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In article ,
wrote:

Believe me, it was taken care of. But, it had been going on for years before
we moved to the street. The damage was done. The kids are 18-22 now, and in
therapy. The oldest has her own kids. Guess how she behaves toward them. The
exact same way.

Doug, when I was kid, there was a boy down the street whose dad was a
drunk. Every time he would put one on he would come home and beat that
kid bloody. I mean bad. He used belts, boards, whatever was handy.
This was in the late 50's and the police would do nothing. I wonder
what happened to him. That image has stuck with me all these years.
It was ugly.

snip

I think I've told this story on the group before, but what the heck?

I was still in grade 6 or 7, living in a little area south of Pottery
Addition near Steubenville, OH.

One night somebody knocked at our door. There was a hushed conversation
at the door and my mother told me to go upstairs to my room. Being the
typically -- or maybe more than typically -- curious teenager, I of
course listened in on things via the heating ducts.

It turned out a neighbor girl of about 18 or so thought she had killed
her father. He'd trapped her by pushing their kitchen table into her,
catching her between the table and sink cabinet. She managed to get a
knife out of a drawer and thrust it at him across the table. He
collapsed and she ran out aimlessly in a panic, finally coming to our
door, maybe because she had done some babysitting for me and my sister
and thought my folks could help her.

I remember vividly her saying how she couldn't stand him forcing her to
his bed any longer and that she just grabbed the first weapon that came
to hand she could fend him off with. She said she didn't mean to hurt
him more than enough to get him away from her, but she didn't know how
badly he was hurt.

My folks called the sheriffs, who took the girl to their office after
checking her house and finding her father dead in the kitchen, lying on
the floor with about four inches of a big chef's knife in his chest. The
knife went far enough in to hit his heart. They said later that it
lookedlike he had more fallen across the table lunging for the girl and
fell on the knife more than she had thrust it into him. That may have
been just to spare her any more trauma. Who knows?

The girl's brother, sister, and mother backed up her story and in the
end she was never charged.

Turned out the Sheriff and Humane Officer had been watching the family
for some time, but had too little evidence to bring Child Welfare into
the situation or make an arrest themselves. They'd had reports and
rumors about how the old man was treating his family, but nothing solid
to take to court.

What really ticked me off, even that young, was some people in the
neighborhood considering her somehow defiled by having been repeatedly
raped by her drunken ******* of a father!

They soon moved away and I hoped the girl recovered as much as possible
and got a decent chance at life somewhere.