Slain Girl's Grandfather Had Been Sex Offender

One of the nagging questions about the horrific murder of 9-year-old Aliahna Lemmon in Indiana: Why would a mother move into a trailer park full of convicted sex offenders with her three young daughters? The answer from AP is a wrenching one: Tarah Souders made the move to care for her father, who lived in the trailer park but died of emphysema earlier this month.

What's worse, a neighbor says that Souders even asked her father—himself convicted of molesting a child in 2006—whether her girls would be safe and and specifically asked about two men in particular. One of them was Michael Plumadore, who police say has confessed to murdering Aliahna. "He said, 'No. They will not touch your children," says the neighbor. Plumadore had lived in the same trailer as Souder's father and helped care for him. The girls had been staying with Plumadore for about a week when Aliahna was killed, because Souders had the flu. (More Tarah Souders stories.)