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Oh and Creepy Gene’s story??

http://www.people.com/people/package/article/0,,20656736_20658893,00.html

So who is telling the truth???

So who is telling the truth???

If it's a gamble on truth, I'll take whichever side is NOT named 'NYTimes"!

I don't have a firm opinion about Gene. But in fact, the article you quote at least provides some support for his story.

One of the objections was how kids could end up a Gene's house, and this article confirms that a group of kids ran out of the school and ended up down the road.

(BTW, this also points out that in at least this case, violating the school lockdown policy saved lives).

There was only one line in the entire article that would contradict the "Gene" story, and that wasn't a statement BY the mom or the child. It was a statement the mother said she got from "another mom":

Not long afterward another mom told Jen that five kids who'd escaped were at the Newtown police station. "She said two moms found them running down the road a half mile from the school," Jen says.

So if could be that this "other mom" got a bad story about the kids, and was repeating it. Or it could be that in fact two other moms found the kids, and Gene is lying. But behind all this, I have to believe that the police had interviewed those kids by now, and if they had said they had never seen Gene, we'd know it.

While the reporter in this story actually talked with this kid, they never asked the kid about Gene, or if they did, they didn't report it. Which is too bad, because a few questions and answers would have put this whole "Crazy Gene" thing to rest, one way or another.

I guess in the end, I still lean toward believing at least the basic information from the Gene story, if for no other reason than I can't think of why a guy would make up having the kids in his house, when it would be so easily refuted by just asking the kids. So I think the kids probably DID end up in his house.

If so, it seems a plausible story that the kids just ran out (confirmed by this article), ran down the street, ran into a bus driver who was trapped by the congestion, the bus driver invited them on the bus, gene saw this, came out and offered them shelter, and the bus driver and kids went into the house.

"plausible" doesn't mean accurate, just that I don't see it as inherently unbelievable. I also think Gene at least embellished his story.