Written by As many of you know and I’ve mentioned before I live in San Diego. Over the past 5-6 days my little section of inland north county has been gripped by the story of Chelsea King, a missing 17 year old student from Poway High School who was discovered in a shallow grave after being assaulted and killed late last week.
It’s a story that hits peculiarly close to home given that my wife and I have walked, hiked and jogged on the exact trail that she was (presumably) killed on last Thursday. It’s an exceedingly safe area that we’ve been surprised, in the past at the amount of people you see walking, jogging and biking on in the afternoons.
This wasn’t a kid doing something she shouldn’t have been doing, she was simply going for a jog to stay in shape and as a cross country runner in high school she must have done this literally hundreds of times before.
It’s hard to deal with, given I haven’t been blessed with my own children yet, but I have friends and family with young children and this has brought up a ton of concerns for me and our local community. In many ways it has made people feel incredibly unsafe in an area that they should feel anything but unsafe. It also is hard to see close friends and family friends be among the adults tasked with helping to pick up the pieces at her high school, despite needing to deal with their own grief. I hope everyone can appreciate the difficulty of the tasks being asked of the principal, counselors, teachers and the athletic trainer who knew her well. The candlelight vigil was held at the church that my wife and I have both regularly attended for some time both as children and adults.
I hope we’re able to bring some type of change from this event to make it less likely in the future. It appears that the person being charged with the crime, literally as I write, is a convicted sex offender that could have been in jail for 30 years, but the judge gave him an 11 year sentence and he was out in 5 on good behavior despite the psychologists recommendation that he stay in custody. Clearly something went wrong when the offender would still have been in jail serving his 11 year sentence if he were not released early. Additionally, why given Meghan’s Law in the state of California are sex offenders able to list only a primary address even if they live multiple places? In this case he listed his Lake Elsinore address (about an hour’s drive north) but did not list his parents address which would have been ineligible based on being 1,000 feet or so away from a school (the requirement is 2,000 feet).
As of now I hope her family can take some comfort in the outpouring of support that has come from our local community.
I do have hope that something good can come of this terrible tragedy.
