I'm not caught up but already I'm ranting. There was mention of one of the women being concerned about the money they'd spent on a walking aid for Jordan being wasted when he died. Callous enough but now I read it cost a princely £7.
(I'm going to have a headache by the time I get to the spoilered posts, aren't I?)
I'm at the end of page two. The only main observation I have is that these people seem very low IQ and that none of them (maybe with the exception of the father's siblings) seems all there.
The grandmother's comments that she couldn't wait to get her hands on Jordan's room...it sounds callous from our perspective, but if you think of it more as a 6-yr old with a learning disorder it feels a lot more understandable.
I don't know if you can judge people like this in the same way you judge appropriate actions from more 'abled' people?
I know of examples that are not as extreme as this case, but they involve people who are more 'average' and a lot of it is about the context as the individual sees it.
Why is Abigail claiming that Jordan was out playing football with he daughter the day before he died when the post mortem shows that he was in no condition to be able to do that? She seems to have an obsession with McDonalds, saying that she brought him a double cheeseburger with fries, and that after his death he would be sad to not get nerf gun toys with a happy meal?
If these people are like 6-year olds with a learning disability, how can they be tried by a jury of "their peers"?
From our perspective it's all unbelievable, and yet from their perspective it seems like they were trying their best with changing his incontinence pads and things like that.
I would imagine that Jordan could have been suffering from severe depression, he'd been isolated from the 'normal' world by being taken out of school, what future would he have seen for himself? Abigail talks of him maybe going to college, but if he was anything like the rest of them, and Dawn had been responsible for his schooling, there's no way I can see that he would have been going to college.
I wish this family had got help back when Jordan was attending school and clearly showing signs of major neglect. But even that sounds more like a family that didn't know how to cope than actual purposeful abuse? Back to the comparison with a 6-year old with a learning disability, how could you expect them to cope? I don't think this is so much a failure in this family as a failure of outsiders not recognising that they really needed outside support from social services in order to function, and that those needs weren't going to magically go away. These people have been existing in our world but not thriving in it. From their responses to questioning on the stand they have limited vocabulary, limited foci (McDonalds, Playstation, food shopping). They don't seem to have a good concept of money and finances. I don't know that any of them is psychologically capable of doing better than they have been doing without major support from social services and mental health services.