"Question: Are you still hopeful?"

In his Thursday, June 9, 2005, Huckleberries weblog, The Spokesman Review columnist Dave Oliveria posed this blog topic: "Question: Are you still hopeful?" He was asking the question based on colleague Susan Drumheller's article headlined Hopes are high that missing Groene children are still alive.

Reread Kootenai County Sheriff Rocky Watson's comments in the article, particularly, "It was a highly emotional crime scene, a violent crime scene. Real violent crimes are usually driven by love, money or drugs."

Of those three usual motivations he lists, only "love" is the intangible one. "Love" can assume many forms and have many interpretations, even some that apparently contradict love's traditionally accepted definition.

For one example, consider the possibility that the children's abductors committed the crimes out of a distorted sense of love for the two missing children. What may have been found in the house by investigators or what may have been removed from the house by the abductors would tell investigators and us much about the emotional state of the abductors and their intentions toward the missing children.

I see two indicators supporting investigators' reasonable optimism the missing children are still alive:

• The apparent absence of crime scene evidence that the missing children were harmed during three brutal murders
• The apparent absence of physical evidence that the missing children have been harmed since being abducted

So, to answer Dave Oliveria's question: Absolutely! In the absence of evidence to the contrary, evidence investigators would expect to see if the children had been harmed during or after their abduction, it would be unreasonably pessimistic to give up hope.