Every once in a while we get a bittersweet ending.  It's not really a happy ending, because whatever happened to Diana was horrible.  But by the grace of God she's back with her family now.

Screw the Long Beach Police for using the classic "magic eraser of police work" and classifying this as a runaway.

Also, there's a world of difference between "true crime" where people are making a sport of the hunt for Gabby Petito's killer, and actually caring about someone like Diana who is missing.  I don't know how to get people to actually care.  Because that's all it took.  Within a few hours of putting Diana's story on TV, someone recognized her and she was rescued.  Shame on the Long Beach Police.  Too busy taking homeless people away from storefronts.

From ABC7:

LONG BEACH, Calif. (KABC) -- A Long Beach teen who was missing for two months has been found, just hours after news reports about her disappearance.

A representative of the family told Eyewitness News Tuesday night that Diana Rojas was spotted in the South Los Angeles area by a person who recognized her from news reports earlier in the day. Police were notified and informed her parents that she was found.
Details about her condition and circumstances of her disappearance were not immediately available.

My big love-hate relationship with A&E includes my favorite show, Parking Wars.  Because Parking Wars is where America lets it all hang out.  That's who we are in real life.  We are a bag of dicks when somebody asks us nicely to move from where we're not supposed to be.

This story is just layer upon layer of sad.
Department of Justice:

"According to court records and evidence presented at trial, Jesse Fernando Perez, 36, is currently serving a 121-month federal sentence for possession of child pornography at the Federal Correctional Complex in Petersburg, Virginia. While incarcerated, he copied images of children from books and magazines, and then drew on the images to create depictions of the children engaged in sexually explicit activity.

Perez faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years and a maximum sentence of 60 years in prison when sentenced on December 11. Actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties. A federal district court judge will determine any sentence after taking into account the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors."

So he's already in prison for child porn.  They probably shouldn't be letting him have books and magazines with pictures of children in them, because he's weird like that.  He's obviously in a bad enough place in his life where he's liable to do stuff like this.

I don't feel right prosecuting someone for being such a pitiful little sad man that he would do something like this so he can wank, frankly.  The boy aint right.  Part of me feels like people shouldn't spend another FIFTEEN YEARS in prison for drawing dirty pictures of kids because they're too messed up to do anything better with their time.  I mean it's a seriously messed-up cry for help.

That said, a 36-year-old man who, if he didn't have access to actual sexual pictures of children, would go to this length to gratify himself, has to be kept out of circulation.  There's a reason even facsimiles of child porn are criminalized, and I agree with that.  It's why you can be arrested for trying to meet up with a decoy 12-year-old.

I just wish America wasn't the incarceration nation, and we were actually helping people.  Why is there always so much sexual violence?  WTF?  Why is prison the answer to every problem?

On the one hand, as I just discussed with the Newburgh 4, I don't trust the FBI not to be all Wile E. Coyote, making up fake bomb plots to put people in prison for life so they can get gold stars at work,  They'll do that!

The FBI also played quite a role in letting Whitey Bulger run amok in Boston for years.  And I personally believe they had a lot to do with the person who killed the Jennings 8, and possibly whoever dumped the women out on the mesa in Albuquerque.  The West Mesa killer, I believe, has law enforcement connections.  And it wouldn't surprise me at all if they were at least friends with the FBI.

Anyway, not to be Debbie Downer, because here the FBI really done good.  They do a great job with the chomos.  NCMEC consistently does great work.

FBI.gov

"More than 200 victims of sex trafficking were rescued during a nationwide enforcement campaign last month that also included the identification or arrest of more than five dozen suspected human traffickers and 126 individuals accused of child sexual exploitation and trafficking offenses.

The FBI-led “Operation Cross Country,” which involved nearly every FBI field office and their respective state and local partners, also located 59 minor victims of child sex trafficking and sexual exploitation, and another 59 children who had been reported missing.   
The two-week law enforcement initiative—now in its 13th year—is a coordinated operation among the FBI, other federal agencies, state and local police, and social services agencies across the country to find and assist victims of human trafficking, particularly child victims. Law enforcement agencies conduct targeted operations to identify traffickers, their networks, and their victims. FBI victim specialists, working alongside local agencies, then provide immediate support and access to the extensive resources that are available to all federal crime victims. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) is a significant partner in the initiative. The private non-profit is a clearinghouse of information and has assisted in more than 400,000 cases of missing kids who were recovered since its founding in 1984."

Remember, everyone in America is innocent of all charges until proven guilty in a court of law, no matter how dead their eyes may appear in their mugshot.

As soon as I heard the story, my only question was why, what was the backstory behind the individuals.  Why him?  Why now?

Because if there's anything anyone doesn't understand about America's racial history, this classic case really explains it.  While it's not being applied in quite the same way here, this story shows the exact mechanism of a "sundown town."  They draw a line in the sand.  They tell people not to be here when the sun goes down.  And if you are, FAFO.

It's very important that we understand specifically how this trick works.  Because the same mechanism gets employed in a variety of circumstances, including against sex workers for a variety of reasons. I recently discussed this in my review of The Killing Season. 

Because those journalists, despite the otherwise good work they did, were quite easily convinced that it wasn't real even while it was being explained to them by women who have had this experience while also being Holtzclawed.  He didn't believe that, either.  They couldn't be convinced that the one police officer whose name got dropped by every sex worker in ABQ could possibly have been a bad actor, because he said no.

Spectrum News

"Earlier this week, now-former officer Samuel Davis, 26, was charged with assault and kidnapping stemming from the arrest of a persistent shoplifting suspect at a Northwoods Walgreens on July 4. He's accused of driving the man to a remote location in Kinloch, beating him with his baton, using pepper spray and breaking his jaw. 

Court documents state after the handcuffed victim was put in the back of Davis' patrol car, Hill, who was Davis' supervising officer, returned to the store and made an incriminating statement to a store employee regarding what would happen to the victim. 
Hill nor Davis never activated their body cameras, according to court documents. They also didn't inform dispatch that they had a suspect in custody or write a report about the incident.
"Police officers who commit violence undermine the trust of the community. My office is working to restore that trust by ensuring a fair, transparent investigation and prosecution in cases of police brutality. Officers in St. Louis County have a host of tools to rely on in addressing individuals who commit non-violent offenses, including referring individuals to our Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program or making a proper arrest when public safety demands it. There is no excuse for this criminal conduct, and my office will prosecute these officers to the fullest extent of the law," said St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell. 
Northwoods police chief Dennis Shireff told Spectrum News the victim was taken to Kinloch at the victim's request after the store decided it didn't want to prosecute him, and it had recovered the stolen merchandise.
Shireff said there were several other occasions where the man, who he said suffers from mental illness and was intoxicated at the time of the July 4 incident, would be taken to other locations, including a relative's home. 
Hill is being held on a $100,000 cash only bond."

When I worked as a paramedic we had a guy who we would get called to multiple times a day sometimes, us and the police both, often at Walgreens.  He would get so desperate for alcohol that he would open up some mouthwash, rubbing alcohol, or whatever he could get his hands on, and drink as much of it as possible before they could knock it out of his hands.  Believe it or not, we would often find him seizing in parking lots.

As much of a pain in my ass as that guy was, I would never in a million years want the cops to do that to him.  We had much worse, more abusive, more problematic people than the guy they're describing.  The situation they're charged with, if proven in a court of law, is unimaginable to me.

Remember when the Department of Justice found Ferguson, Missouri systemically racist?  Whatever came of that?

I love a happy ending.  And this police officer did a great job.

Someone called GW Bush International Airport wanting to report his mother missing from her international flight.  It seemed strange to this officer that he had waited several days to do so.

When a non-English-speaking trespasser was later discovered, luckily it was the same officer called to investigate.  She discovered it was the same woman that had been inquired about by her "son," and connected the dots.

I appreciate the great job by this officer.

One of the most "through the looking glass" parts of the Donald Trump presidency was the way suddenly the FBI was supposedly out to get Republicans.  LOL!  As if.

Over in the land of alternative facts, the FBI is a progressive thing that's out to get the struggling white Republican guy who can never seem to catch a break in this country.

In real life, the FBI was founded as J. Edgar Hoover's personal right-wing goon squad.  One of Hoover's hottest personal agendas was harassing any sexy black people that showed up on radar, like Martin Luther King or Angela Davis.  He lost his mind trying to go after both of them.  I think they built an FBI cafeteria on top of Leonard Peltier. 

I have always thought of the FBI to be on the trustworthiness scale of say, Wile E. Coyote.  And it sucks, because unfortunately they are the ones tasked with pursuing (a) the mafia and (b) child sex predators, both of which directly interest me personally.  And I have to say they do a not-bad job with the chomos, thanks in no small part to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children.  Kudos on that.

But in this story we see another example of the extreme toxicity of the GW Bush presidency, more of those radioactive chickens coming to roost.  From the same slippery slope of human rights and law enforcement that brought us Guantanamo Bay, they also stitched up these four guys, three of whom have now finally been released.  One of them is a paranoid schizophrenic.  America!  He's lucky it wasn't Texas or they'd have given him the death penalty.

Here, again, the state was a bad actor, making work for itself to make itself look good when a certain sort of cases were in fashion.  As if there wasn't a mega crap ton of real work to do in America all the time.  As if the woods weren't full of militia wingnuts.

There won't be justice for anyone until there's justice for everyone.  And I can't imagine that there ever will be.  We'll never have nice things in this country.  Because this isn't a broken system.  The system is perfectly reflecting the desires and values of the people who built it.