aerockyulhim comments

It's easy to see the mother at fault for not acting quicker, but the story doesn't really give us a good idea of what "repeated attempts to contact her son" is. If she was having trouble contacting him for 18 hours, she probably should have made the call much sooner (to the police). But she may have assumed that he was still at his grandmother's house. Maybe the grandmother didn't tell the mother at any point in the day "I'm going to let your 8-year-old son play by himself around the city with no supervision." Did she call the grandmother's house repeatedly? Did she make the trip to grandmother's house to check herself? Did she do her own search for him around places he might be? What times did she "repeatedly" call her son and was the first call just a routine check-in still assuming he was at grandmother's house (which could have occurred fairly late)? Anyway, the story isn't giving us a good idea of what the mother actually did before finally calling the police at 1 am. But we can probably be sure that she didn't just suddenly realize at 12:59 am that he might be missing so she called the police.