I am suddenly overcome with rage.
I'm just throwing this out there - but seeing the INSIDE of that house how unkept it appears - hearing about the numerous phone calls and pleading with services to step in.
Makes me wonder if it was just some 'patsy' ticking off a box on a sheet to say she had attended and actually HAD NOT.
Considering how many people were following up on her well being it would of been marked as a priority. MY GOODNESS.
Is there any kind of sentence for those who are assigned to protect and DON'T because IMPO they are JUST as guilty if not more so than the abusers themselves..
Just even hearing the fact that this was more than likely the case is ... twisted enough.
This is where we need to focus. We can not afford to have 'weak links' working in our systems that are put in place to protect. We need people who care, who follow instinct - heck even just listening to what was being said would of been an indicator here.
Sadly it's taking yet another life to expose yet again the never ending frustrations of a system that is NOT working.
Who to blame i don't know.
All i know is that they could have gotten their foot in the door - judgin from how untidy the house is there was bound to be a scent, and a house is a reflection of yourselfs in most cases, neat house, neat dress. THERE ARE SO MANY POINTS.
At the end of the day - it should of taken ONE gut instinct to make the call and involve the state and save a life.
Laura's voice will continue to haunt us
Her voice shouts to us from the grave. It shouted through a downtown courtroom in recent weeks, in the trial of her half brother Luke Wright. It resounded through a horrified community. It was so loud, and the details of what she tried to tell us so horrific, that many of us could not stand to listen.
Laura Cummings. Sweet-faced victim. Twenty-three years old, but mentally and emotionally like an 8-year-old. She should have been taken from her nightmarish, abusive home and placed with people who loved her.
Instead, 15 years of torment went unchecked. At least a half-dozen calls for help in her final year, when the abuse reached frenzied levels, went unheeded. Laura was suffocated and scalded to death in her North Collins home in January 2010. Homicidal mother Eva Cummings— who hated Laura for her disability— is in jail for life. The sadistic Wright was convicted Wednesday of all 10 felony counts involving Laura’s abuse.
Let me state the obvious: Laura Cummings is dead because in ways large and small, a lot of people failed her. At least some of those whose job it was to help her should — and will — have to answer for the horrendous way that she lived, and died.
Six years after her death, Laura Cummings finally gets a formal dignified burial. The 23-year-old developmentally challenged woman died at the hands of her mother after years of being tortured at home.
This burial happened thanks to the Loving Laura Project, which raised funds for the burial. Laura was cremated after her death in 2010.
"Her brother Richard had the ashes, I think this was an appropriate time to part with those and give her the dignified burial marking the final resting place with a beautiful headstone," said Suzanne McKenney, administrator of the project.