The first morning of the new school year, I let my freshman daughter walk alone to the bus stop, me chattering on the phone with her like a cellular chaperone. The second morning, after some debate, I walked her half way until another student joined her. I did the same thing the third morning, but was considering using the cell phone periodically.
By the fourth morning, the image of 11-year-old Jaycee Dugard and her 18-year nightmare ended any debate with my daughter or in my own mind.
“We need to leave soon,” she said one morning earlier this week. No discussion. No argument. No question.
Now a high school student, my daughter deserves some opportunities for independence and self-reliance. We live in a nice neighborhood where people are jogging, walking dogs, or cycling in the pre-dawn darkness. But someone else could be lurking on the shadowy sidewalks, as well.
As I return home, I pass women running in pairs, men biking alone or in groups, and cars carrying commuters to work. There’s a whole community of folks awake and alert as the buses rumble through the neighborhood.
But there are also people like Phillip Garrido who are awake and alert.
There is much to be grateful for within Jaycee’s story: She is alive, she is free, she is apparently physically healthy, and her family is surrounding her with love. The two young daughters she gave birth to, reportedly in the backyard, are being gently and cautiously introduced to the family and the outside world from which they were hidden.
There is much to be grateful for but much to be angry about, as well. Society and its systems failed a little girl who was held captive long enough to grow into a woman with little girls of her own. Jaycee was allegedly imprisoned for nearly two decades, sentenced to unimaginable torture. Meanwhile, Garrido only served 11 years of a 50-year sentence for abducting and raping a woman in November 1976. He went free and apparently enslaved Jaycee just three years later.
It is notable — but only cold comfort — that federal laws changed in 1987, requiring convicts to serve at least 85 percent of their sentence. Too late for Garrido and, tragically, way too late for Jaycee. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Francisco said that under the current rules, “Chances are, yeah, he’d still be in prison” for the 1977 kidnapping and rape conviction.
Parole officers scheduled to check on him twice monthly noticed nothing. A police officer, answering a neighbor’s 911 call about children living in squalor in the backyard, didn’t even step into the backyard of this sex offender on lifetime parole. So the complex compound of sheds, tents, outdoor toilet and shower, and one soundproofed outbuilding went undetected.
Our culture failed Jaycee. Most of the neighbors just avoided “Creepy Phil,” as the registered sex offender was known. One neighbor reportedly asked him to leave her garden party because he was acting strange, looking at the female guests. But no one stopped the strange behavior in his yard.
Of course, he’s innocent until proven guilty in the abduction and rape of Dugard. But our society is already guilty of failing to save her and other children like her. We are busy running our own lives rather than seeking tougher laws from those running the government. We often ignore or avoid suspicious characters in our neighborhoods and towns, rather than get pegged paranoid or nosy. We fail to notice or act when a child has a haunting look in his or her eyes rather than ask awkward questions.
I’m still haunted by the look in the eyes of a young girl I noticed at vacation Bible school many years ago. She didn’t say or do anything, but her discomfort around people and her inability to make eye contact — it concerned me. My concern was based only on intuition without any evidence to support it. So, I did nothing.
But it was intuition that caught Garrido and freed Dugard and her two girls. Two University of California, Berkley police officers listened to their intuition, mixed it with their maternal instincts, and began piecing together the puzzle that eventually revealed the 11-year-old girl hidden within a 29-year-old woman.
Even now it’s difficult to admit that I did nothing. I’ve often wondered if my suspicions were true or false. I’ve wondered if anyone who knew her better noticed anything wrong. I’ve wondered if the girl, by now a young woman, is OK.
I’ll never know. Because I chose silence my wondering is met with only silence. But it sends a loud message to me and I hope it does the same for anyone else haunted by the look in a child’s eyes.
Jaletta Albright Desmond is a self-syndicated columnist who writes about faith, family, and the fascinatingly mundane aspects of daily life. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and two daughters. Contact her at jdesmond@bdtonline.com.
Columns
September 4, 2009
Jaycee's story sends messge to those who remain silent
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