006 by the same man she sues for nonsupport one year later in 2007. In 2011 Ms. Person is dead by blunt force trauma in her own home. This is the kind of history that I want to know about, it makes a bit of sense out of the crime. The commenters are the ones that often tell the rest of the story, the story that the Sun won't tell, yet is perfectly legal to report.