Natalee Holloway's stepfather seeks divorce

Associated Press ^ | January 5, 2007

[maggief]

Holy cow! Someone didn't raise you properly to make a comment like that!

[HarmlessLovableFuzzball]

No Problem.

[Cold Heat]

I tend to agree to a point, but teenagers think they are indestructible, even to drugs and alcohol. This sort of mistake is common and happens in the best of families.

I think we know too much about this mother, and this causes some judgment to be made about her character.

In reality, this is the fault of the teen and the teen alone.

[MHT]

Yes, she was over 18 and considered an adult. However, there were 124 high school kids on this trip and only 7 adults. Those are insane odds. The class trip there the year before had been so wild that this class was banned from the Holiday Inn. Wasn't there discussion or gossip as to what happened on that trip? What would have made her parents so trusting? In the world of girls-gone-wild, a little cynicism from the parents of the entire community would have been helpful. Seven adults for 124 kids? They thought that these kids were so perfect that each adult could be there for 17 kids without something like this happening?

I don't want to blame the victim, but this set-up was perfect for disaster. Furthermore, she had been drinking the entire day. Who knows how experienced she was with alcohol or how street-smart she was. Because of her own behavior, it becomes more difficult to distinguish the facts from the lies. Who knows...she might have gotten overwhelming drunk and suffered from alcohol poisoning and drowned. She might have been a target from the moment she walked in and been served a date-rape drug and died from an overdose. It also seems that it would have been a whole lot less likely that she would have been abducted in their car had a more experienced adult at least been in the bar. And were there no "sister's keepers" with her, concerned that she had driven off alone with 3 locals? A search for her earlier than the next morning might have been helpful.

Just because she was over 18 didn't mean that she had adult judgment and everyone is always on a learning curve. However, this is a cautionary tale for others.

[FR_addict]

Here's an FBI account from one of Natalee's close girlfriends of how they spent their time in Aruba.
It is very different that the official "Beth" version.

FBI 302 for Lee Ashford Broughton 6/03/2005

http://www.refugeesunleashed.net/viewtopic.php?t=8048&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0


They were drinking from morning till night on two successive nights. And Natalee was not the only Mountain Brook girl who was doing body shots at Carlos and Charlie's.
There was at least one chaperone at CnC's that night and no one stopped these girls.

Beth will not talk about the dangers of teenage drinking. Yes, it was legal in Aruba, but why pay for an all-you-can-drink booze trip for your teenager to a foreign country.

This girl could just have easily drowned for all we know. According to one of the FBI statements by a security guard at the hotel, the MB kids were out skinny dipping that same night.