Detective Mike Weber
Appearances
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
Right. I don't either. And it's funny the way she, depending on who she's talking to, the way she tries to kind of couch that, right? I mean, some people she'll say outright terminal. Some people she'll say, well, we just never know how long she's going to live. And then in her journal, she's wanting to give this child to God.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
And she's just all over the place, which is what you see in these cases. It really strikes a chord with me from what I've seen in past cases.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
Well, she did. Now that I know that she has a Facebook record, she did everything right. I can tell you where this case really went wrong, and that's where we see cases go wrong all the time. You know, they separated the child when the child was impatient at Seattle Children's. Child was recovered, was healthy, had had no episodes, was doing great.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
And then family court places her with family members who do not believe that the offender is guilty. And this, you cannot do this in these cases. And look, that's not fair to Sophie's sister and Sophie's mother either, right? Because it is their daughter. They're going to be biased. They're going to have that internal bias to believe their daughter has not done this.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
And they may think they see things that are simply not there, even if they're trying to be as honest as they possibly can, because Sophie is in their ear. You know, so if you can't contact with the have contact with the victim, she can she can have contact with her mom and her sister all day long. Right.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
And, you know, they're going to be looking for any little thing in this child in order to justify what what Sophie has done. So that is that again. And we see it all the time. Family court is terrible. at understanding what this is and what to do about it. And you cannot make that placement with a family member that does not believe this is occurring. You will have failure every single time.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
If she's ready for discharge, she would not necessarily go to a medical foster family. That's the court's decision on where the child goes once she's ready for discharge. But, I mean, this child did not have any symptoms while in the hospital. And no symptoms. One thing... I hate to see this, but I know why they do it.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
But they left the feeding tube in, even though she had shown she could eat with no issues. And when you do that and you release back out, now you're leaving access to an offender, right? And CPS is not sitting on the doorstep making sure that Sophie is not coming over to the house, right? Right.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
And again, it just goes to show how lost family court is on this. You don't allow them to bring anything. I mean, Sophie could have poisoned food to cause symptoms. She could have been medicating the food. And the thing is about dystonia, which is one of the main complaints by Sophie, you can also get dystonia through massive medications that you don't need. I've recently had that in the case.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
So all of that, I mean, it just, the family court handling of this was just butchered beyond belief. And I don't blame a CPS investigator for that. Who I blame for that is family court judges or CPS attorneys who did not bring the proper evidence to family court judges to make a decision. And, you know, we see it all the time. You know, I yelled and screamed at the top of my lungs about it.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
and CPS in my state doesn't seem to care. So I really don't know what to do about it.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
Right. And, you know, it may not even be anything intentional. And another thing, another issue you brought up, you know, we don't have the medical records, but I didn't see anything noted in detectives or work support report about the days that the victim was in the hospital after separation. There was no defiance issues. There was no no issues like that at all.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
So why is she now having defiance issues when she's in her placement home? Could it be that a six-year-old has no other way to act out when she knows that things are happening that should not be happening to her? And, you know, again, is Sophie telling him to give her medication? What is going on? It's very easy for Sophie to direct care. Very easy for Munchausen by proxy by proxy.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
to happen in these cases when you place with a family member that believes that their daughter could never do this. And that seems to be kind of where Sophie's mom kind of ends up on this.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
That should eliminate them from placement right there. Right.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
And, you know, if you have a family member that you know is protective, yeah, sure, that is a proper placement, right? Derrick Jones is a good example. That was a proper placement. He was protective of his children. He did not let her around them. But the health and safety of the child has to come first. And I don't know what we have to do to drive that through family court's head on these cases.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
We have made some progress in my county with family court, but it's very dependent on who the judge is still to this day. And across the country, we are not making that progress. And that that is something that I don't know how you change it. You know, the. Say all the time, the last two articles in the Juvenile and Family Court Journal on this abuse were in 1990. And so they are just lost.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
And I wish they would seek education on this. I've gone down that road and just hit dead ends every time I try.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
And the detective consulted with the DA before that charge. Right. So they they said, yes, we are going to take this case. Go ahead and get the warrant.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
It does not. It's very dependent on from agency to agency on whether that occurs.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
Basically, if you take the case, you shouldn't just then throw your detective in the grease. And when things get hard, say, oh, well, you know, family court didn't do the right thing. So we're not going to go forward with prosecution. But but that's what appears to have happened in this case.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
Oh, I say all the time that they're at their core, they're con artists. It's just a different type of con. You talk about the resource suck of what the offender's taking up for other children, you know, the cost to the child. This is a child that's going to be abused the rest of their childhood. If this is occurring, that's going to happen.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
And then probably about 80 to 90% of my cases are Medicaid cases. So this is also a cost to the public. And it can, I mean, it is an extreme cost to the public. You know, these cases can get over a million dollars, easily over a million dollars in Medicaid costs to the taxpayers. And so you have all of that. So when you make that decision as a prosecutor,
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
you're basically protecting yourself over all of those other things.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
Those are two very valid concerns. And I think if you talk to some other members of the committee, they will back those concerns up. They want their child to not only be medically fragile, but also to be very specially medically fragile in a lot of cases. And what's better than that than an extremely rare disease that hardly any children have? Right. It's always the worst of the worst. Right.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
And so, yeah, these doctors are highly susceptible to this. And again, they don't have any training on medical child abuse. And it goes back to the old medical adage, you know, when you hear hoof prints, you know, think a horse, not a zebra. And unfortunately, a lot of the very specialist doctors who deal with these very rare conditions don't.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
often think they found the zebra when, you know, it's just a big old horse with medical child abuse on its side riding their way. There's an image.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
You know, I just wish prosecutors' offices would seek education on this and learn how to address these cases so they're not intimidated by everything when it comes to them. And God, please, family court judges, I don't know that we have any listened to this show. But talk to your organizations. Get a training on this abuse. It certainly doesn't have to be me.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
There are plenty of other people with, you know, the impressive letters behind their name that your organization may want to bring in that can train on this. Any member of the committee for sure.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
Right. Get training on what you should do on these cases, because to be very blunt, you're doing a terrible job by these children, family court judges, to be very blunt. Again, I'm talking nationwide. We've gotten better in Tarrant County. We're far from great. We're far from good, but we're better nationwide. with some of our judges. So I want to give them that grace.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
And thank you for kind of helping me along to that published author status.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
I'm good. I'm in the great white north and just enjoying a little vacation on my time away from work.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
I am officially retired, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to work. It's just kind of shifting to another aspect in another part of the career. I don't see myself ever not working ever.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
Yeah. And, you know, I read through the entire police report. And really the only thing that I see missing in this is and there could be many, many reasons for this. You know, the detective actually preserved the social media records when the case first started. I didn't see anywhere where they were. They were obtained by warrant.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
And yeah, that's, I mean, it kind of struck me odd that I didn't see that in her report. But again, we may not, I was just about to say, we may not have everything and we certainly don't know everything. Everything else was done just what she should have done. She got her devices. She found her actual journals and,
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
Something I noticed was in Detective O'Rourke's interview with the gym teacher, the gymnastics, to be very clear, teacher in her supplement, was the gymnastic teacher that said, said that the victim had told her, when she approached the victim about joining the gymnastics program, the victim had told her, no, I'm no good. I'll never be good enough.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
And that is, I mean, you see the same thing in Sophie writing about herself. And, you know, you just wonder how much of this abuse, you know, is multigenerational. I'm not a psychologist, but I just found it very striking that Sophie's writing that she's not good enough. And now her daughter is now writing that her daughter is not good enough.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
Yeah. When we talk about the evidence in this case, it's really, really strong. It's circumstantial. But when you deal with falsification cases, they're all going to be circumstantial. And you have to put every piece of the puzzle together.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
her statements that would be admissible at trial and i'm going to clear let me put an asterisk by this in the state of texas i'm going by texas law sophie's statements in her journals about pinching and hitting her children how she's a bad person for doing that would absolutely be admissible because that goes to show the relationship between uh the the suspect and the offender um
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
I say absolutely admissible by law. You know, that depends on what judge you get. Depends on the judge's relationship with the defense attorney. Is the judge going to go by the law or is the judge going to try to even out the trial and make things fair for, you know, make it a 50-50 proposition for each side? And I've seen both of those things happen. Yeah.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
You know, of course, you know, the major thing that stuck out is how she calls herself. I remember she said pathological or what word she used, but a pathological liar, basically. And, you know, that's something I've gotten in interviews with several offenders. And it's really the one true thing I think that I get out of interviews. I mean, I get a lot of minimization, right? I get a lot of...
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
admissions, but never a whole true confession. Out of those writings, that's the thing that really struck out to me. She calls herself an habitual liar, I believe. Which, interestingly enough, Jessica Jones did the same thing.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
Yeah, that really struck out to me. And obviously, all of her admissions about her illness, her own illness falsifications, which showed just a pattern of behavior. You know, I'm not an attorney. It'd be interesting to see what an attorney had to say about those being admissible, specifically an attorney from the state of Washington. I think you may have problems getting them in.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
in the guilt innocence portion of trial, but they would absolutely come in in punishment phase, right?
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
The main thing they would have done is there was no way her defense attorney would let her take the stand because she makes one statement that she's an honest person. She makes one statement that I don't lie about anyone's health or I don't lie about health. She makes that statement on the stand under cross-examination. That comes in. Right. All those statements from her from her journal come in.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
So and people mess up whenever they're under cross examination all the time because they don't know. They don't know the legal system. No matter how much you coach them as a defense attorney, when they get up there, you never know what they're going to say. And it would have kept her absolutely from testifying. at the minimum.
Nobody Should Believe Me
Season 5 Breakdown with Detective Mike Weber
But one of the things she says in the journal is, you know, we need a feeding tube. I need to push for this. So she can't... Those journals, again, eliminate the defense of just saying, well, you know, I'm just following what the doctors tell me to do.