The Mystery of Lil' Rowan

Little Rowan Ford, age 9, went to bed last Friday night in her own room at her home in Stella, Mo.
No one has seen her since.

Her mom works the night shift at a local Walmart Supercenter and had left Rowan in the care of the step-dad. Her first sign that something was amiss was when she got home and Rowan hadn't dashed out the door to welcome her home, as was her custom on Saturday mornings.
For most of the day her mom assumed that Rowan had gone to a friends to spend the night. Both her and the step-dad called around to Rowan's friends to trace her. No one had seen her. This caused a serious delay in filing a missing child report by almost 10 hours!!

This is where the story gets weird. And is the first of many fishy, peculiar facts that, I'm sorry, all lead to the step-dad.
First off, did mom just make the assumption on her own that her little girl went over to a friends? Or did the step-dad tell her that? And if he didn't, why didn't he correct her on that notion? He was there all night wasn't he?
Uhhh, no. He wasn't.

His story is that he and some friends went out tearing around for a few hours that night.
(Leaving a sleeping 9 year old kid, alone, at home...real responsible there, Bubba!)
Then, once back home, the guy calls his momma...at 1 am...asking to borrow her car!!!
Momma happily complies. (WTF??!! Any of my 'adult' kids call me at 1 am on a Saturday morning wanting to borrow my car, I'm gonna laugh and hang up. Well, ok, I'll wait long enough to hear their story...but it better be a damn good one!...Then I'll rip 'em a new one and then laugh and hang up.)

So, momma shows up with the car, step-dad takes the car, leaving momma there at the house while he's off doing gawdnose what for an hour or 2 in the wee hours of the morning. Does she look in on the sleeping grandchild???
According to reports, No.
It's not revealed why.
I think it's obvious why. She probably was told that Rowan was spending the night at a friends!
But who would tell her that?
All roads point to the step-dad.

By now the feds are involved and the community has all pulled together to do searches and assist with the law. We all know the scenario. This is being played out far too often across the nation. I'll be shocked and amazed if lil' Rowan is found alive.
Although he is not publicly being called a suspect, the step-dad's story STINKS to high heaven. A local channel got an interview with him. That clip can be seen here.
He weeps and swears up and down that he would never do anything to harm that lil' girl.

Uh, Bubba...you did. Even if your hands are clean in this matter, by leaving her alone, unattended in the dark of night, out in the middle of nowhere just so's you and your buddies could go out and party on a Friday night, you allowed HARM to come to this child! You may not be the boogeyman, but you let the boogeyman have access.
Of course, as a mom myself, I can't exactly hold the mom up as a standard of purity and light either. We moms can be hypercritical when one of our own drops the ball.
Character counts. I'm sure maybe she felt safe in leaving her child in the charge of this man overnight...maybe not. But maybe she felt it was worth taking a chance under the circumstances. Times are tough in this region, jobs are hard to find. We don't know, but maybe she was the sole support for this family. I know in the past that I have turned down or have been rejected for jobs simply because I've had to honestly check "No" on the box that asks "Are you available to work all shifts?"

Even when my husband was alive, the idea of working an overnight shift somewhere and leaving my kids was unthinkable. I just couldn't do it. It's not that I doubted my husbands competency, it's just that the idea was abhorrent to me. Too many what ifs.
I know lots of women do work late shifts with no problem, but most are gals who have moms, sisters or other trusted family members living nearby to watch over and stay with their younguns overnight. It just wasn't right for me. So, yeah...I'm being alittle harsh on the gal. My kids are far more valuable to me than that extra 50 cents an hour.

We all know the saying- There's nothing more dangerous to a child than Mommy's new boyfriend. (or in this case, the new step-dad.)

And people wonder why I prefer to remain alone. Not all boyfriends and step-dads are potential monsters. I know several examples of men who have bonded to their non-biological kids with wonderful results. A few in my own family. But it appears for the most part the majority of perpetrators in child abuse, abduction or murder are men who have no biological connection to the kid.

Here's a link to the local coverage of this story.