911: Don't Assume!

In one lede, you assumed by saying a 6-year-old girl saved her and her mother's life.

Now, certainly the mother was being brutally attacked. And the girl was in fear for her safety. Conventional wisdom gives you the right to label that as just that, in the same way the girl's actions can be viewed as heroic based on how she dealt with a horrible situation and how conventional wisdom would view that.

But can you say the mom would have certainly died without the 911 call being made? And do we know for sure the little girl was at risk of death?

I don't think so. This is a stretch. You can say the girl helped rescue her mother or helped apprehend her attacker, because those are based on facts. We simply don't have enough information to judge whether she would have been killed or just brutalized. There is a huge difference between the two.

Likewise, you can say the girl was terrified and at risk of harm because an attacker was in her home, but not that her life was certainly at risk.

Now, some of you said the girl potentially saved her mother's life (italics mine), or something to that effect. That's more reasonable. Certainly if she is being allegedly raped by a man with a knife, she's at risk of substantially-greater harm.

But we have to be precise in how we couch that. She may be at great risk, but she is not assured of death. Our language needs to make that clear.

In another instance, you made an assumption that the victim was someone the attacker had personally known.

You did know the victim was the suspect's neighbor, but does that automatically mean the knew each other? I mean, I don't know my neighbors. Maybe that's because I'm an asshole, but the rapist doesn't sound like the nicest neighbor, either.

Again, you're going a step further than the evidence at hand allows. Either get a clarification from sources that establishes your premise or back off to a claim better supported by the facts in hand.