Laurie Anne Bariola ✍🏼| Woman/Mrs/Female/She/Her

🚨 An Indiana man is facing 20 felony counts after being accused of torturing and molesting multiple children under 12 he kept locked in a basement and fed only crumbs. Joshua Chasteen, 28, is accused of locking children in a basement, starving them, subjecting them to brutal physical abuse, and sexually molesting them. He also killed and abused animals in front of the children and made violent threats toward the victims and their mother. These allegations involve multiple young victims, all under the age of 12. The severity and prolonged nature of the reported abuse point to a disturbing pattern of control and harm against children who were likely in his care or close proximity. When children are subjected to this level of abuse and torture, it raises serious questions about how such situations can go undetected for so long and what systems failed to protect them. What more can be done to ensure children in dangerous home environments are identified and removed before the abuse escalates to this level?

My kid's school asked me to donate supplies. Paper. Pencils. Hand sanitizer. Tissues. I pay property taxes. My state has a $4 billion surplus. The federal education budget is $238 billion. And the teacher is buying pencils out of her own paycheck. And I'm sending in Ziploc bags. We fund stadiums for billionaires with public money. We fund schools with bake sales. And then blame teachers when test scores drop.

"A ten-year-old started screaming about a wave no one could see—and 100 people lived because her parents believed her. December 26, 2004. Mai Khao Beach, Phuket, Thailand. Christmas holiday. Perfect weather. The Smith family walked along the sand on their first overseas vacation together. Then Tilly noticed something wrong. The water wasn't behaving normally. ""It wasn't calm and it wasn't going in and then out,"" she later recalled. ""It was just coming in and in and in."" The sea had turned frothy—""like you get on a beer,"" she said. ""It was sort of sizzling."" Any other ten-year-old might have thought it strange. Tilly knew exactly what it meant. Two weeks earlier, her geography teacher Andrew Kearney had shown the class footage of the 1946 tsunami that devastated Hawaii. He taught them the warning signs: sea receding unusually far, frothy bubbling water, ocean behaving strangely. Tilly was watching those exact warning signs unfold in front of her. She started screaming at her parents. ""There's going to be a tsunami!"" They didn't believe her. They couldn't see any wave. The sky was clear. The beach was calm. But Tilly wouldn't stop. She became more insistent, more frantic. ""I'm going,"" she finally said. ""I'm definitely going. There is definitely going to be a tsunami."" Her father Colin heard the urgency in her voice. He decided to trust his daughter. By coincidence, a Japanese man nearby overheard Tilly use the word ""tsunami."" He'd just heard news of an earthquake in Sumatra. ""I think your daughter's right,"" he said. Colin alerted hotel staff. They began evacuating immediately. Tilly's mother Penny was one of the last to leave. She had to sprint as the water began rushing in behind her. ""I ran,"" she recalled, ""and then I thought I was going to die."" They made it to the second floor with seconds to spare. Then the wave hit. Thirty feet tall. Everything on the beach—beds, palm trees, debris—was swept into the pool and beyond. ""Even if you hadn't drowned,"" Penny later said, ""you would have been hit by something."" The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed over 230,000 people across 14 countries. Entire beaches in Phuket were wiped out. But at Mai Khao Beach, not a single person died. Because a ten-year-old girl paid attention in geography class. Tilly was hailed as the ""Angel of the Beach."" She received awards, spoke at the United Nations, met Bill Clinton. Her story is now taught in schools worldwide. Her father Colin still thinks about what could have happened. ""If she hadn't told us, we would have just kept on walking,"" he said. ""I'm convinced we would have died."" Tilly still credits her teacher. ""If it wasn't for Mr. Kearney,"" she told the UN, ""I'd probably be dead and so would my family."" Two weeks. One lesson. One hundred lives. That's the power of education.

Her own father got her drunk… then raped her for four hours straight. She couldn’t even walk afterward. Her uncle had to carry her into the hospital. The rape kit proved his DNA. She was left so broken she took her own life — because she couldn’t live with what her dad did to her. And he’s only getting THREE YEARS? This is not justice. This is a slap in the face to every survivor. May he never know a single second of peace. Say her name. Share this until they listen. 💔

“I effing killed him” — Gay man charged with murder of baby boy he adopted. The baby’s cause of death was acute upper airways obstruction, as a result of smothering by hand, fabric, or inserted object. The child had suffered 40 injuries including external and internal bruising, and a fractured arm. Detective found videos on Varley’s phone, recorded earlier that day, with the boy lying on the bed with respiratory arrest but the defendant did not seek medical help. Varley is charged with: murder, manslaughter, two counts of assault by penetration, five counts of cruelty to a child, grievous bodily harm, sexual assault of a child, 13 counts of taking indecent photos or videos of a child, one of distributing an indecent photo of a child. A month before the child’s death, Varley told a social worker he wasn’t “bonding” with the child and was having “dark thoughts” about him, including thoughts of drowning or suffocating the baby. He said he would never act on them.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ They let him keep the baby anyway.