Talk about a great story for TV. On Tuesday night someone spotted a child left in the backseat of a Chevy Impala parked at the Deja Vu strip club on Taylor Blvd. Police arrived and rescued the child, perhaps just as the 43-year-old mother, Laura Diprimo, who works, or has worked, at the strip club, came out to check on the child. Somewhere in the vicinity lurked the 28-year-old Dad, Thomas Lee, who was supposed to be on home incarceration but was instead out having a drink at a strip club with his wife on a Tuesday night at 11.
I’ve gathered all these facts from the TV reporting on Wednesday night’s late newscasts. There’s certainly more to the story, but the details already discovered were pretty interesting, and would lead anyone to think these people are, really, really dysfunctional. In the words of LMPD spokesman Dwight Mitchell, their excuses were “not credible.”
The reporting of the event included a telling ironic detail, at least in Steve Tellier’s report on WLKY. Cops told him that Lee complained that the squad car he was taken away in was “hot.” Seriously. After leaving a child in the back seat of his own car for at least 15 minutes. With the windows rolled up.
And while WAVE and WDRB filed reports on the story, WHAS-TV’s Adam Walser dug up some in-depth details, including a front-porch interview with the mom’s brother’s girlfriend. She said this: “He’s 27; she’s in her 40’s. So that tells you a big thing. He’s still wanting to party and all that and she’s trying to settle down and he ain’t ready for that.”
Walser also found out about DiPrimo’s arrest last month on the Second Street Bridge. She was driving home from Deja Vu, drunk, when police pulled her over. And this, about Lee — six months ago he was arrested after abducting the poor child and refusing to tell police where the child was.
We’re left asking the usual question — how can these people behave this way?
