Withholding Information (Review)

~ Originally posted on 11/22/13 at U4A by MM

Withholding Information

• How many times have we heard that the three in the house the night Ayla went missing are withholding information?
• How many times have we heard that there’s no way that all three could keep a secret this long?
• How many times have we heard that the three couldn’t have a secret or they would’ve slipped up during their interrogations? 

Here’s a story of another innocent baby girl who has been denied justice because three people are withholding information.  

Aisha Mariah Dickson was born on May 3, 1994 in Bangor, Maine. Aisha was the daughter of DeShawn Dickson and Sarah Johnson. Aisha died on January 6, 1995 in Bangor, Maine and was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery on August 23, 1995. 

 

Even though Aisha’s father, mother and grandmother were all in the home the night Aisha was beaten to death, none of the three will speak up or take responsibility for their actions. 

 

 

Nor would any of the three step up and take responsibility for little Aisha’s burial until almost 8 months later.

 

 

 

Aisha’s mother, Sarah came forward the day after the newspaper ran the article and arranged for Aisha’s private burial the following day. Sarah and DeShawn were still living in Bangor but Sarah’s mother, June Johnson had moved to Honduras.

 

After another eight months, Aisha’s mother “breaks her silence”. Her attempt to point fingers at the other two and gain sympathy for herself was clearly debunked by Sgt. Gagner. “All three of those adults are still suspects.”

 

Eleven years later and Aisha still hadn’t received justice. Eleven years later and the three in the home the night Aisha was murdered still weren’t telling all they know.

January 13, 2006  Aisha died in a Bald Mountain Drive apartment in Bangor. Nearly every bone in her 11-pound body was broken, save for her spine. Her mother, father and grandmother were with her. They each hired lawyers and opted not to talk to police. Just who did beat that baby to death that cold January night remains unknown.

With only the three adults in the home and no one talking, police were left with little to work with.

Her murder is what’s known in the police business as a “cold case” revisited from time to time by detectives but mostly going nowhere.

“It’s an active case,” Bangor Police Detective Sgt. Paul Kenison assured me this week. “John Robinson is the detective assigned to the case, and he talks to her [Aisha’s] mother very often. He definitely keeps track of their whereabouts and continues to interview neighbors and family members.”

Aisha’s grandmother moved back to her native Honduras shortly after Aisha’s death. Her mother, Sarah Johnson, and father, DeShawn Dickson, left for Lewiston not long after and remain there today. The couple went on to have two more children. The state took custody of both children and they were adopted.

After attending Aisha’s funeral, my co-worker Tom Weber wrote in his column, “Someone killed Aisha Mariah Dickson, police say. And until that someone is made accountable for her death, no one should allow this tragedy to be put to rest.”

But let’s face it – time moves on. Detectives retire, reporters have other stories to tell and communities have new concerns and crises to deal with.

Aisha’s life was brief, and her community connections here were limited. But she did have two connections in the way of Brian Storman and his wife at the time, Shirley.

Brian was Sarah Johnson’s teacher at Penobscot Job Corps. The couple took mother and baby under their wings. They worked to try to help Sarah be a better mother. They had them for dinner a couple of times a week and took them to church, where Aisha quickly charmed her way through the congregation.

It was Brian’s call that drove me deep into the recesses of my computer’s memory this week.

Brian remembers Aisha every day. He keeps pictures of her around him and visits her gravesite when he comes to town.

He still struggles with feelings of guilt that he didn’t do more to protect that precious baby.

“I just wish I had taken her and run,” he said. “I should have just grabbed her and gone.”

But he couldn’t have done that, of course. He and his wife called the Department of Human Services with suspicions, but were told they didn’t have enough evidence of abuse to warrant action.

So they kept watch the best they could.

Aisha would have been 11 years old now. Brian is living on Grand Lake Stream and wishes he could be taking her four-wheeling and fishing.

Instead he’ll keep making the trek to Bangor and picking a handful of flowers to place on the rose-colored stone that marks her tiny grave.

Her killer will go on living his or her life somehow, and Detective Robinson will pull out the folder from time to time, hoping to find that missing piece of the puzzle that will land someone in prison.

Fourteen years later and the three in the home the night that Aisha was murdered were still keeping their secret. While they were protecting themselves and denying Aisha her right to justice, Aisha’s case was being passed on from investigator to investigator. Thanks to the silence of those three, people were forgetting about sweet Aisha.

March 6, 2009  Aisha Mariah Dickson was beaten to death in a Bald Mountain Drive apartment on Jan. 6, 1995. An autopsy revealed that nearly every bone in her 11-pound body had been broken in her short life, save for her spine. Her mother, father and grandmother were in the apartment at the time of her death, but each hired a lawyer and refused to talk to police, leaving investigators little to work with.

Detective Brent Beaulieu is handling the Sprague case, Detective Tim Cotton is in charge of the Bassett case, and a replacement is needed for the Dickson case because lead investigator Detective John Robinson recently changed jobs, Reid said.

After fourteen years, Aisha was rarely mentioned in the media except for yearly updates on unsolved murder cases. The silence of the three people in the home the night Aisha was murdered is working to their advantage. Aisha is all but forgotten by many.

March 7, 2010  Detective Brent Beaulieu is handling the Sprague case, Detective Dave Bushey is in charge of the Dickson case, and Detective Tim Cotton is the lead detective in the Bassett case, Edwards said.

Even though the Effie MacDonald case will never close, no one is assigned to pursue it, the sergeant said.

“You win some, you lose some,” Edwards said. “Maybe that will be how that one ends.”

It has been almost nineteen years since Aisha was murdered. The three in the home are still withholding information and no one has been charged. Where is there justice for Aisha in that? “Justice delayed is justice denied”

Almost a year ago, Trista voiced her concerns that police wouldn’t be able to solve Ayla’s case. At the time I had some concerns too but it had only been a year and I was still hopeful the case would be solved and Ayla would eventually have justice.

December 13, 2012  The mother of missing toddler Ayla Reynolds says she’s losing hope that police ever will solve the case, but at least three law enforcement experts from around the country say there are plenty of reasons for optimism.

“A year is really nothing,” said Chuck Drago, a retired police chief from of Oviedo, Fla., and law enforcement consultant. “It’s a long time in terms of fresh evidence and so forth, but I’d assume police are nowhere near considering this a dead case, or giving up on it, or feeling like it won’t be solved.”

Drago thinks it’s unlikely police will give up anytime soon. A high-profile case such as this will be as “prominent for police as it was on Day 1,” he said.

Drago, who provides professional consulting for police agencies and serves as an expert witness for both plaintiffs’ and defense attorneys, said cases go cold when investigators run out of leads to follow, when they’ve spoken with everybody who is connected with the case, when they’ve exhausted every question.

“And even then, you continue to leave it open,” Drago said. “You keep it active in terms of fliers being posted, keeping it on the police website, keeping the media involved as much as you can so the media keeps it alive; because you just don’t know where your next lead is going to come from.”

Mike Nault, a retired detective commander from Seattle, Wash., and an expert witness, said the case could be further along than the public knows. Even though no one has been named as a suspect and no arrests have been made, investigators might have enough information to do both. Police might be withholding suspects’ names from the public to protect the integrity of the case, and they might not arrest someone until the case is strong enough to prosecute successfully. The burden of proof to justify an arrest is much lower than is needed to prove guilt in court, he said.

Ron Martinelli, a retired police officer from San Jose, Calif., agrees.

“What’s probably going on right now is they’re trying to grab every forensic thread that they possibly can, and there are still some pieces missing,” he said.

In cases like this, investigators meet with prosecutors every time a new piece of evidence is found.

“They’re going back and forth to the district attorney’s office or state prosecutors. They’re saying, ‘What do we need to move this forward?’ Ultimately, the prosecutor doesn’t want to have egg on his face. He wants to do justice for the victim, but he doesn’t want to have an extremely embarrassing case.”

Drago said there could be cause for pessimism in the case if it remains unsolved in another year or two.

“It’s hard to give it a date, but the longer it goes, the grimmer it looks in terms of finding someone responsible,” he said. “But we all know that cases do get solved years later.

“People’s situations change in a year, two years or three years. People who didn’t want to talk before might suddenly be anxious to talk.”

By the time Jeff announced that Trista would be releasing the information of the blood evidence found in the DiPietro home, my hopes that Ayla would receive justice had diminished greatly. We were getting close to two years, which is when the experts say there could be cause for concern.

September 17, 2013  “I’ve been patient,” she said Tuesday. “I’ve waited almost two years now.I’ve done everything everyone asked. I’ve been working with state police. I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere, and by releasing this evidence and talking about it, I really feel this is the only way Ayla’s case is going to be solved.”

Bob Lowery from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children said what the grieving mother is doing is unusual, but he doesn’t fault her for doing what she thinks is right.

“I don’t think any of us can understand Trista’s pain,” Lowery said from the organization’s office in Virginia. “She wants answers. That part I do understand. With parents, not knowing what happened in the worst.”

“I am her mother and can talk about whatever I want to talk about, release whatever I want to release,” she said. “Personally, I don’t care how state police feel about what I’m doing. Ayla is my daughter, and this is what I’m going to do.”

Clint Van Zandt, a former FBI profiler, said he didn’t blame Reynolds for speaking out.

“Any parent has every right in the world to try to find out what happened to this child,” Van Zandt said Tuesday.

September 23, 2013  Reynolds says she decided to come forward to make sure Ayla doesn’t become another cold case, and she says she’s hoping to put pressure on DiPietro to make him talk.

“I need it to eat him alive. I do, and this I’m hoping, by all of this, it will,” she says.

She says owes it to Ayla.

“And I’ve got her in my head telling me, ‘We can do this Mommy,’” she says.

Reynolds says she won’t rest until she knows what happened to her daughter and justice is served.

Justin DiPietro, his now former girlfriend, nor his sister have been charged in Ayla’s disappearance. We requested an interview from DiPietro and he declined.

Of all the posts I’ve written, this has been the hardest one to do. I cried when I read about the injuries Aisha suffered. To think this baby had broken bones as young as two months old that probably weren’t treated…almost every bone in her body broken, how long did she endure pain after these injuries were inflicted? She was 8 months old when she died, 32 weeks old. How many bones minus the spine are in a human body? “There are totally 206 bones in our human skeletal system. When we were a child, we had more than 300 bones in our body. As we grow up, some bones will fuse together and become one.” What did these people do, break 8-10 bones a week? Or maybe 20 every other week? How could they possibly break 300 bones in poor Aisha’s little body?

When I read that for over 7 months, neither Aisha’s mother, father or grandmother bothered to give her a proper burial, I thought of all our prayers and hopes that Ayla would be found so her mommy could give her the proper burial she deserves.

After absorbing all the information on Aisha’s case and realizing that the silence of three people has kept them safe from prosecution for eighteen years, I was overwhelmed with a dark, nauseating fear. I had to step back and couldn’t finish this post for days.

In Aisha’s case they had her remains and an autopsy proving she was beaten to death that night. They had proof that the three people were there that night, and all were suspects. There was a DHS order for Aisha’s mother “Not to reside in any home with young children”. Any of the three could have been responsible for Aisha’s murder but their silence has done exactly what they hoped it would do. There has been no charge for:

• Murder
• Manslaughter
• Child endangerment
• Child neglect
• Obstructing justice 

One big difference between Ayla’s and Aisha’s case gives me hope. It’s pretty obvious that all three people in Aisha’s case were responsible for abusing her at one time or another, all the more reason for all three to continue their silence. In my opinion, only one of the three in Ayla’s case is responsible for what happened to Ayla. Maybe one of the other two will break their silence so justice for Ayla won’t be denied.

Maine State Police Tip Line  –   207-624-7076