It takes a particular courage for a hurt child to look steadily at the adult who hurt him and simply tell the truth, and Lucas found that courage somewhere inside his small exhausted body, and he used it.

I want to be clear about what I am praising here, because it matters.

I am not praising him for enduring what was done to him; no child should have to be brave in that way, and the courage he showed was courage he should never have been forced to find.

But given that he had been forced into that hallway and that confrontation, given that the adults around him had failed so completely that a nine-year-old was left to state the truth of his own abuse to a police officer, he did it with a steadiness and a dignity that grown men twice his size routinely fail to muster in far lower stakes.

He did not scream or collapse or beg.