| ] Mercado, who brushed back strands of brown hair from her] reddened eyes as she spoke, has a story that has not
 ] changed from the start. She told the Richardson police
 ] officer who responded to the store's call that she had
 ] always taken pictures of her children nude, and that it
 ] wasn't uncommon in her native Peru to do so. They were
 ] innocent baby pictures, taken for the family's benefit,
 ] she said.
 ]
 ] Five days later, when a state child welfare investigator
 ] and two detectives arrived at her house, Mercado again
 ] insisted that she saw nothing wrong with the photos. She
 ] allowed the group to search the couple's cramped room,
 ] and the detectives went through everything, including
 ] their photo albums, apparently looking for more evidence
 ] of child porn. They found nothing.
 ]
 ] "We fought so hard to come to this country," says
 ] Mercado, a 33-year-old who was a nurse in Peru and
 ] aspires to become licensed in the United States one day.
 ] "For this to happen is unbelievable."
 This is crazy. People are so afraid that they're going to miss a child abuse case that they go after everything and anything. |