There's a strange item in the news for the past few days. A girl who just graduated from high school went to Aruba with a group of her classmates. She never showed up for the flight home. Her mother and a girlfriend are making the rounds of the cable news talk shows discussing this girl's disappearance and some minor details about her. They claim she's very, very responsible. She was ranked 25th in her graduating class. She's planning to go to college in the Fall. Everyone loved her. Her minister says she was a wonderful girl who everyone loved. This story sounds terrible. Another of those missing person stories that is chilling because it could happen to any of us. Only this is worse because this is such a young girl. Just graduated from high school with her whole life ahead of her.

Except the more that is revealed about this trip to Aruba, the more questions I have about what the hell those kids were doing. Apparently there were chaperones, but they couldn't have been very conscientious. Because it seems that this young girl with some of her friends were in a bar in Aruba. When her friends left to go back to the hotel for the night, she got into a car with 3 local island men. That's the last time anyone in her group ever saw her. She was not in her room the next morning. The details of this are sketchy at best because as soon as the questions get too specific, the girlfriend clams up and prefers not to say more.

Now, while this could certainly end up being a terrible tragedy, it seems a little incongruous to me to have this girl's friends and family showing up on television talking about what an intelligent and happy and well liked girl she is when she wasn't smart enough to know better than to stay out of a car with 3 island locals who drove her God knows where for God knows what purpose. These men have been questioned, and they admit to driving off with her. However, they say they returned her to the hotel later that night and dropped her off. Surveillance cameras show no record of that, but the police say they have no reason to hold any of these men for further questioning.

This is not the time to ask probing questions about what the hell kind of trip this was and who these chaperones were who were supposed to be responsible for the welfare of those kids. But at some point, someone had better start coming up with answers that make more sense than what's being reported so far. Because the implication here is that an 18 year old girl at an island resort allowed herself to be picked up by 3 men she didn't know beyond meeting them in a bar. No chaperone stopped her. None of her friends did anything more than watch her get into a strange car with 3 men and drive away. That's not quite so chilling because the fact of the matter is it couldn't happen to any one of us. It only happens to someone phenomenally stupid.