Someone powerful in Memphis TN is trying to railroad 15-year-old James Prindle for a rape of a toddler he didn’t commit.
We don’t know yet who it is or why they’re doing it, but we have our teeth in this case and we will eventually learn what is going on. Our best guess right now is that the puppet-master is someone who is involved in child sex trafficking. And we know it must be someone powerful because the police and courts appear to be dancing to this person’s tune and are doing everything in their power to prevent the truth from becoming known.
We have an interested party on the ground right now and he says the whole thing stinks. He came to Memphis to learn what facts he can, and all his experience and connections are being frustrated so far. Yesterday a court clerk threatened to call security to remove him from her office, and he dared her to do it (she didn’t). But neither would she release any public records to us including the initial police incident report.
I have recommended that we get the FBI involved, and the postal inspectors too (it appears correspondence from the boy may have been intercepted by the jail authorities). Even if the Feds don’t help us, we will have at least created a paper trail to help support a future appeal and civil litigation against official wrongdoers.
When I wrote my April 14th piece about child sacrifice, it was James Prindle that I had in mind. He is being treated like a “throw-away child” by everyone, even his parents. He feels deeply hurt and abandoned. He knows nothing but his cesspool existence of having been raised in an abusive home—a Cordova Creek apartment, actually—that was known as the neighborhood drug house. James’ stepfather Jefferson Sanders, 40, allegedly deals meth, cocaine, and date rape drugs, and regularly beat James, his mother, and his younger brother.
He can’t understand how his mother Monica, 37, would choose to side with his stepfather and not him. He still cannot get his head around why, accompanied by her lawyer, his mother would have visited him in jail two weeks ago to disown him. He still cannot understand how his mother can say she believes he raped his little sister—especially at a time when there were seven other kids in the apartment.
He cannot understand why his biological father Sam, who has money and lives in Maine, will not help him and only says, “You’ve got to learn to stand on your own two feet.” James says he’s trying.
James cannot comprehend that this turn of events in his young life may, in fact, prove to be his deliverance. But that unimaginable possibility is far in the future. He is charged as an adult, indigent, being held in adult jail and receiving no schooling, he has no skilled lawyer who cares about him, and is unable to pay an impossibly high bond.
James has been assigned the worst attorney in the public defender’s office and the facts of the case are being obfuscated and hoarded by the court. Lacking evidence and relying mostly on statements made by a pair of brothers who had been involved in the child sex industry (and maybe the likeliest perpetrators), the full extent of the police investigation seems to have been to come up with a “blame the babysitter” rationale and leave it at that—and the babysitter in this instance is unfortunately James.
James can’t understand how anyone can seriously believe he raped his little sister. “I only like girls my age or older—that’s it.” He says he “would rather blow my brains out than ever think about touching my sister.”
James is popular at school and earns mediocre but passing grades. He has never been in trouble with the law before. He has been labeled socially “slow” and diagnosed / medicated for a rash of mental disorders caused by TV, junk food, and bad parenting: Severe Depression, ADHD, and Borderline Personality Disorder. James ran away from home several times, cut classes, acted out in school, cut himself, and was hospitalized for being suicidal. Nobody helped or cared. “I hated my life,” he said. Who can blame him?
Yet even though he’s facing charges that could land him in prison for more than sixty years, what mostly upsets James about the whole affair is that his brand new X-Box was stolen that night and sold by one of the other kids to buy pot. “I got to play with it less than five minutes before it was gone,” he says. He’d saved for it for months. (He’s a kid and that’s how they sort of think.)
But I’m throwing too much at you all at once. Let’s back up and start at the beginning.
On August 16th 2010, James Prindle was babysitting his little sister and brother while his mother and stepfather were at work. It was past nine when two brothers showed up at the door of his apartment. He had not invited them—they were just there along with a few of their friends.
The brothers had heard about James’ new X-Box and came to see it. Figuring the brothers would break down the door if he kept them out, James let them in. There were suddenly eight of them, plus James’ sleeping brother and sister, in that small apartment.
The brothers were…
(For some reason I don’t quite grasp, I’ve been asked not to use the brothers’ real names—even though their information is plastered all over the Internet. Okay, I’m a sport, so we’ll use pseudonyms: Nemo and Mike.)
…The brothers were 12-year-old Mike and his 14-year-old brother Nemo. Their last names start with “S.”
They had reputations as known neighborhood troublemakers. “I knew them and told them to stay away,” James’ mother Monica said to the press. They’d lived in their apartment for less than two months, and she knew the brothers were trouble. “I’d already heard that one of the boys had been arrested for trouble at a middle school,” she said.
But she couldn’t have imagined how much trouble they would be.
Nemo had already racked up charges for auto theft, assault, vandalism and disorderly conduct. Mike has previous charges for assault and possession. And more to the point of this story, for five years, from the time that Nemo was 5 and Mike was 4, both boys were exploited by a child sex trafficking ring of registered sex offenders. They were taken to private camps and organized fishing trips that their dad actually paid for—so everyone in that family got screwed.
So these are the street- and sex-smart urchins James let into the house and who somehow convinced James it was okay to leave them alone with the X-Box and the baby while James ran down to a nearby convenience store to get something to eat.
By the time James returned there was a commotion inside. James could hear the baby crying. There was fear in the sound of her shrieks and wailing. Mike came to the door and refused to let James in, so James ran downstairs to a neighbor and asked him to call 911.
When James returned to his apartment door, this time Mike let him in. The baby was still crying and, as James made for the bedroom Mike restrained him. As he looked around he saw some of the guys had left and that his X-Box was gone! Nemo emerged from the bedroom and immediately took charge. Nemo and Mike called 911 and reported a break-in by a masked robber who had stolen the game console and assaulted James’ 23-month-old stepsister.
When the police arrived, James was so bewildered and scared that he just let Nemo do all the talking. “My homey is slow,” Nemo explained and laid out the lie for the cops. Somehow Nemo and Mike got James to play along.
Nemo’s scheme unraveled when the boys were separated and questioned and, in something worthy of a late night comedy sketch, Nemo said the robber was white and James said, “Uh, I’m not sure but I think he was black.”
There was no sign of forced entry, and it appears that someone gave the little girl a bath before police arrived, possibly to get rid of evidence.
There were indications that the girl had been held down while she was raped. She suffered serious head trauma and was released after spending a week in the hospital.
Things were way out of hand while James was away. A kid named Adam later testified that he was alone with the baby and had touched her. He said he was checking her for fever with a rectal thermometer. “Do you have younger siblings?” the judge asked and Adam answered “no.” How then, the judge asked, did he know how to check for fever?
Before the police arrived, James was in the clear but he just didn’t know it.
James should never agreed to go along with Nemo’s and Mike’s lie. (He’s not labeled “slow” for nothing.)
The worst thing is, James is now being made a fall-guy for the crime. He’s being tried as an adult for rape, child abuse, and false reporting. Nemo, on the other hand, is being charged as a juvenile with facilitation of rape and child abuse. Yet due to a lack of evidence, all charges against Mike were dropped. (I don’t know what’s happened to Adam or even who the other guys were in the apartment that night.)
This all happened at an October 21 hearing where the judge sorted out all the evidence as presented and—much to the delight of Nemo’s and Mike’s attorneys—got it all wrong. He compounded his error by remanding James to the adult courts and jail.
There will be a lot more to this story as it unfolds, but this is all I’ll write today. We need to find James competent counsel, and pronto. As things stand right now, this kid cannot stand alone with the whole corrupt system against him.
James’ dad should be ashamed for abandoning his son to the wolves.
Please contact me if you want to help.
۞
Groove of the Day
