Kidnapping My Daughter

Introduction

I kidnapped my own daughter.

Who did I kidnap her from? Many people, I suppose.

I kidnapped her from the man who was hurting her. I kidnapped her from a legal system unwilling to extend their power to save her, including a so-called agency of child protection which, despite being admittedly aware of her abuse, demanded the extent of that abuse be exponentially worse before taking action. And I kidnapped her from a family court system that dismissively and knowingly decided to place her back into the hands of her perpetrator.

I never thought of it as a kidnapping, so much as a parental act to stop horrible things from happening to my child. I kidnapped her for the same reason any other parent would snatch their child out of the path of an oncoming car or reach out to grab hold of them if they were falling down the stairs. Though the threat facing one child may differ greatly from the threat facing another, the instinctive mechanism to save them from trauma is the same. I could have no sooner handed my toddler back to the man responsible for her abuse as I could have stood on a beach while she drowned without jumping in to save her.

Rescue is rescue.

In my search to find other stories of parental abduction it has become evident to me over the years that parents who kidnap are often demonized by the media. Consequently, I feel it appropriate here to state that I make no apologies for running with my daughter.

Before elaborating on that assertion, though, I want to make any reader of our story aware that I absolutely, unequivocally believe there are times when a parent runs away with a child for reasons having nothing to do with keeping them safe.

My heart grieves for those children and for any left-behind parent who was, in fact, a safe individual for their child to be with. I can only imagine the suffering and anguish of decent, loving parents who have had their children stolen from them solely out of spite or selfishness. I have no doubt it is a devastating and profoundly painful circumstance to find oneself in and I wish very much it was something no safe parent, or their children, ever had to endure.

I do not, as a parent who was faced with circumstances from which running became my only option to achieve protection for my daughter, now hold the irrational belief that every parent who tries to keep a child from their other parent must automatically be assumed to have valid reasons for doing so. I know—with far more certainty than I wish I did—that people are sometimes cruel and wicked, solely for the sake of being cruel and wicked. I also know, firsthand, that some parents are powerfully capable of denying the rights and well-being of their children in order to serve their own desires and agendas.

I pray, literally, for every child on the run. I pray that the ones who would be safer and healthier with their left-behind parent make it back home soon, and I pray that the ones who need to stay hidden because it’s the only way they can be free from true abuse remain undetected.

From the bottom of my heart, I pray for them all.

There are those who will proclaim vehemently that my actions equated to a crime. If that is true, then it would also need to be said that the judge who knowingly ordered my tiny daughter back into the unsupervised hands of her abuser also committed a crime. After all, by his act, he knowingly attempted to aid in the sexual abuse of a twenty-month-old baby. When he is willing to acknowledge that his action was a crime, then—and only then—will I be willing to acknowledge that mine was, too.

I broke a law, that’s true. Violating a court order is, technically, an act of law-breaking. I believe there are sometimes legitimate differences between breaking a law and committing a crime. Call it semantics if you want but my point is a valid one.

When an individual walks through a gate into a private backyard without permission, he or she is trespassing, technically breaking a law. But what if that individual went through the gate to save someone drowning in a pool in that backyard? Would their actions constitute criminal behavior?

The complicated reality is that sometimes good people find themselves in terrible situations which require them to break the law in order to do the right thing.

My only alternative to running was to, three times per week, knowingly give a toddler to a pedophile who had already abused her. No matter how one stretches it, that would have been the real crime.

If we now, in the twenty-first century, in the United States of America, live in a society where the sexual abuse of children is openly protected by law and blessed by judges, then we have far bigger problems than those created by one custodial mother who violated a court order in order to keep her child safe.

The representatives of our judicial system would do well to remember that there are higher laws than those of man and that, someday, they will face their own Judge. My experiences have left me with the distinct impression that many of those in positions of extreme authority have become so intoxicated by their own sense of power over others that they have forgotten that—or perhaps never cared to consider it in the first place.

Yes, I kidnapped my daughter. No, I’m not sorry for doing it.

Do I wish the agencies and individuals in positions of authority and with the power to have helped her from the beginning would have made the slightest attempt to prevent further abuse so we would not have needed to run? Of course I do. I wish it desperately at times, in fact. It would have been so easy for them to do. But they didn’t.

So, I ran.

While keeping my daughter safe required unusual strategies, I don’t identify with the label of Protective Parent. I intend no disrespect to those who classify themselves as such, and I understand the unifying purpose behind the label. I also recognize that there are many courageous mothers out there—a number of whom that have had their children taken away after trying to protect them—working hard to raise awareness under the banner of Protective Parents. I admire them very much.

I don’t accept the label for myself because I don’t believe we have should have to be assigned a label in order to be deemed worthy enough by society to be allowed to protect our children from harm. I don’t see a distinction between parenting and protecting when it comes to my role as a mother; I perceive them to go hand-in-hand. I’m not a protective parent—I’m simply a parent. I’m just a mom who was unfortunate enough to come up against the deplorable machine that is court-licensed abuse.

When I see the term Protective Parent I feel a powerful defiance in my heart telling me I shouldn’t be required to adopt a label just to be believed or taken seriously. None of us should. We should have the right to protect our children from sexual predation and incest, label or no label.

I support Protective Parents, but I am unwilling to let society think that I believe I have to be designated as one in order to deserve the right to fulfill my role as a mother.

My child needed to be saved. So, by the grace of God and with a great deal of help from others, I did what I had to do to save her.

I don’t view it as having been a valiant effort on my part. It was simply my obligation, as a mother. It was my job; my responsibility.

And, it was my privilege.

One

If someone had asked me before that unseasonably warm autumn if I thought I could ever find myself in hiding and running from the FBI, I probably would have laughed.

I was barely out of my teens, having turned twenty that year. Anyone who had known me prior to then would likely say I was noted for being about as strait-laced as could be. With no interest in partying and plagued with an unfortunate degree of social anxiety, my teen years were pretty unremarkable. In fact, when I did attend parties, I usually showed up with a book in my purse. I wish I was kidding! That way, when I inevitably became irrelevant in a room full of people having fun, I could find a seat somewhere out of the way and read, unnoticed, until the person I’d tagged along with was ready to leave. It’s certainly fair to say I was a nerd—shy, awkward, and totally uninteresting.

I didn’t really want to be any of those things but we are who we are. I was a bookworm who listened to what others talked about without saying much myself. My aversion to drugs and alcohol was a good thing in the long run, but in the 1980s beach town I grew up in, also cemented my status as a boring nobody.

So it’s hard to imagine how a quiet, compliant girl eventually found herself in the midst of a serious legal situation, running from authorities and facing prison time if caught.

Sometimes, there are moments when I’m still baffled by the turn of events which took me from one extreme to the other.

***

Steve and I began dating when I was fourteen years old. We remained a couple, on and off, for the following four years. Our age gap was significant and because of that, I was, unfortunately, oblivious to the degree of manipulation and grooming I had sustained during that time.

Steve had behaved in strange and disturbing ways from the very beginning of our relationship but as a young teen I did not recognize it. By the time my high school graduation rolled around and he asked me to marry him moments before I crossed the stage to accept my diploma, I was so heavily affected by the control he had in our relationship that it never even occurred to me to reject his proposal.

Shortly before graduation I’d been accepted to a top-notch university in our area; something Steve was openly unhappy about. His initial reaction to the news was one of anger—he expressed that he didn’t want me to live in the dorms because he didn’t want me to, meet any other guys. As soon as he made the comment he seemed to realize how overbearing it sounded and quickly pretended he hadn’t meant it the way it sounded. In the end I dismissed it, believing that as time passed he would no longer feel threatened by the idea of me living on campus.

What I didn’t understand at the time was that the real threat, in Steve’s mind, was simply one of my world expanding in a direction which might lead me to discover that emotional reliance upon him was not, as he had worked so hard to convince me, the only option I had. And to some extent at least, that is what happened.

After living in dorms for a few months I grew exhausted of Steve’s constant monitoring. He wanted to know where I was and who I was with every minute of every day despite the fact that he hid most details of his own life from me.

Watching over me so intensely was something he hadn’t been able to do while I’d lived with my family but with them so far away his control tactics became much less subtle.

I tried to break away. In fact, I ended our relationship completely at one point. He didn’t seem emotionally distraught over it. Instead, his immediate response was simply an angry comment about how much money he had spent on the engagement ring.

During that conversation, Steve had asked me to spend some time with him in the upcoming days so we could work things out between us. I declined, telling him I’d accepted an invitation from a group of girls in my dorm to attend a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show that weekend.

Going out with girlfriends at night was something I never would have done before because, simply put, Steve didn’t approve of me doing such things. He had a certain talent for implying that going out with my friends somehow meant that I was cheap and slutty. It was the same tactic he used when he wanted to stop me from wearing makeup or certain clothes.

At the time I was seventeen and, unfortunately, I didn’t recognize his manipulations as abusive behavior. All I wanted was to make sure people didn’t think poorly of me. As a result, I always gave in.

Steve lived nearly an hour from campus and by the time I headed into the theater with the girls from school a few nights later I’d completely forgotten I’d told him about my plans, so I was stunned by what happened next.

As we sat waiting for the show to begin, I heard a few of the girls start whispering among themselves. Before I had a chance to ask what the excitement was all about, I discovered that Steve was sitting in the seat directly behind me. He leaned forward and quietly whispered into my ear.

Come on. Let’s go.

I remember thinking it was creepy that he’d shown up there but I was so intensely embarrassed that he was acting like a stalker and every friend I’d managed to make at college had witnessed it firsthand that I didn’t know how to deal with the situation except to comply.

As I stood to leave, my roommate shook her head at me as she glanced from me, to Steve, and back again. I assured her I was fine and I made my way to the end of the aisle. When I glanced back I could see that a few of the girls had turned to watch us leave with looks of disbelief on their faces.

I felt totally defeated and humiliated. It had taken strength and courage to end that relationship and doing so had brought me a deep sense of relief. I didn’t want to leave that theater with him but I lacked the skills to assert myself—something he knew all too well.

Three months later, Steve talked me into leaving the university entirely. He wanted me to move back to my hometown. He had just moved into an apartment with a friend and wanted me to live with him. Again, I complied.

It’s not that I was forced, and I don’t want to give the wrong impression. These were decisions—very poor decisions—which I made, and the responsibility for having made them is mine alone.

However, it is entirely fair to say that Steve had spent years perfecting the art of getting what he wanted from me. He was a master of manipulation, unbelievably skilled at convincing me that if I didn’t acquiesce to his wishes it somehow meant I was selfish, stupid, or a slut. He knew exactly what he was doing and he was good at it.

Many people tried to stop me from leaving school including the RA, my roommate, and other girls in my dorm. Even one of Steve’s friends tried to talk me out of it when we were at his house one night. When Steve mentioned I was quitting school, the friend—someone I had attended school with when we were younger—shot me a disapproving look and said, "You can’t just leave."

For some reason it was the only one of all the comments anyone had made which struck panic in me; I thought, oh no, what have I done?

But all I could do was mutter the words, I already did.

The best way I can describe what life was like when I first moved in with Steve is to say simply that it was odd. He fluctuated between extremes of wanting us to live like a married couple to insisting we sleep in separate rooms and maintain an entirely platonic relationship. The way he spoke to me also changed significantly; there was much more control and far less respect in his words and tone. He stayed out late most nights, supposedly at band practice. In truth, I have no idea where he actually spent most of that time.

It was a bizarre arrangement. I remember feeling confused a lot of the time and regretful about having left school to move in with him. I’ve wished so many times that I could have found the courage to walk away then.

Four months later I learned I was pregnant. By then, Steve and I had moved into a small house in a nice neighborhood.

I was attending a vocational school at the time, although I eventually had to give it up due to a lack of transportation. Just as I’d begun my new courses, Steve decided he could no longer afford monthly car payments and sold his truck. My dad loaned us one of his cars to use while we saved for another, but Steve always took it to band practice and refused to pick me up after my classes which ended late in the evening. I rode my bike for a few weeks—it wasn’t uncommon for residents of the beach town I grew up in to use bicycles to get around—but the campus was several miles from our house and located in a sketchy neighborhood. It was obvious that as my pregnancy progressed I was not going to be able to continue to use my beach cruiser as a form of transportation. I quit school, again, and took a job as an assistant manager at a gift shop within walking distance of our home.

Steve’s behavior grew even less respectful after we found out I was pregnant. In fact, his treatment toward me became outright hostile. Shortly before I’d learned I was pregnant, he’d actually said he wanted us to have a baby. So when he began acting so mean, I was puzzled and disheartened by the change in him.

One evening very early in my pregnancy I went to dinner with two childhood friends before we stopped off at a local bowling alley to visit a third friend who worked there. For years, the same bowling alley was often a place where Steve and most of his friends hung out together or used as a meeting place before heading off somewhere else as a group. As a result, he spent a lot of time there. I half-expected to see him inside when we arrived, though I didn’t.

My girlfriends and I left the bowling alley less than half an hour later and they dropped me off at about ten o’clock that night. Strangely enough, Steve was actually home when I got there. Normally, he would have been out with friends until after midnight and I was surprised to see him home so early.

He was waiting on the porch, just sitting there playing with his work keys which were on a large, heavy ring. There were dozens of keys on it. I don’t remember the exact order of events after I got out of the car and walked toward the porch but I do remember at one point he threw that key ring at me and told me if I ever went out with my friends again I need not come home at all.

The following day, Steve confronted me in our living room and told me he wanted me to have an abortion.

That was probably the very instant I stopped caring what he thought of me or what he wanted from me. It was as though that was the exact moment I became a mother.

I vehemently refused the idea of abortion and he became enraged. At the time, he had a large water glass in his hand. When I told him I would not abort my baby, he threw the glass at me as hard as he could. He was furious and literally growling. He sounded crazy. The glass exploded as it smashed into the wall about two feet from my face. Fortunately, I’d turned away and ducked in time to avoid being injured.

Shortly after that incident Steve approached me apologetically, explaining that his unacceptable behavior stemmed from the fact that he felt a lot of pressure from his dad because we were living together—and now expecting a baby—without being married.

Steve then said he felt we should get married as soon as possible. He said he loved me and would never hurt me. He insisted he loved the baby and would be different if I just married him.

I don’t know whether to blame my youth and naïveté, Steve’s extensive manipulation skills, or my own sensitivity to the social stigma attached to being a pregnant teenager, but whatever the reason or reasons, I married him at the end of that summer.

I can distinctly remember not wanting to be married, but in my immature mind it appeared to simply be the logical next step on the path Steve and I had put ourselves on. I couldn’t see that getting married at eighteen was premature at best, baby or no baby. And although I understood the moral and emotional implications of marriage, I was completely ignorant of the legal ones.

Somewhere along the way I’d also become convinced that not marrying the father of my baby would mean I was a bad mother and that I would be condemning my baby to some degree of disgrace if she were born to unmarried parents. I don’t remember when or why I developed such a notion because it sounds ridiculous to me now. But I do remember feeling intensely pressured and even obligated to get married despite the troubling things Steve had done.

In fact, hours before our wedding I announced to everyone around me, I don’t want to do this.

They all turned and looked at me, Steve included, with expressions on their faces which clearly said, you can’t be serious. I promptly shut up and went through with the ceremony.

That very concession will always remain one of the most powerful regrets of my life.

Two

Things did not improve after the wedding.

Our first night home, I had a remarkable dream. I dreamt I was standing at a long, high counter in a local bar. In reality, I was still three years too young to even enter a bar. But once, a few months earlier, I’d walked into that very building because Steve’s band was playing there and I needed to talk to him about something. I can only guess the issue was urgent enough that it couldn’t wait until morning because sneaking into a bar was pretty radical behavior for me, to say the least. I was promptly thrown out and, with the exception of one midday, work-related holiday party, I haven’t been inside of a bar since.

In the dream, though, I was standing at the counter in this same establishment. I recognized a mutual friend of ours standing behind the counter with a stack of photos in his hands. He began flipping the photos onto the wooden counter, face up, one after another. The pictures moved like in one of those little flip-books, the kind where if you flip through them fast enough they run together like a silent film.

In these photos, I watched a mini-movie of Steve kissing a blonde woman in a denim jacket.

I woke up just then to see Steve standing at the foot of our bed getting ready to walk through the bedroom door and leave for work. As I woke up, he looked down at me and I immediately asked, What did you do?

He stared at me without saying a word. I knew him well enough to know his lack of an answer was his way of avoiding an overt lie, so I pressed him further.

I had a dream of Mike showing me pictures of you kissing some blonde woman at that bar on Front Street.

During the following hour I learned that the dream had been extraordinarily accurate. Steve had kissed a blonde woman at that very bar— a blonde who just happened to be the current girlfriend of the guy in the dream who had shown me the photos.

It wasn’t the first dream I’d had which seemed to mimic reality, but it remains one of the most vivid and accurate of those types of experiences I’ve ever had. One thing is certain: Steve never looked at me quite the same way again after that.

To say I felt trapped after learning of Steve’s little indiscretion, which according to him took place just a few days before we were married, would be a gross understatement. He apologized and swore it would never happen again (of course) but his word was no good and on some level I already knew that. There I was not only pregnant, but now married as well. I was eighteen and it seemed my fate was sealed. I felt so stupid for all of my naiveté and shortsighted choices.

Part of the problem—a big part—was that for reasons I still don’t understand, I didn’t recognize that I had other choices. I could have left that day. It would have been difficult and it would have been a temporary burden on my relatives, but it could have been done.

I’d grown up learning I couldn’t count on my parents to help me correct bad situations; I had been estranged from my mother since I was fourteen because she had abandoned me to go live with her boyfriend in the Caribbean. My dad was technically my ex-stepdad and I was unsure if it was appropriate to ask him to help me, though I do believe now that he would have. I ended up with relatives but, frankly, they were young and had their own struggles. I simply didn’t know how, or whom, to ask for help.

Over the years, at times when I have mentally beat myself up for not leaving Steve sooner, I’ve surmised that the most likely reason I didn’t was because I doubted anyone would help me. I didn’t believe that I deserved to be helped. And at the time, I didn’t have the ability or resources to make it on my own.

As a result, I have always taught Cheyenne there is no reason—ever—that she cannot come home. I want her to know she never has to tolerate an unhealthy situation simply due to lack of choices. No matter what her circumstances, as long as I live, she always has a choice.

***

As I progressed into my second trimester of pregnancy, life continued to be troubled and sometimes the things Steve did were disturbing. While some of those things fell into the category of those common to many relationships, others were quite unbelievable and even shocking.

For instance, at one point it became very clear that he and one of my friends were sneaking around very late at night to spend time alone together. Although both admitted lying to me at times in order to meet up alone, when confronted they adamantly denied sleeping together. I didn’t believe either one of them but I still saw no immediate way out of my living arrangement.

The relationship between Steve and I changed quite drastically at that point, for obvious reasons. Realizing he was likely sleeping around, and knowing that my friend had never been very choosy about her sexual partners, I, for good reason, became genuinely concerned about being exposed to sexually transmitted diseases. I explained the situation to my doctor so I could get the appropriate medical tests and make sure I was healthy; a humiliating experience I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Simultaneously, I distanced myself from Steve emotionally and physically.

It was also about this same time that I first realized Steve was capable of intentionally causing serious harm, or even death, to animals. Late one afternoon, he’d driven me to pick up a friend of mine who lived nearby. As we drove home on a quiet residential street, a small dog stepped off the curb far enough ahead of us that it would have had ample time to get to the other side of the street as long as we didn’t change our rate of speed.

Suddenly, Steve became incredibly excited and asked, Think I can get it?

With those words, he floored the gas pedal and actually steered the vehicle straight for the dog. There is no doubt he was absolutely trying to hit the dog with the car.

As we got closer to the poor animal—now running to get out of the way—Steve started yelling, Vroom! Vroom! in between bouts of laughter.

My friend and I both screamed at him to stop but he wouldn’t. The little dog disappeared under the front of the Volkswagen van as Steve triumphantly shouted, Ha! Ha!

Miraculously, despite ending up completely under the vehicle as we drove over it, the dog didn’t die. Somehow it managed to avoid being crushed by the tires.

Even so, the experience was horrifying and after it was over Steve continued to laugh jovially as though it had all been very entertaining to him. That wasn’t the only time I witnessed his capacity for animal cruelty but it was the most frightening.

When I was five months pregnant we left our little house and moved across town. It was meant to be a very temporary arrangement—one I’d had no say in and which had been an agreement between Steve and his parents—but the new house was tiny and in a much less desirable neighborhood than the one we were leaving. It was owned by Steve’s grandparents. In fact, it was on the same property as their house.

It wasn’t much more than a shack. His grandparents had built it themselves several decades earlier as a temporary dwelling while they’d finished building their permanent home. It was old, cheaply built, and falling apart.

Days after moving into the little house I tried making plans for Steve’s birthday which was quickly approaching. I was still working at my job at the gift shop and had been saving to take him to an expensive restaurant to celebrate. However, because we rarely spent evenings together—including birthdays and holidays—I mentioned my plans a few days early in case he needed to cancel anything. To my dismay, he turned down my offer of dinner and said he wanted to go to a friend’s house instead.

The plan sounded suspicious from the start. The friend was someone Steve had known since childhood. I’d met him very briefly several times over the years but Steve and I had never actually spent any time with him as a couple.

I questioned the sudden interest in spending his birthday with someone he hadn’t really interacted with in years and he casually explained that his friend had gone through a messy divorce earlier in the year, and he just thought it would be nice to carve out some time to spend with him. In fact, he said he thought we should both go.

The truth of the matter was that he wanted a quick and easy activity to take part in with me, allowing him to later deflect any complaints about not being allowed to celebrate his birthday with him, before dropping me back off at home so he could leave again for the night to indulge in whatever his real birthday plans were—plans in which I was not invited, nor welcome, to participate. I didn’t realize that until later, though.

So in the early evening of Steve’s twenty-fifth birthday we drove to an apartment complex a few blocks away to visit Ben; an insignificant encounter apart from the fact that it served as the backdrop of my introduction to the man who would become—and who remains—the most important person in my life.

I could tell when we walked into Ben’s apartment that even he wondered why we were there. He was polite, though, and full of friendly conversation.

The three of us sat around exchanging niceties and lighthearted discussion for less than an hour when, out of nowhere, Steve announced he wanted an ice cream sundae for his birthday. While I was admittedly perplexed and offended that he’d turned down my plans of a fancy dinner in lieu of a childish excursion to Baskin Robbins, I mentally threw up my hands and conceded that it was his birthday and he could do whatever he wanted with it.

Despite the weirdness, Ben was mercifully cordial about the whole thing. He grabbed his keys and offered to drive. The two of us inched our way toward the front door but Steve sat planted on the sofa with no apparent plans to get up. Irritated, I made an attempt to get the birthday boy up off his rear end to join us for the ridiculous jaunt to the ice cream parlor he’d requested.

And that’s when he unknowingly, and certainly inadvertently, changed the course of all our lives forever.

Steve! I barked at him.

Huh? he answered stupidly, as though he was confused as to why I was calling him.

"Are we going?" I asked.

It was so embarrassing and I worried Ben was going to conclude to himself that Steve and I were both nuts.

Steve’s eyes shifted around before landing on us as he conjured up his best innocent face and sputtered out a reply which, if you can imagine it, took the scenario to a whole new level of strange.

He said, "No. Hey, why don’t you guys go?"

Ben and I just looked at him. Nothing about the entire evening made any sense to me, and probably much less so to Ben. Steve spewed some nonsense about being tired and wanting to relax . . . and could we please bring him back some Pralines and Cream?

I think Ben and I were so annoyed and confused by Steve’s antics by that time that we both wanted the same thing—which was to do whatever it took to get the night over with. We walked out of the apartment, leaving Steve behind.

And in one form or another, we’ve been leaving him behind ever since.

***

The drive to the ice cream shop was quiet and awkward.

Ben and I had met six years earlier but I doubted he remembered. When I was twelve years old, a mutual friend had introduced us as we left school for the day. Our paths had crossed several times over the years since then simply because we lived in the same city and knew a lot of the same people, but beyond saying hello the one time six years earlier, we’d actually never spoken to each other before that night. In fact, I’d managed to attend Ben’s wedding as Steve’s guest two years earlier without exchanging a single word with him.

By nature, Ben is friendly and open. His character is a mix of sincerity and humility, coupled with a penchant for silliness and a great sense of humor. These attributes make him an easy person to feel comfortable with, so by the time we walked out of the shop with our ice cream I was enjoying his company so much I’d forgotten about the weirdness we’d left behind at the apartment half an hour earlier.

The drive home took less than fifteen minutes but in my memory it seems like we were driving for much longer. We talked as though we’d been good friends for years. Ben explained that less than a year after the wedding, his wife had had an affair. The other man had been his friend, he said. He even confided that he’d walked in on them together once; an event I could tell was still the source of a lot of pain and confusion.

I told him how sorry I was and I tried to sympathize by saying I didn’t know what I would do in the same situation.

Ironically, I would find out shortly after that conversation exactly what I would do in the same situation.

The morning after Steve’s birthday, he and I learned that a very young member of his extended family had been murdered the night before in an act of gang-related violence. Understandably, it was a tremendously difficult loss for those closest to the boy who had died. One of the most distraught among them was Steve’s young cousin, Celia, who was twelve years old at the time.

On the evening of the victim’s wake, Celia called me at home. She was nearly inconsolable. A group of friends and relatives had gathered at her family’s home after the service and she was overwhelmed in the midst of their grief and mourning. I thought the best way to help her at that moment was to offer to get her out of the house for a little while. She sounded relieved and asked me to come get her.

Steve was at band practice across town and had told me that a friend would be dropping him off at home afterward. I thought the drive into midtown to pick him up was the perfect distance to give Celia a break from the misery at home without keeping her out too late, and would also mean that the person scheduled to drive Steve home would be off the hook for the night. It seemed like a good plan.

To make a long story a