Shannan Troiano left her husband, and her son's father. Her son quickly starts going downhill, as kids often do when they lose a parent, in this case by the mother's choice.
Things started to spiral downward for the youth because mom and step dad are too busy making money to give a shit about him. She throws him out of the house at 14 some point, but apparently lets him return.
By 16, the kid is doing all the typical things that troubled kids do when their parents ignore them and/or abuse them - pulling fire alarms and whatnot at school - the typical 'cries for help'.
Finally, a bunch of adults, including a corrupt cop, work together to get the kid thrown in jail:
Of all the times she worried about how much to discipline her teenage son, depriving him of a PlayStation and taking down posters of cars and rap stars he admired, Shannan Troiano never imagined their relationship had become so strained that he would try to hire a hit man to kill her.
But there in the spacious living room of her Southern Maryland house was a detective, talking about how Cory Ryder, then 16, had told someone he wanted to have his mother killed. "We need to find out if he is serious," the detective said.
He proposed a sting. The woman Ryder talked to, the mother of one of his friends, would take him to a hotel room, where he would meet with an officer posing as a hit man.
This entrapment, of course, is eerily reminiscent of the
Central Park Jogger case, where
a bunch of corrupt politicians, cops, detectives, prosecutors and judges worked hard to get five innocent black kids thrown in jail. They all helped to coerce false confessions and suppress evidence to make sure that defenseless black kids made their way to the slammer for a crime they did not commit. None of the guilty politicians/cops/detective/prosecutors/judges in the case were ever jailed.
Much of the same happened here. Exactly how the professional manipulator, the detective, got the boy to talk about killing his mom, I don't know yet - I'm looking for a transcript of the court proceedings, where i hope his defense attorney was able to effectively point out the entrapment.
Imagine the scene - two adults in a hotel room with a teenage boy. The boy doesn't have an effective father figure - his mom is always the disciplinarian, it seems, so he sees the adult male detective and says what he thinks the detective wants to hear - the boy wants to please. And please he does - he says what the detective and all the other adults around him want him to say, and then he gets handcuffed and taken to jail.
How did they get to the hotel room? Another adult, the friend's mom, actually led the boy to this 'contract killer'. Can you imagine? Exactly how evil do you have to be to manipulate a kid like this? Cops do it all the time - especially to black kids - but in this case, it's a white kid, and the boy's parents were in on it.
What kind of sick society is this?
...
plea deal. Cory plead to one of the four counts against him - 'involvement' with a solicitation to murder him mom. The corrupt prosecution knew they would have to tell a huge string of lies to get a conviction, so they offered a plea deal. Ryder accepted the plea because that's what defendants have to do - minimize their risk.
What is sick about the whole situation is that all the people running Cory's life originally tried to have him tried as an adult. That's usually something the prosecution reserves for black kids, but in this case, the people who ruined Cory wanted to make sure he was done for good. They failed - the case was sent to juvenile court.
Dude was living out of his car/truck for a while - as a minor - when the parents still had legal responsibility for his care and well-being. When Cory was allowed back into the house, he had nothing in his room - just a bed and a dresser. It'd be like solitary confinement.
And the best part about this deal for the corrupt cops, is they don't have to testify as to how they coerced this kid into saying whatever he supposedly said - the now-infamous 'two bullets is all it takes' line. I doubt he ever said that or anything else. I think this was a frame-up from top to bottom.
It wouldn't be the first time corrupt cops and prosecutors have gotten over on
innocent people.
