caerula's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- not in my backyard This may be a more-than-one entry day. A lot happened over the weekend, although not really to me. But this is the most important one, and I'm sorry, but there's nothing remotely funny in it. We went to the school carnival thingy on Friday � more on the good bits of that later. After a half-hour or so, we saw a U-M medvac helicopter doing a flyby. That's really close, we thought, must be a bad accident on 23. Then a few minutes later, another one. Kids were looking up and pointing. Then a police car drove into the school parking lot and a police officer took over the magician's microphone. "We need your help. We are looking for [name deleted], an 11 year old girl. She has on a red shirt and jeans and was riding a gray bike. If anyone knows her or has seen her today, come talk to me." At first we thought, well, her parents much have lost track of her here at the carnival. Didn't connect it too the helicopters in the least. And I said to my mom "Well, if her parents were stupid enough to let her ride down here on her own and then expect to be able to find her in this crowd�." Turns out, she was riding her bike in her subdivision around 4 pm, two hours before the carnival, when someone grabbed her and shoved her into his car. They found her bike, dumped, around 10 pm. Someone found her, bruised and beaten, possibly raped, on the side of the road not a quarter-mile from where we live, and took her to the gas station that we can walk to from our house, to call her mom and the cops. Last week, a woman in Ypsi was abducted, raped, and dumped on the side of a road in our township. The road my parents live on. The burned out house mentioned in the article? That's at the end of my parents' rural dirt road, about half a mile from this. And there's a girl from Ypsilanti High School still missing. These stories don't get big press like the Utah kidnapping. No Morman missionaries out hunting for the Ypsi girl. No calls from church bigwigs or prayer vigils. No one knows what do to � things like this don�t happen here, to us. I know, everyone says that when it hits home. "This is a nice neighborhood, nothing like this has ever happened before." It�s true. I've lived here all my life, except for five years or so spent elsewhere. I came back here because it was safe, quiet, not too expensive. Good schools and a good place to raise kids. I do not remember one event of abduction, rape, child kidnapping, in my lifetime here. Sure it was on the news all the time � we get the Detroit stations, after all � but nothing ever happened around here. We get the rural epidemics. Bored teenagers smoke marijuana, get pregnant, start fires in cornfields. Things happen in Detroit, Flint, Ann Arbor � last week, a 16 year old Ann Arbor kid committed suicide by jumping off a parking structure. Kids get busted for drugs at Ann Arbor high schools; here it's more likely to be skipping to go down to the Milan McDonalds or trying to buy cigarettes. Friday night I actually called the police because someone had started a bonfire in the field across from our house, and it sounded like they were throwing beer bottles or firecrackers into it, and it was making a lot of noise. When I heard police sirens around 12:30, I thought wow, they must have really wanted to run those guys off. I didn't know they were on their way to pick up a little eleven year old girl who goes to the same school as my child. The police have been out in force. We stopped yesterday at that same gas station to pick up a paper and something to drink, and two cop cars were there. My mother has seen five police cars up and down her road all weekend, a road where three cars within an hour is heavy traffic. These things don't happen here. They just don't. Maybe they do, and we pretended not to see, and don't remember. Maybe. But ask anyone. These things don't happen here. This weekend, they did. 10:36 a.m. - June 10, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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