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Thread ID: 5516 | Posts: 18 | Started: 2003-03-13
2003-03-13 13:30 | User Profile
Elizabeth Smart Found Alive in Utah
NewsMax Wires Thursday, March 13, 2003 SALT LAKE CITY -- The search for Elizabeth Smart came to an end Wednesday when the missing teenager was found alive and well in the Salt Lake City suburb of Sandy. The teenager was kidnapped at gunpoint from her family's Salt Lake City home on June 5, 2002.
Police said the missing girl, now 15, was in the company of another female and a former handyman Brian David Mitchell, also known as Emanuel, who police had been looking for in connection with the girl's disappearance.
Smart, who had been the target of a nationwide search since last summer, was discovered during a traffic stop in the city of Sandy, a suburb about 13 miles from downtown Salt Lake City after two witnesses reported they had seen a man matching Mitchell's description accompanied by someone who appeared to be the missing teen.
Police did not immediately reveal any details of the girl's disappearance. But Fox News reported that Mitchell had performed some work for Elizabeth's father, Ed Smart, and felt he had not been paid enough.
Fox News said Ed Smart told them that Elizabeth had said she and Emanuel had hidden in the hills near the family home for several days after the reported kidnapping and spent months driving around the country with the other woman, traveling to San Diego and Florida.
The prime suspect in the case had been another handyman, Richard Ricci, who died in custody of an aneurysm last summer and was never charged in Elizabeth's alleged kidnapping.
Copyright 2003 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
url: [url=http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/3/12/212115.shtml]http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2...12/212115.shtml[/url]
2003-03-13 14:20 | User Profile
Did you see the family press conference last night?
Gawd, no wonder the kid ran away and didn't want to come back.
Do they ever shut up?
Jesus, every freakin one of them was a media hawg. And they were all spouting the typical salon reader style cause de jure. In this case Amber Alert.
Christ knows what it will be next week with twits like this but right now they are hot on amber alert.
It was amber alert this and amber alert that. As if life would finally be worth living if every state in America would instantly iniitiate an amber alert program.
My first experience with AA came last month and it was enough to ruin AA in Baltimore forever, the Smarts propagandizing notwithstanding.
Naturally, Baltimore's first use of AA was a total fiasco. A fiasco in he way that only a city 50 years past it's prime and far gone into tribalism could accomplish.
One of Baltimore's finest black citizens, a druggie and career petty criminal, reported that one of his 3 illegitimate daughters had been abducted by, of all people, the guy driving the hack which daddy had flagged down. In Baltimore, FYI, many blacks pick up extra money by turning their cars into unlicensed "hacks" and picking up fares.
Anyway, the cops fell for this ridiculous on its face story and used the brand spanking new AA program for the first time. All over the Baltimore metro area people were alerted to look for, of all freakin things, "a gold or possibly grey Honda with a black baby in it". Then it was amended to "maybe a Toyota".
Naturally the momma and the daddy were ubiquitous on local TV.
And camera friendly they weren't.
If you added their IQ's together you might have approached triple digits only if you rounded up to the nearest 100.
By 6:00 pm the cops had broke daddy and he fessed up that he had inadvertantly killed little Tamisha by rolling over on her while taking his noontime beauty rest. Fearing that he would be yelled at for this minor indiscretion (you know how mothers are) he decided to concoct the hack story and dispose of lil Tamisha in a nearby dumpster.
The cops rushed across town to the dumpster in true Keystone Kop fashion only to discover that it had just been emptied and all its contents including poor lil Tamisha taken to the city incinerator.
So much for Amber Alert.
2003-03-13 15:45 | User Profile
I am very happy that Elizabeth Smart is alive and well. Well-bred, upper-class white kids are a rare and infinitely precious resource.
The (Rilya Wilson?) Baltimore Amber Alert fiasco saturated the Washington, DC area also. I think I am not alone in saying that when I heard it was a little black girl who was abducted, and her father was the only witness, I immediately passed it off as bogus.
The Amber Alert system should be reserved for missing/abducted middle- to upper-class white kids.
2003-03-13 16:35 | User Profile
I agree, Juan. Elizabeth is a beautiful girl and that film of her playing the harp made me realize how precious a commodity she is. I will think about her the next time I am at Walmart wading through the mudhens with their mulatto progeny. It will give me strength.
But if I had to listen to her parent's inanities every day at dinner I'd probably be willing to take my chances with Emmanuel too. And as for family get togethers with the aunts and uncles. Can you imagine? It would be like being at a curriculum planning seminar for middle school social studies.
I don't believe she was abducted against her will.
As for mom, what kind of a lunatic invites a panhandler home to do chores when you've got a little girl in the house? Especially when the guy turns out to be small time Rasputin who is looking for another "wife". I realize mom couldn't have known this but she put the girl at risk.
2003-03-13 17:17 | User Profile
Originally posted by eric von zipper@Mar 13 2003, 11:35 **Elizabeth is a beautiful girl and that film of her playing the harp made me realize how precious a commodity she is...But if I had to listen to her parent's inanities every day at dinner I'd probably be willing to take my chances with Emmanuel too...
I don't believe she was abducted against her will...
As for mom, what kind of a lunatic invites a panhandler home to do chores when you've got a little girl in the house? Especially when the guy turns out to be small time Rasputin who is looking for another "wife". I realize mom couldn't have known this but she put the girl at risk.**
Good points.
The parents did seem to put her at risk; I always check out anyone doing work at our house- insurance, licenses, etc. Of course anyone could be a criminal but inviting homeless lunatics like Ricci and Mitchell into your home is asking for it.
The media seems to be playing the public like a harp, also. Every time the inevitable question is asked yet again, on every network- "Was she sexually abused?"- the footage of Smart in a bathing suit is replayed, over and over. What a bunch of calculating freaks these network news execuvitz's must be.
Additionally, this comes at an excellent time for the news cycle- just when the U.S. public might start straying away from their 24/7 Talmudvision vigil, tired of waiting for the missles to launch- this girl turns up miraculously alive. Not that it's anything but a coincidence, but the constant play this story will receive over the next few days will give CNN/Fox the carryover they need until War, Inc. gets its act together.
Buy a book.
2003-03-14 02:53 | User Profile
weisbrot,
It seems that our news is at all times primarily composed of two issues: war and a missing woman/girl.
2003-03-14 05:11 | User Profile
I was delighted to hear that this beautiful, talented young lady was found alive & well. She seems to have a quiet femininity that's very attractive and unusual, especially in a teen girl raised in this tats 'n' piercings Redstone Age. God bless her.
As for her relatives, what an irritating crew of knuckleheads. Her father & uncle seem in dire need of intensive testosterone therapy.
2003-03-14 05:26 | User Profile
N.B., you are right. The father is a complete idiot. Look at the animals and freaks he was letting into his house to do handywork. Ex-cons, drifters, etc. If anyone looking like these characters came near my kids I'd cave their skulls in. So would any other father with a lick of sense. I'm glad she's alive, but the father and uncle are prime examples of what's wrong with too many white males.
2003-03-14 06:19 | User Profile
NOT COINCIDENCE! -- IMHO, Weisbrot. I swear I am not (just) anti-Semitic, trying to work connections with Zionist Jews Plotting For Isreal into everything, but I really think there is one here!
Its a combination of factors, but particularly, as others noted, the timing: Elizabeth Smart was abducted in July, about the same day Ariel Sharon was visiting on the East Coast -- trailed by suicide bomb kids that FBI Chief Mueller declared "inevitable" here.
Then suddenly, diverting national attention to the storied Mormon West, the bizarre kidnapping, with all the sweet (ulk...gimme the bag, eric) details -- and, yes, the utter slut-rut channel TV exploitation of every little-girl sexual inuendo they could muster; goes with the crawl-line programming, so it won't be all alarmist bad news, and death ... lasting 9 months, again after staging an all-out public cooperation appeal that had everyone looking in trash cans for missing dead girls body parts....Sharon slipped in, and out, without incident.
Then again, next month in August, just as Sharon is arriving for a visit to the East Coast, where he tells the US Senate sub-committee that our God gave Likud *Eretz Yisroel*, citing the Bible as deed and the Pope as legatee ... once again, across America's interior, a scheme popped up in someone's head to stick pipe bombs in mailboxes, with a laminated letter stating "Your Mailboxes are exploding", dotted in a smiley-face pattern across the map, people approached in terror that which had once been the pride of Norman Rockwellians. The FBi nabbed this one, in Wis. Rep. Sensenbrenner's own town of Menominee Falls; turns out to be a kid with a Kurt Cobain crush on his dad. Catholic religious family, with priest at the news conference, explained Luke Helder's peculiar need to communicate in this weird way. Required new search and seizure laws for college dorms to catch 'em, all said. Meanwhile, another terrible suicide bomb explodes in Israel, and Sharon high tails it back.
Now, another case of massively sought perps "hiding in the open" , like Muhammed and Malvo, plugging Americans in the back while Republicans march to victory in November. The GET SMART case gets cracked same way. They were there with the girl all along, the authorities were just releasing misleading imformation (and anyone responding to it was a fool).
Similarly in timing, one recalls Jennifer Peterson -- went missing Christmas Eve, when all eyes and hearts would otherwise have been lifted toward Bethlehem -- if the IDF hadn't shot the bell-ringer at the Church of the Nativity earlier -- pregnant and due in February, where it could be calculated, since it was known in advance, the SHOW DOWN WITH SADDAM would need a PR fix. A birth to "countdown" to, hope its alright, that's the fantasy token-slide.
I don't think it is all cincidence. I think there is a use of the shared, unconscious fantasy-flow of events, sucking everything into the maelstrom of war-as-birth delusion ("liberating the Iraqi people" = ourselves, as Americans, reversal of "from Bush" -- Saddam Hussein has to go so that we can have Bush), by ultra-cool, totally conscienceless, cruel anti-democratic, and anti-American interests, conscripting our blood, by verbal and media trickery, to redeem (some) descendants of Jacob's sons that have reassembled at Palestine, to resurrect Old Jerusalem. There is confluent millenial psychosis afoot. Whatever is "secret" is scripting it. I call for general refusal to cooperate with anything secret, for our protection, for our health (no vaccines in our blood pool), which indemnifies our future to neocons.
2003-03-14 16:48 | User Profile
I'm very pleased she was found alive and apparently unharmed. And, I agree with the sentiment that she is a person this country very much needs. Anyway. . .
This looks more like a runaway than a kidnapping. We're hearing a lot of nonsense such as she never had the oppertunity to escape because there were always at least two people with her. She had plenty of oppertunities to leave and she's old enough that she could see and use these oppertunties. Her alleged abductor was even in jail for week at one point.
I suspect that when the girl and that bum met they got along great. I won't be at all surprised if it turns out that there never was a knife when the bum came for her. The unSmart parents now complain that police didn't put much weight on the story of the sister who witnessed the alleged kidnapping. That would probably be because the dad was pushing the police to believe it was a true kidnapping while the sister probably told a story of the girl willingly sneaking out of the home. Thus, because the police thought the dad knew his daughters best and young children don't make great witnesses, police were mislead into doubting the sister's story.
Other than dad's nonsense preventing an earlier recovering of the girl, if dad had had taken even a modest amount of care to protect his children, this would never have happened in the first place. If I had young girls in my home I wouldn't let a bunch of questionable or drifter types have the run of my home. And, if I had the money for a 6600sq ft home, I would have had a good security system.
The Amber Alert that the unSmarts are pushing is ill-concieved. Already, if police think it helpful they can alert local media. The only thing the Amber Alert will do is dramatically lower the bar for what gets thrown on TV and we'll get tired of the local TV station trying to enlist us to look for the thousand case of mommy and daddy having a custoday dispute.
2003-03-14 18:05 | User Profile
Originally posted by Happy Hacker@Mar 14 2003, 16:48 **I'm very pleased she was found alive and apparently unharmed. And, I agree with the sentiment that she is a person this country very much needs. Anyway. . .
This looks more like a runaway than a kidnapping. We're hearing a lot of nonsense such as she never had the oppertunity to escape because there were always at least two people with her. She had plenty of oppertunities to leave and she's old enough that she could see and use these oppertunties. Her alleged abductor was even in jail for week at one point.
**
"You guys think I'm that Elizabeth Smart girl who ran away," Elizabeth Smart challenged police officer Bill O'Neal the moment she was found by authorities.
Smart's startling words have ignited a firestorm around Salt Lake City: Was the teen unknowingly conveying the unthinkable -- she deliberately ran away from home?!
While local and federal authorities work on the likely premise the girl was taken by force and later brainwashed, questions of a possible runaway scenario began to creep into the picture, sources said late Thursday.
One top federal source said the case remains "utterly baffling."
Just as NBC reported teen Elizabeth had a "ceremonial marraige" to the drifter on the night she went missing.
[url=http://www.libertyforum.org/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=news_news&Number=496716&page=0&view=&sb=&o=&part=1&vc=1#Post496716]Liberty Forum/Drudge Report [/url]
2003-03-14 19:53 | User Profile
Originally posted by Okiereddust@Mar 14 2003, 18:05 > Originally posted by Happy Hacker@Mar 14 2003, 16:48 I'm very pleased she was found alive and apparently unharmed.ÃÂ And, I agree with the sentiment that she is a person this country very much needs.ÃÂ Anyway. . .
This looks more like a runaway than a kidnapping.ÃÂ We're hearing a lot of nonsense such as she never had the oppertunity to escape because there were always at least two people with her.ÃÂ She had plenty of oppertunities to leave and she's old enough that she could see and use these oppertunties.ÃÂ Her alleged abductor was even in jail for week at one point.
**
"You guys think I'm that Elizabeth Smart girl who ran away," Elizabeth Smart challenged police officer Bill O'Neal the moment she was found by authorities.
Smart's startling words have ignited a firestorm around Salt Lake City: Was the teen unknowingly conveying the unthinkable -- she deliberately ran away from home?!
**
It is interesting right now that authorities are baffled, but as I think a little bit more about this I think that's the only reliable thing we can gather at this point. The authorities don't have a clue now, just as they never did.
I must confess a certain spirit of rush to judgement myself though. Cases like this can be extrordinarily complex to decipher as the Patty Hearst case demonstrated. Psychologists have even come up with a phrase to describe what goes on in cases like this "The Stockholm Syndrome" given to the outwardly strange but on examination quite understandable situation of where captives start to empathize with their captors.
If this can happen with grown adults, imagine how vulnerable a 14 year old girl would be. We'll all just have to wait and see what the investigation finds out, unpleasant as that may be.
2003-03-15 01:47 | User Profile
Not to belittle Elizabeth Smart's harrowing ordeal, but there are many more missing children in this country who should also have the same happy ending. For those of us who believe that all children (regardless of race) are a precious gift from God, check out [url=http://www.missingkids.org]www.missingkids.org[/url].
As for the abducted teen's parents and relatives, who gives a flying you-know-what about them? What's important is here is that Elizabeth was found alive and well. Here's hoping that she fully recovers from her traumatic experience and goes on with her life.
2003-03-15 07:47 | User Profile
I agree with Happy Hacker. The evidence points to Miss Smart being a runaway. We live in an age where 9 year old girls are enticed to leave their families by 42 year old perverts with the most immoral purposes - all on the internet . It not out of the realm of possiblity that is what happened. It is clear that she offered no resistance to her captors when confronted by police. Indeed, she attempted to aid them. She gained weight which strikes me as odd for a kidnapped girl. She may have even instructed her sister to cover for her with the abduction story. However, my fellow Okie is spot on about the "Stockholm Syndrome". It is also possible that she was abducted and through thought reform learned to identify with her captors.
I totally agree with NBF. It's is refreshing to see a 14-to-15 year old shun makeup and not dress as a cheap street whore.
2003-03-15 09:21 | User Profile
Originally posted by Oklahomaman@Mar 15 2003, 07:47 **I agree with Happy Hacker. The evidence points to Miss Smart being a runaway. We live in an age where 9 year old girls are enticed to leave their families by 42 year old perverts with the most immoral purposes - all on the internet . It not out of the realm of possiblity that is what happened. It is clear that she offered no resistance to her captors when confronted by police. Indeed, she attempted to aid them. She gained weight which strikes me as odd for a kidnapped girl. She may have even instructed her sister to cover for her with the abduction story. However, my fellow Okie is spot on about the "Stockholm Syndrome". It is also possible that she was abducted and through thought reform learned to identify with her captors.
I totally agree with NBF. It's is refreshing to see a 14-to-15 year old shun makeup and not dress as a cheap street whore.**
Well I feel a little pushed to run to judgement with this, but that's the way the internet works. Right now everyone's interested in this, even though we know very little about the key players over the crucial period of time. Later we'll know much more, and be able to give a lot more informed discussion about it, but then it will be old hat and no one will be interested in it. For now maybe I'd just like to avoid prejudicial terms like "runaway" on one extreme and "brainwashing" on the other.
It seems to me that these terms aren't really necessary to understand what happened, since the girl wasn't kidnapped by a stranger, as the media had told us over the year, but by a very close acquaintance, who had known the girl for quite a while before she was "kidnapped". Obviously (or at least quite likely nothing is really completely obvious to me yet) the process of control and the girls identification with the captor began well before the girl left the house.
Its hard to say exactly what the relationship of the girl was with this guy and his wife, or for that matter what it was with her family. But it does appear the guy was a pro, knew very well what he was doing, and was very able to manipulate people, especially impressionable 14 year old girls .
The Stockholm syndrome I think really applies to just one of the many types of coercion that can take place. It applies to one of the most unlikely circumstances, where you have bonding between people desite extremely hostile circumstances. Its just an indication of how manipulable people can be, even under the adverse circumstances. It certainly appears to me that there might not have been overtly hostile circumstances here at all.
That doesn't mean though the girl is really culpable or knowingly complicit, just as we never hold child sexual abuse victims responsible for the fact that they did not sufficiently resist the abusers advances. Kids are socialized to trust authority figures, and giving someone free reign of your house certainly can become manipulated into a position of authority by a clever operator. Just like people on the internet.
2003-03-15 10:32 | User Profile
What mastery at word parsing, Okie. I'm in agreement about the term "runaway" which implies the girl made her own decision to leave home without any outside influence or psychological manipulation. Neither is "thought reform" particularly helpful, as I had mentally pictured more subtle processes than those on which communist re-education camps operate. You are quite right to chastise my imprecise language. What I meant to convey is the idea that Miss Smart's "episode" was probably not completely in confilict with her own volition or more succintly, she wasn't abducted by force - the theory that the authorities originally tendered. Perhaps such phenomena are of so recent an origin that English has yet to develop a nuanced terminology to properly describe them.
I'm not hostile or aloof to the plight of young Miss Smart in any fashion. I'm completely sympathetic. However, I know little about such matters. I've little experience dealing with young teenage girls on any level other than a peer. I'm from a family of five boys. I'm an educated man but afraid I'm completely ignorant of the personality development and psychology of young teenage girls. I do know that I want children of my own someday and ought to seek whatever wisdom can be gleaned from this affair.
In furtherance of that purpose, it appears to me that the father abdicated his responsibility to protect the girl from such depredations by inviting "Emmanuel", who has psychopathic (or psychotic) tendencies, into his home on more than an extremely short term basis. I'm really not interested in the argument that he was manipulated as well. He had a moral duty to know. He should have investigated and screened quasi-tenents of his home. In this obligation, he failed. There is no excuse for him to have endangered his daughter in such a manner. What is really confusing to me is Emmanuel's wife. What's her motive?
2003-03-15 17:28 | User Profile
Originally posted by Oklahomaman@Mar 15 2003, 10:32 What I meant to convey is the idea that Miss Smart's "episode" was probably not completely in confilict with her own volition or more succintly, she wasn'tÃÂ abducted by force - the theory that the authorities originally tendered. Perhaps such phenomena are of so recent an origin that English has yet to develop a nuanced terminology to properly describe them.
Sorry for being persnickity about words. Its just most terms in an emotionally and sensational case like this are so charged they tend to alter our ways of thinking about the matter. We are dealing with two highly loaded terms in this case, "kidnapped" and "runaway". The reality appears to be in between, but these are so charged and intractable synthesis becomes very difficult.
It makes for a sensational trial, but a lousy chance of justice IMO for either the girl or her abductors. The abductors are already dead meat, and the girl will be tarred forever I'm unfraid, probably unfairly.
Maybe its all my experience on this list with the propagada of verbal and literary deconstruction that makes me sensitive to this.
**I'm from a family of five boys.ÃÂ ÃÂ I'm an educated man but afraid I'm completely ignorant of the personality development and psychology of young teenage girls.ÃÂ ÃÂ I do know that I want children of my own someday and ought to seek whatever wisdom can be gleaned from this affair. **
Consider yourself lucky and more knowledgable than you might think. There are Ph.D's in psych who obviously don't have the slightest inkling into the thought processes of young girls. And what they and I do know, sometimes we wish we didn't. It can be scary. ;)
In furtherance of that purpose, it appears to me that the father abdicated his responsibility to protect the girl from such depredations by inviting "Emmanuel", who has psychopathic (or psychotic) tendencies,ÃÂ into his home on more than an extremely short term basis.ÃÂ I'mÃÂ really not interested in the argument that he was manipulated as well.ÃÂ He had a moral duty to know.ÃÂ He should have investigated and screenedÃÂ quasi-tenents of his home.ÃÂ In this obligation, he failed. There is no excuse for him to have endangered his daughter in such a manner.ÃÂ What is really confusing to me is Emmanuel's wife.ÃÂ What's her motive?
**
It appears to me from a little I heard that his wife may have also been controlled to some extent. It certainly was a strange situation, but one familiar in a lot of child kidnappings. Wives etc. very often are involved, for a wide variety of reasons I suppose.
Your comment about the parents being willing to abdicate responsibility though starts to point to the real issue here I think, which will probably be ignored. A great majority of adults are willing to abdicate responsibility for the moral education of their kids these days - to the TV, nefarious public school brainwashing, local kids peer groups, anything. And it does seem to be producing a generation of kids, like Elizabeth, who whatever the exact details of this case, do seem to have some character defects. James Davison Hunter in his latest book aluded to it in his book The Death of Character.
I could be rushing to judgement on this, and there are aways the possibility of extenuating circumstances, but initially it seems to me this girl lacked at least one aspect of what good character training produces - conflict when one is in a situation that contradicts some basic internalized understanding of who you are, what you stand for, and what you're all about. It just seems odd initially that this girl can change overnight from one set of living arrangements, loyalties, and family figures and not have at least some visible confusion or turmoil of what its all about. She seems like a girl who thinks like all that happened is that she just got back from a long and really wild summer camp.
That's what character training does to a person of course. It makes a person assume the moral obligation to go beyond the surface aspects of the situation, and step back and take a hard look. "Is this really right?, "Is this the way I was raised?, "Am I asking all the questions I should?, "Is there something here that doesn't seem right or just doesn't look right"?, "this may feel alright to me, but is there someone else who may actions might be hurting or who is worried about me"? etc.
Modern values training with its emphasis on "self-esteem" just doesn't produce people that are trained to ask these sometimes troubling questions, as I think Hunter characterizes the problem with modern education.
It strikes me in this case that something lacking in Elizabeth's moral and character development in this regard. For that matter, was lacking in Elizabeth's father.
That's the real story in this case, and one I doubt the media will explore very effectively, in deference to the more sensational aspects of the case.
2003-03-16 01:22 | User Profile
Light is starting to be shed on this "Emmanuel" character. His belief structure is an eclectic mixture of old polygamist Mormonism and Rasputin. A modern Joseph Smith if you will. His motive in the kidnapping appears to have been fufilling a self-prophecy that he would come to have seven wives which well be a cover for an overriding sexual ulterior motive. Miss Smart's young cousin seems to have been another potential target but his attempt to ensnare her was botched.
His modus operandi then was religio-spiritual coercion. Not at all suprising when you consider that she was an active Mormon. I doubt Salt Lake City was selected at random or by whim to be his operational territory. There are many things to admire in LDS teachings, but theology and pre-1492 American history is not among them. They all seem to lack theological grounding instead defering to the whim of whatever is said by Mormonism's highest echelon, which varies considerably from one moment to the next. He probably argued that his views are closer to Joseph Smith's than the current LDS practice, an argument in which I suspect he is correct. I can well imagine "Emmanuel" gaining control over her by simply having much better command of religious apologetics, doctrine and history. Having deconstructed an important part of her worldview, he then could have reassembled the pieces into a form more pliable to his will. Then again, maybe this thought is akin to blaming Orthodoxy for the rise of Communism in Russia - too preposterous for response.
I hadn't considered whether or not some key psychological development is absent from Miss Smart. Your observation about her present emotional state is correct. She does seem very nonchalant about the whole ordeal; an attitude which I find troubling. Perhaps she is just soft-spoken and not acting with the customary histronics we expect from the modern teenage girl.