Doug and Valerie Herrman: Parents of the Decade

Posted January 5, 2009, 10:16 p.m.

It’s only January 5th, and I’ve already stumbled upon my nominee for the parents of the year. In fact, they’re my nominees for parents of the decade.

Doug and Valerie Herrman took in two-year-old Irvin Groeninger III as a foster child and, before too long, adopted the boy and gave him the name Adam Herrman. In 1999, when Adam was approx. 12 years old, he disappeared. The Herrman parents apparently weren’t too worried, because they didn’t report him missing in the next several days . . . or months . . . or years. In fact, Kansas police have just started trying to piece together what happened to Adam ten years ago, since they just found out about it.

I don’t even know what to say. How could two people who loved this child enough to take him into their home and raise him for ten years go for two days, let alone ten years, without reporting him missing? I just don’t understand. According to the Herrmans’ attorney, “they were very worried about him.” Well, we have ten years of negligent inaction that would imply they weren’t very worried at all.

Amazing.

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

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