Family Stages Kidnapping to Teach Boy That Life Is Cruel and Awful

In a news story ripped straight from the first season of Arrested Development, three Missouri women have been charged with kidnapping and child abuse after they staged the kidnapping of a 6-year-old who they believed to be “too nice” and not aware of “stranger danger.”

The unnamed boy’s mother, aunt and grandmother decided to teach the boy a lesson by enlisting the aunt’s co-worker in a very reasonable kidnapping scheme that involved the child being lured into a pickup, being told he’d be “nailed to a shed wall” and then being threatened with a handgun when he wouldn’t stop crying. As the Associated Press reports, the boy, who was told he wouldn’t “ever see his mommy again” was held for a while in the co-worker’s basement—tied up and blindfolded, of course—before being released “upstairs” where he was hit with the debriefing part of his ordeal, a stern lecture by family about the dangers that strangers pose to small children, while completely missing the irony that the child would likely be safer in the pickup of a real stranger who is not a psychopath than at the hands of his loving family.

I don’t know how the trio of women came up with this amazing life lesson or how they got a co-worker in on it—this might be unfair, but I’m just going to suggest that it might be a good idea to be fucking suspicious of any man who’s willing to go along with a plan that involves tying up a child and waving a handgun around—but I can’t say I’m sorry that the child protective services are now involved. The boy was removed from the home after he did the only correct thing anyone in this story has done, which was inform school officials.

Who else thinks that the defense on this will be “the family saw it on TV and thought if it worked with Jeffrey Tambor and that guy with one arm it would obviously work for them too”?

“That show was on Fox, a major television network!” the attorney will exclaim before resting his case. “I rest my case!”