6 Year Old Molested at the Gym

WTF?  No shit.  Midtown Sports and Wellness (of which there are three in ABQ) is a big, well equipped gym near my home in ABQ.  They have day care (2 hour maximum) during the day and I took advantage this winter.  Gracie loves going and playing with the other kids and I get to blow off some steam and not turn into a lump of fat.  I stopped going a month ago cuz it warmed up enough that I can do things outside: my preference.  Yesterday my new friend Dan told that a six year old was molested/raped at Midtown S&W.

Usually I am pretty hard to bump out of groove.  Life is a winding road, just like the song says but this bumped me.  Dan's daughter, my daughter, lots of peoples daughters use the day care at MSW.  This happened when the day care room was not staffed but ... who fucking cares.  Unsupervised young kids at a gym while Mom or Dad are off working out?  Woman on the cleaning staff has a 20 year old son that is a member of the gym.  He spent a little time with the girl helping her get a video started and then went back and molested her: nasty details like holding his hand over her mouth and telling her he would hurt her if she yelled etc.  She left the room crying after he left and told staff what had happened.  Cops caught up with him and he freely admitted to having a problem 'touching little kids'.  WTF?

"Day Care".  Most day cares care for kids whose parents are not on site.  These day cares be licensed and inspected by a governing body.  MSW's day care is exempt because parents are still on site.  So the gym did not have any guidelines that they were required to follow and I think this is how this situation came about.  After gym day care staff has left people still bring in their kids (albeit older than my 17 month old daughter but still young) and let them hang out, watch videos, play with the toys and all of this is unsupervised.  I think adults know that the kids are doing this but noone is specifically dedicated to the task.

I googled it and found all sorts of hateful, vengeful chatter on various 'white power' and 'gun nut' sites.  Their focus was on the fact that this 20 year old was an illegal alien (and this of course explains why he did something so depraved and damaging to this girl).  I just don't get it ... the racist angle.  As though a US citizen would never do this sort of thing ... ?  Stupid people are everywhere I guess.  One guy on a 'white power' site went into grisly detail how he would torture and kill this illegal alien child molester: cutting off his fingers with tin snips etc.  WTF? How is that any different and somehow justifiable than molesting a six year old?  He had it all planned out in numbered steps.  Totally twisted.

Dan, the new friend that told me about the situation at MSW, started in about how what he would do if this happened to his daughter.  I told him I didn't want to hear it and explained that if you truly wanted to get away with killing someone having witnesses to your 'plan' before the crime was probably something you'd want to avoid.  I said "Don't tell anyone anything."  Silly really, but ... god forbid, you never know.

Here would be the appropriate spot to get on my 'irate, vengeful, soapbox' and detail my plan to rid the world of one more predator BUT : my official perspective on this is; I don't need to spend that amount of energy and focus on something so completely negative and poisonous.  The other side of the revenge coin would be love and healing for the injured child.  That's not going to happen if I am plotting a murder is it?

The world is a really fucked up place.  Shit like this sometimes intrudes into my tight, white, safe little world and while it is a distinctly scary reminder I appreciate it for what it is.  Most of the world is not safe and wonderful.  I think that in spite of this sort of heinous shit it is possible to raise kids without teaching them to be eternally afraid.  Nuf said.