Four teens charged in Christian County vandalism

This is a shame. I know Ron Cleek and he is a very decent person.

Yes, it is a shame. Parents can't always control the actions of their children, but I want to know the following:
My spouse & I moved here just a few years ago & we are wondering what kind of cesspool we have moved into. We have never before encountered the kind of things we have seen here. We have a friend who has had signed, written reports from various local government agencies proving that she is telling the truth about something, but yet the legal system won’t believe her. What is evidence if it is not signed & in writing? And here we have the following:
The owner of that property, Gary Braden, had grown weary of past vandalisms, and set up surveillance cameras at the entrance of Nixa's Bluebird Hills subdivision, court documents say.
On June 21, Braden caught footage of five individuals damaging a sign and vandalizing the trailer.
"One of the individuals was identified as Dustin Cleek," a probable cause document said.
Still, the damage continued.
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, looks like a duck,-- it is not a cow – IT IS A DUCK!
I can guarantee you that if I had been captured on this surveillance camera, my butt would have been sitting in jail on June 22 instead of more vandalism continuing.
What all do you need as proof in this cesspool? It looks like to me that whoever lies the longest & the loudest & has the most money wins against hard evidence.

I agree,the kid should be treated just like everyone else.it's a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation for cleek i'm sure.I don't live in Christian co so i can't say what the law is like.

an AMERICAN wrote:

This is a shame. I know Ron Cleek and he is a very decent person.

I would firmly disagree with this statement. If you can't have a strong enough character to influence your own children, shouldn't that say something about your ability with others?

I just hope that truly equal treatment under the law presides, but I expect to be disappointed.

Ron Cleek is good as gold!!!! He stands on two feet in the morning & at night and he will always do whats wright!!! Dont Judge what you dont know!!!

Sometimes good people do bad things.
You can still love the person but not their actions.

Nothing’s Wrong with Good “Beef”

Dear Editor,

I appreciate your newspaper and all the good hard work that is done to makeup a local county paper. Your efforts in reporting news of interest is commendable. I look foreword to reading the special interest stories, historical articles, local sports coverage, and all the great pictures of area activities.

Of course, within those pages I am sure it has some kind of importance by including the not-so-great things going on in our community, such as the inclusion of policing activity, arrests, and the like. I personally don’t read much of that kind of material since I don’t see much value in learning about other peoples problems. Non-the-less, your reporting has been rather fair and neutral regarding such topics; which can be rather embarrassing and a real challenge for entire families to endure.

I’ve always said that there is nothing wrong with having “a beef” as long as it’s a good one. Well, I am sorry to report, I believe I have a good “beef” since I must take exception to your papers use of
shock and awe regarding the recent story of a group of teens being arrested for various crimes. Your reporting of the story is generally pretty solid and well laid out. However, I have a real “beef” with sensationalizing a story by the use of who someone’s parent is. Isn’t a tragedy like that hard enough for a family to work through? Does your paper really need to “investigate” who someone is related to, just to see if it’s someone important and in the public eye? And then let everyone know about that connection in a way that generates shock and awe?

I don’t know, but I would guess there is more than just me that doesn’t care for this kind of tabloid reporting. Why? Well maybe I happen to have a heart and I would rather sympathize than sensationalize.

You know, it may be an established practice in the world of news to consider anyone in the public eye as being fair game for the sake of shock and awe.
But yours is a local county paper, read by friends and neighbors everywhere. Just what kind of a paper
are you striving to be? I mean, on one page of your paper are neat stories and pictures of youth doing wonderful things and on the next page you are attempting to somehow discredit and embarrass a public official by sensationalizing a very unfortunate situation. I don’t cotton to that.

Lastly, I feel that you could sell allot more papers by developing a more sympathetic style of reporting. Increasing a families pain for the sake of sensationalism is mean spirited. Get a heart would ya?

Karl Fellner
Ozark