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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: Amber Alerts shouldn't be overlooked

A class full of ringing phones can be somewhat amusing until you realize that the phones are ringing because an Amber Alert is being administrated to the general populace.

This wasn’t the first Amber Alert to be sent out to Indiana residents this week.

Early on Monday, two young children went missing in the Fort Wayne area.

Since that alert was sent, the children have been found dead.

The death of young children is always saddening, but this case is infuriating.

Amber Pasztor, 29, was charged with the murder of her two children after they were found in her car late Monday night.

It is impossible for me to fathom killing or even injuring my children. I can’t even scold children without feeling guilty after.

Not only is she suspected of killing the two children, police have suggested that she may be behind the death of an elderly man, too.

Official reports have not yet been released if this is the case, but it is highly plausible.

What struck me as bizarre was that Pasztor came to the police herself to report her children dead.

Most homicidal people will take what they did with them for as far as they can until they get caught. Did she confess out of guilt? Or was it a more sinister reason? Murderers that are the scariest to me are the ones who want recognition.

Other cases of cruelty towards children have surfaced in the media lately.

A single mother in Albuquerque, New Mexico, went online to find men to sexually assault her 10-year-old daughter.

The daughter was beat, raped, murdered and dismembered by her mother and three other men.

Michelle Martens, the girl’s mother, felt no remorse about what she had done and even claimed she did it “because (she) enjoyed watching it.”

As if just killing your children wasn’t enough, this woman took it upon herself to do every other horrible thing to her daughter.

On top of which, police found a video camera that they believe were used to exploit the daughter and possibly other children.

Thankfully, the Amber Alert that caused all of our phones to ring in class was resolved peacefully with no dead or injured children.

Many times, missing children cases just become a post that is shared around your Facebook feed for a few days until people forget about it.

It’s really disheartening to see majority of them end badly, or just become forgotten because the case has gone cold.

The Amber Alerts have brought more attention since they are pushed through iPhones unless you turn the notifications off.

However, they don’t exactly follow up on the alerts and you have to look them up yourself.

It’s great that we as a society pay more attention to what’s happening to children now, but I think we could afford to spend more time worrying about the people raising children and what they are doing to them.

It hurts my heart to wonder what could have happened to these kids if someone worried about the state of mind of their parents or looked for dangerous 
signals.

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