Last summer, a Broward County jury convicted middle school teacher Aaron Mohanlal of 13 counts, including child abuse, molestation and lewd battery on a 13 year-old boy, and a judge sentenced him to 43 years.
But a year later, Mohanlal has yet to spend a day in prison.
The story, by CNN reporter Ashley Fantz, first appeared on the network's website Thursday afternoon.
I happened upon it as I was watching Headline News. The network was devoting as much as 10 minutes to the story at the top of each half-hour block with the outraged anchor doing a Q&A with reporter Fantz and using words like "animal" and "monster" to describe Mohanlal. They knew they "owned" the story.
Intrigued, I did a Google news search to see if any of the South Florida media outlets had anything on the story. I found only five links, none of them from any of our media powerhouses here in So Fla.
At midnight, my Google search showed a few TV stations and small newspapers had picked on the story.
But neither the Herald, the Sun-Sentinel or the Palm Beach Post had anything on their websites.
We're starting to see the effects that recent staff cuts at local papers are having on news coverage.
I'm sure in the days ahead the local papers will start to do this story. What they won't be writing about is why they dropped the ball on this one. But we already know the answer to that one.
