Texas mom murders her son

Texas is the one state with jury trials for child custody. You would think that a mom who is a psychologist and a college professor would have an easy time convincing a jury that she is a fit mother. The U. of Texas has now taken down her web page, but the bing cached copy says:

Dr. Karen Hayslett-McCall is a faculty member in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences (previously, Social Sciences) at UT-Dallas. She teaches courses on geospatial information systems, research methods, communities and crime, victimology, and policing. The broadest swath of her research involves the study of crime and its relationship with neighborhood resident characteristics (i.e., social ecology) as ell as neighborhood infrastructure data (i.e., physical ecolotgy). She graduated from The Pennsylvania State University and joined the faculty at UTD in 2002.

Here is her impressive resume in pdf. (The above typos are in the original -- not sure if they are her fault.)

No, the jury saw right thru her, for the crazy and vindictive woman that she. I mean that she was, because she just killed herself and her son:

A woman shot and killed her 7-year-old son before turning the gun on herself late Friday morning in Sachse, police said.

Officers forced their way into the home after hearing gunshots and found 43-year-old Karen Hayslett-McCall and 7-year-old Eryk Hayslett-McCall in an upstairs bedroom at about 10:30 a.m.

Sachse police were at the home in the 7100 block of Longmeadow Drive as a precaution when her estranged husband, Rodney McCall, arrived to pick up his son.

McCall had received sole custody of the child in a court hearing at 10 a.m.

"The father knocked on the front door," Sachse police Chief Dennis Veach said. "We were simply standing by and at both front and rear of the house when we heard three shots from within the house."

Veach said police had been to the home on several locations but there were not allegations of serious violence.

Maybe no violence, but the backstory is that the mom was vindictively framing her husband with false accusations:

Hayslett-McCall had accused her husband of molesting their son last fall. A grand jury later found no evidence of a crime, and McCall was cleared.

But McCall had lost his job as a high school teacher.

McCall's attorney told the Wylie school board in November that the case was "an allegation brought by a woman who is about to lose custody of her children," the Wylie News reported.

He also told the board that Hayslett-McCall, a former police officer who has a doctorate in criminal justice and a master's degree in psychology, knew how to manipulate the justice system, the newspaper reported.

The couple had been battling over custody of Eryk for more than a year.

They filed for divorce in Collin County in March 2010, and temporary custody orders were in place in April 2010. By November, an attorney was appointed for the child.

The judge ordered psychological evaluations in January 2011. Jurors were sworn in on Monday for opening statements, and McCall won custody of his son Friday.

A feminist blogger supports the mom:

Let’s just say, Karen Hayslett-McCall was no dummy when it came to detecting sexual deviants. She allegedly believed her husband was acting on some sort of perverse sexual deviency with their own child. It is possible that she killed herself and her son because she lost parental rights and not because her child was being totally given over to a man she believed was a child molester. It is more likely she did it because of both.

I don’t know what I would do if faced with the same circumstances.

Really? She doesn't know whether she would murder her son as some sort of sick revenge on her husband?

A professor of criminology should know that it is extraordinarily rare for a natural father to molest a 7-year-old. I have never even heard of it happening. She should also know that accusations require evidence in order for action by the authorities. They are supposed to, anyway. Apparently she did succeed in getting him fired from teaching based on her unfounded accusations.

Wait a minute -- she doesn't teach criminology, she teached "victimology". I never heard of that, but I am pretty sure that the U. of Texas does not need more feminists teaching victimology.

A comment disagrees with the blogger:

You have no idea of the facts in this case. I am one of the jurors who terminated her parental rights this morning. She was a truly vile person who destroyed her child and her husband. She knew how to manipulate the system. Why do you immediately think she was the victim in this? You really should have been at the trial. Amazingly, everyone that knew her more than a couple of years, including former friends and colleagues testified in the husband’s behalf.

It would be interesting to see those psychological evaluations of her that the judge ordered. My hunch is that the jurors had her figured out much better than the psychologists and other authorities.

A female reader adds:

As a matter of fact, Mr. McCall had reached out to CPS two weeks prior to the trial to have his son put in protective custody during the trial pending whatever the outcome was to be. He was worried about Eryk’s well being and would have preferred that he be protected by strangers than with either side’s families and friends to avoid bias.

It also should be known that Karen is the one that kicked Mr McCall out of the house in March of 2010 and filed for divorce because of her new boyfriend. She was not abused, but in reality was the abuser by verbally abusing her husband. Back in December of 2010, they had their first trial and the judge awarded joint custody. Mr McCall was happy with that decision, but it was Karen that filed the motion to have the decision overturned and requested a new trial. Karen was the one that did not want to share her son with his father and was the first to seek termination of parental rights. Mr McCall’s reasoning to seek termination was because she was coaching their son to make these false allegations and possibly even abusing him herself or one of her new found friends that had moved into that house.

The reality is Mr McCall never abused his son in any manner, but loved him very much. Yes, he was arrested, but the grand jury did not indict since there was no case there.

There are so many things wrong here, I cannot list them.