FORT WAYNE, Ind. — To assist her dying father, Tarah Souders made a choice: She moved her three young girls to a run-down trailer park in rural Indiana to help take care of him as his lungs rotted from emphysema.
She knew it could be dangerous. 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 for abuse from 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 and the other man that Souders had inquired about.
Weeks later, police say, her 9-year-old daughter, Aliahna Lemmon, was killed. Police say 39-year-old Michael Plumadore told investigators that he bludgeoned her to death 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 66-year-old James E. “Shorty” Lemmon, who also was a convicted sex offender and died Dec. 3. 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.
Aliahna and her two younger sisters were staying with Plumadore for about one week because their mother had been sick with the flu.
Neighbor Richard Patee, 58, said he didn’t think it was odd that Aliahna’s mother had Plumadore watching the girls for an extended period.
“They had known each other for somewhere of three to four years, I know that, and he took care of their grandfather,” Patee said. “I didn’t see any reason to question it at all.”
