That's my assumption for now -- that the parents' lifestyle involves being up at 2:30 AM, doing whatever, and then crashing and not waking up until 1:00PM. Then they look around for an hour before calling police. Reasonable, I suppose, if you're in the habit of leaving a one-legged, hearing-impaired 10 year old to her own devices through long stretches of daytime hours when a child on any sort of regular school schedule would be awake and inclined to try to have some fun. The stepmother's laundry list of charges sketches a picture of a general lowlife -- lots of bad checks, stealing from employer, driving without license, failing to return rented property (presumably she'd stopped making payments on it). Odd that they don't seem to have a comparable list for the father, though. Irresponsible lowlifes usually pair off with their own kind.
And I'd certainly like to know more about how this little girl lost her leg and became hearing-impaired, and why her biological mother has been out of the picture since before her first birthday. Sounds like she's had quite a rough life.
I hope Zahra ran away, and it sounds like she may have had good reason to want to. But it doesn't sound like investigators are leaning in that direction. They wouldn't have arrested the stepmother on those many outstanding charges -- which obviously aren't all brand new -- unless they thought she was involved. If those charges weren't considered serious enough to arrest her for before, they wouldn't be considered serious enough now to be the real reason she was arrested.
MOO
