The story of Melissa Huckaby, the 28-year-old Sunday school teacher charged with raping and murdering 8-year-old Sandra Cantu, just gets more and more upsetting. CNN reported this week that Huckaby was connected to another possible abduction of a child in the trailer park where she and Cantu live. In the earlier case, which took place in January, a 7-year-old girl was missing for four hours; she was found with Huckaby, who claimed she had permission to care for the child, an assertion the girl's family denies.
When the girl was returnd to her family, they say they saw evidence that she had been drugged. According to the girl's older sister, "Her speech was slurred. She could barely walk. She could barely stand." Because the police could not prove Huckaby had drugged the girl (though the girl remembered that Huckaby had given her water that "tasted funny"), no charges were filed. A local newspaper reports that Lora Polk, the girl's mother, was briefly accused of drugging her daughter after a hospital visit revealed muscle relaxants in her system; the child spent the night in the care of Child Protective Services. After she returned home, the family cut ties with Huckaby but no further alarms were raised, and nobody followed up. When Cantu went missing in late March, Polk said she immediately suspected what had happened.
News reports say that Huckaby claims Cantu's death was "an accident." It seems clear that although the death may have been accidental, the initial crime wasn't. Abducting and drugging little girls so that she could molest them sexually seems to have been Huckaby's sick and evil hobby. Perhaps if the family whose child escaped death in January had been able to make themselves heard -- if the mother had not been hampered by her own sketchy history (she had lost a child to CPS earlier), or if the stigma of trailer part rough living hadn't hung over the families involved -- she could have been stopped earlier.
Photo: Paul Sakuma / AP
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