Time is one of the biggest weapons in the corruption and cover-up arsenal, but none of us are forgetting.

Congratulations, Oakland County.
I want to start by saying congratulations.
Not everyone gets to be famous for forty-plus years of failure, but you pulled it off.
People know your name. Not for justice. Not for courage.
For silence.
Other counties solve crimes. Some botch them. Some admit they messed up.
But you? You achieved something rare: a legacy of murdered children and absolutely no reckoning.
That takes coordination.
Four kids were murdered.
Four families were broken.
And somehow the system responsible for protecting them managed to outlive every obligation it owed.
Impressive.
What makes you famous isn’t just that children died.
It’s how they died—and how perfectly the conditions aligned to protect everyone but them.
They were old enough to walk alone, but young enough to trust.
They didn’t need to be forced. They needed to be believed.
Trust did the work for you.
They were reached through credibility—through adults, institutions, reputations that looked clean on paper.
No alarms. No struggle. No witnesses.
Just bodies, later.
You had evidence without exposure.
Cases without accountability.
I especially admire how quickly the word unsolved became a full stop instead of a question.
As if saying “we don’t know” magically absolves everyone who was supposed to.
You had bodies.
You had timelines.
You had patterns.
You had warnings.
What you didn’t have was urgency.
Or humility.
Or the courage to admit that children don’t disappear this way without adult permission somewhere upstream.
And yes — I said permission.
Because children don’t wander into death corridors.
They’re guided there by trust.
By authority.
By adults who look safe on paperwork that outlives them.
I’ve watched time do your work for you.
Witnesses age out.
Records vanish.
Memories get labeled unreliable.
Jurisdictions blur responsibility. Agencies divide ownership. Everyone is involved—so no one is accountable.
That’s the trick.
You didn’t need a cover-up.
You just needed patience.
And it worked—until it didn’t.
Because when survivors speak, we’re told it’s complicated.
That it was a different time.
That everyone did their best.
If that was your best, it deserves to be remembered exactly as it was.
That’s why there is no second Oakland County.
Not because the harm was unique—but because systems rarely get away with failing this completely twice.
Usually a witness talks. A journalist refuses silence. A court demands answers. A public won’t settle.
Here, none of that happened.
So yes—Oakland County is famous.
Famous for teaching predators that credibility is camouflage.
Famous for proving that silence isn’t the absence of knowledge—it’s the absence of will.
Famous for showing how a system can absorb the deaths of children and still move on.
And here’s the part that really stings, I think:
You don’t get to outlive us quietly anymore.
Because the children you failed grew up.
Some of us survived places like Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission.
And some of us learned how to talk.
Congratulations, Oakland County.
History noticed.
And this time, it’s not forgetting.
— Michael Farquhar
Survivor, Brother Paul’s Children’s Mission