Friday, May 25, 2012
The Associated Press
FORT WAYNE, Ind. - To assist her dying father, Tarah Souders made a choice: She moved her three young girls to a run-down rural Indiana trailer park to help care for him as his lungs rotted from emphysema.
She knew it could be dangerous. The park of about two dozen homes was teeming with convicted sex offenders.
She worried about neighbors with sex offense records who had been helping her father get by, according to trailer park residents.
And before she arrived, she even asked her father if her children could be at risk of abuse by two specific men -- including a suspect now accused in her daughter's death.
"He said, 'No. They will not touch your children. They're doing everything they're supposed to do,'" said Greg Shumaker. One of 15 convicted sex offenders who live at the park, Shumaker is the other man who Souders had inquired about.
Not long after Souders and her family moved in, police say, a horrific tragedy unfolded.
Her daughter Aliahna Lemmon, 9, was brutally killed. Police say Michael Plumadore, 39, told investigators that he bludgeoned her to death last week with a brick, then dismembered her and hid her head, hands and feet at her grandfather's trailer before dumping the other remains elsewhere.
Shumaker said Aliahna's family moved there to help take care of James E. "Shorty" Lemmon, 66, who also was a convicted sex offender and died Dec. 3. He said Lemmon was "getting old" and "had trouble breathing."
Shumaker said he introduced Plumadore to Lemmon shortly after Plumadore moved into the trailer park, and Plumadore moved in with Lemmon a few days later. Shumaker said he knew Lemmon because they were both sex offenders and were in jail together.
Sheriff's department spokesman Cpl. Jeremy Tinkel confirmed that Lemmon was a sex offender. Indiana Department of Correction records show he was convicted of child molesting in March 2006.
Paulette Hair, 45, a former manager at the trailer park, said she also knew that Lemmon was a sex offender.
"He stayed out of everybody's way," she said. "Shorty couldn't take care of himself very well."
Shumaker said Plumadore briefly moved away, but returned when Souders asked him to care for her father.
A man who answered the door at Souders' home Tuesday afternoon referred all questions to the Allen County sheriff's department.
Aliahna and her two younger sisters were staying with Plumadore for about one week because their mother had been sick with the flu.
Souders and Aliahna were listed among nearly 600 friends on a Facebook page listed under Plumadore's name.
Authorities didn't say Tuesday why Plumadore killed the child, but Sheriff Ken Fries said that soon after the girl was reported missing Friday night, inconsistencies in Plumadore's story -- that the girl had vanished while he went to a store that morning -- had led investigators to suspect that he was involved.
A judge ordered Plumadore held without bail or bond at an initial hearing Tuesday, Tinkel said. He has yet to be formally charged in Aliahna's death.
Plumadore is not on Indiana's registered sex offenders list. He has a criminal record in Florida and North Carolina that includes convictions for trespassing and assault, and an Indiana conviction for forgery.
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