Awww. And I so wanted to believe! ha
DENVER (AP) -- The mother of the 6-year-old boy once feared missing inside a runaway helium balloon told Colorado sheriff's deputies that the whole saga was a hoax, according to court documents.
Mayumi Heene admitted to deputies that she and her husband Richard "knew all along that Falcon was hiding in the residence" in Fort Collins, according to an affidavit used to get a search warrant for the home.
She allegedly told investigators the incident was a hoax meant to make them more marketable to the media.
"Mayumi described that she and Richard Heene devised this hoax approximately two weeks earlier.... She and Richard had instructed their three children to lie to authorities as well as the media regarding this hoax," the affidavit released Friday said.
The day that balloon boy happened, I was late at work and in the cafe they have CNN on. It was NON STOP FALCON HEENE the whole time. For a long time. Once he was found alive in the house, CNN wouldn't touch it. When I came back to watch, it wasn't even in the crawl at the bottom of the page, NOTHING. They ran away from it. As far as CNN was concerned, while there was a chance Falcon was still flying, there was NO OTHER NEWS. Once he was found alive, who cares?
Posted by: xerocky | Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 08:59 AM
Every person who lost a child watched in horror and prayed that the little boy would not die. What an awful way to bring attention to yourself. And then, to top it off, they made their children tell lies.
Furthermore, they ruined the wheat field of a struggling farmer, diverted emergency services, and closed an airport. They are despicable.
Posted by: Lala | Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 09:45 AM
bring back the stocks!
Posted by: x11b1p | Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 12:01 PM
Indentured Servant Girl has a link on the story behind the story.
http://indenturedservantgirl.blogspot.com/2009/10/peak-behind-veil.html
It's the flip-side of the Prisoner's Dilemma... From links to links, etc, we have the Cops pulling a fast one to obtain the confession.
"Clearly, the only way that we were going to be able to bring this to a successful conclusion is if we got a confession. You know, we could speculate all we want, but we had to get somebody talking and somebody telling us what really happened. We developed a strategy to do that. It was very important during this time that they maintained their trust with us, that we maintained a very good relationship that we had established with the family."
Mixed feelings. IFF the cops are accurately quoted, and it's not an anti-cop hoax, then it comes down to something along the lines of poetic injustice at best and perhaps malfeasance requiring an investigation at worst. Neither party - the family and the cops - come out of this smelling like bouquets.
Posted by: Ran | Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 10:17 PM