From Predator to Person, Then Back to Jail Again

(Posted by eAdvocate) 4-5-2009 National:

Fear came so easily when I first heard about you, a child convicted of sexual assault, a child who would soon join my daughter’s homeroom class. I felt fear, based on the approximately seven sentences of information I knew about you from a closed meeting and a website. I wanted to warn my daughter that you might be a possible danger. I wanted to warn my friend that you had moved in with a family just three doors down from her house.

But I had a position that demanded, by its very name, confidentiality and balance and care. I was a member of the school board, with the title of Trustee. And if I couldn’t be trusted to stay calm and rational now, when the stakes were so high, how could I be trusted with anything?

I didn’t feel like I could even tell anyone anonymously. I did not want to expose you to hatred or possible danger based on fear and seven sentences.

So I kept my silence, and five days after that first meeting, my silence didn’t matter anymore. Parents began calling me as rumors spread and they learned of you through the sex offender website.

(Posted by eAdvocate)

Parents wanted more information, and I referred all questions to the administrator, exactly as I was supposed to do. People seemed mostly understanding about my reticence, with the exception of the friend who lived just a short walk away from your new home.

“I just want you to answer one question,” she said. “When did you know?”

“I found out five days ago,” I said. “I was told I couldn’t legally discuss it with anyone. I’m truly sorry.”

She hung up. I never have found out whether she was angry about the five-day silence, or perhaps suspected I had known for even longer. She has been friendly since then, but never again a friend.

Otherwise, people in our community shocked me with their calm, careful response to your arrival. I expected a large group of parents at the next board meeting, and crazy, enraged public comments; believe me, previous meetings had set the precedent. But parents instead scheduled quiet, private appointments with the administrators to ask what we were doing to keep their children safe. At least two parents threatened to withdraw their child because of you, but in the end, no one did.

* * *

I saw you on your first day of school. I came to the office to deliver my daughter’s forgotten lunch, and you were there with your backpack, waiting for your schedule. I recognized you from your photograph, a picture that now dissolved into a tall, awkward, long-legged boy wearing absurdly-large, black Converse tennis shoes. Normally, parents or relatives at our school wait with their children until they get their schedule straightened out. Normally, they embarrass them with hugs or goodbyes. You were on your own, and fidgety; you rocked on your feet and rubbed and squeezed the padded straps of your backpack.

The secretary handed you your schedule, then her phone rang, three calls at once. She put her hand over the receiver and whispered, “Would you mind walking Andrew to his class?”

So we walked down the hall together, and I talked too much. “You’re going to be in my daughter’s homeroom,” I told you, a stupid comment; how could I know what homeroom you were in without looking at your schedule? “This is it,” I said when we arrived at the door. “Have a good first day, Andrew.”

You flushed. Your skin is very pale, and your cheeks and neck turned red as you looked down at the floor and mumbled a single word: “Andy.”

I never did have to warn my daughter about you. You did that work for me in your second week of school. My daughter plopped into the car one afternoon and announced, “We’ve got this new kid? This Andy kid? He’s kind of perverted. I dropped a book, and I bent to pick it up, and he said, ‘You know, I could totally see all the way down your shirt right now. I could see everything if I wanted to.’”

So far, you were not doing a very good job accommodating my need to feel safe about you attending our school.

Your first days were not smooth: you spent at least a month on the margins. Other students spoke to you, and you had somewhere to sit at lunch. But I kept hearing worrisome details from parents, teachers, and my daughter. “Andy says he used to be in jail because he raped some kid,” she told me one day, but you had not said this directly to her. Supposedly you said it to Lyssa, who told it to Jennifer, who passed it to my daughter. Maybe you had said such a thing. Or maybe it was a third-hand rumor based on a comment a kid heard from a parent.

You definitely opened new topics of conversation in our school and community. A group of parents arranged for a counselor from a nearby Children’s Advocacy Center to talk about sexual abuse. The topic turned – carefully, theoretically – to you. “Children who engage in sexual activity at a young age have usually been abused themselves,” the counselor said. “A certain amount of experimenting between boys of similar ages is fairly common. There is a wide spectrum of ‘normal.’”

“What if the kid was convicted of sexual assault?” one mother said. “Surely that’s not normal.”

“Consider that the child may not have had a good lawyer,” the counselor replied. “The DA’s office in my city doesn’t usually pursue these cases as a criminal offense. They usually come to us to get help for the child and the victim and the family. Sexual abuse is often a problem passed from generation to generation. The entire family needs help for that cycle to be broken.”

* * *

Months passed. Our weather turned to its familiar, bipolar spring pattern: sweaters one day, shorts the next. I asked my daughter about you sometimes, inquiring whether you were still making rude comments. “I guess,” she said. “Not any more than some of the other guys, really. Especially Kevin. He’s such a jerk. So immature.” I knew and liked Kevin and his family. If Kevin’s outdoing you in rudeness, I thought, you are definitely making some progress.

You joined the track team. You were the tallest from our school; not the fastest, but you could clear hurdles like a gazelle. At our last home track meet of the year, I stood near the fence with another track mom, watching you run in the finals of the 300 meter hurdles. You started in last place, and then you began to surge ahead, running, leaping, just behind the top runners. My friend and I began jumping and yelling for our school and for you. “Andy! Go! You’ve got this!”

You came in second place. I remember this, and how you looked so focused as you ran. Not blank, like your website picture. Focused. You ran your hardest all the way through the finish line, ending strong, just like the coaches taught you to do. I watched your teammates give you high fives. I watched you sit on the field with the other boys, waiting until the scores were announced, saw your face turn a bit red when the coach walked over and handed you your silver medal.

I know about one more event that happened during your time with us. You attended a worship service for teenagers at one of our neighborhood churches. I am not a fan of this church. They are Bible literalists, they enthusiastically proselytize, and one of their deacons had once sent me an e-mail explaining my duty as a Christian to vote for George Bush over Al Gore. So I was not, of course, there for this service, and neither was my daughter.

But my daughter’s carpool friend told me about the service: how at the end, you had walked forward during the altar call. “Pastor James asked him if he wanted to say anything, and Andy shook his head,” the girl said. “He just stood there, and then he started crying all of a sudden, and James hugged him, and a bunch of us came forward and hugged him too, and everybody was crying.”

I have never known what to think of this story, and thought this young girl might perhaps be exaggerating. But if you were crying, were your tears from shame, or the pain of a desperately hard two years? Were you manipulating people somehow? Did you suddenly accept God into your life? Or were you crying because you had friends who suddenly seemed to have accepted you?

What did I know about you? Snapshots and conversations. You came to us with a record. You were terribly nervous your first day. You never seemed to have stopped making provocative comments to your classmates. You were often in trouble with teachers because of your rude remarks, and because you never stayed still, never. You ran track. You won second place in a race. You once cried during a church altar call. Seven pieces of information. Not enough to know you. But enough to strip away a label. Enough to change you from predator to person.

And then, one day in May, my daughter came home and told me you would soon be going back to juvenile jail. “Andy has to wear this ankle thingy now,” she said. She did not know much more. I learned during one final, closed meeting that your relatives had taken you across the state line to visit a family member, violating your probation.

“How can that be fair?” I asked. “He didn’t go across state lines on his own; his relatives took him there. How can they send him back to jail for that?”

No answers; only speculation. I had fought against you coming to our school. I now surprised myself by being sorry to see you leave.

* * *

POSTSCRIPT I

In June, the administration called a special closed meeting of the board to tell us that a twelve-year-old had been sexually assaulted at our school during the last track meet of the year. The victim was cornered under the bleachers, pushed, slapped, and sodomized through his clothes with a practice relay baton while two boys stood and watched.

The story made the newspaper: “Twelve Year Old Brutally Attacked at Junior High Track Meet.” My phone began to ring. This time, parents conveyed all the rage and fear and hysteria I expected when you first arrived. Some parents demanded names: Who did this? Who watched? Some made a connection to you, and demanded to know, Was it that sex offender kid, what was his name, Andrew?

Legally, once again, I could say nothing. The case was in the hands of police investigators, who told us very firmly that anything we said could hurt an eventual case against Kevin. Kevin, the child who my daughter said was ruder than you, and “such a jerk… so immature.” I had not listened carefully enough to her comments because I knew Kevin, and his mother, a kind and quiet woman who had helped me organize the PTA bake sale that fall.

I could not reveal Kevin’s name. But I had no ethical hesitation at all in revealing who the abuser was not. “It wasn’t Andrew,” I said firmly. “He was running hurdles. I watched him race. He won second place. I watched him on the field when he got his medal. I watched him the whole time.”

The danger had been the boy we knew, the boy we weren’t watching.

* * *

POSTSCRIPT II

I thought of you this week because you contacted my daughter and her friend through MySpace. “His page is kind of weird,” she told me. “Lots of Emo stuff. He’s wearing all black clothes. He’s holding up his middle finger in one picture, and he has on black nail polish. He told us, ‘I hate my new school and I hate these F-in people.’ He said he wished he could come back to our school.”

Then she asked, “Do you even know who I’m talking about? The kid who went to jail? You remember Andy, right Mom?”

I came home and wrote down what I could recollect to see if I could come to any peace about you. I was not trying to suggest sex offender policy; I don’t know enough for that. In fact, the theme of my life these past three years seems to be learning how little I do know, or can know, about anything or anyone.

I wonder about you, and what will become of you when you turn eighteen, and your record is wiped clean, and you remake your life as a free adult. I wonder about the child you abused three years ago, and think how everyone seems to be a victim here.

I was halfway through this story before I even realized I was writing it as a letter. I have thought of you often, and hope your time with us brought some small hope and acceptance into your life, some meager point of grace that might help you focus, run toward something good, finish strong.

I do remember you. ..News Source.. by Salon