So I keep looking at the map. I don't know why, really... I just keep looking at the roads wondering how what got to where. How it happened, I guess. I feel really upset about this, and maybe I should declare a moratorium on reading the news or this site for a couple of days because it's 2am and I'm still reading. I guess it hits close to home because I have a daughter the same age.
O/T: Last night at dinner, my daughter, her boyfriend and I were discussing (with regard to my niece and nephew) whether or not 10 is too young to have a cellphone. He asked how old SHE was when she got hers. She was 10. He seemed surprised, but at that time I was working half an hour away from home, and we lived on a street where all of the houses but ours (which was split up into several small apartments) were either vacant or burned down. Across the street was a large, old cemetery. The bus picked her up and dropped her off 2 blocks from the house, but I felt that I needed to be able to be sure she had gotten home after school okay. I called the apartment to be sure she was home if she had not called me within a reasonable time after school.
The impetus for her getting a (prepaid) phone was that (for reasons I can no longer remember) on certain days she walked from school to the public library, and I picked her up there after work. One one such occasion, I arrived at the library to find that it had closed more than an hour earlier. She was nowhere in sight. I rushed home, expecting to find her. She was not there. I went to the school (3 miles from home), which was locked, but saw a light on in the principal's office and knocked on the glass to get his attention. We spoke, and she was not there, and had not been there since leaving for the library at the end of the school day.
I drove back and forth between home, the library, and school, checking the home phone for messages, and looking for any indication of her along the way. I called her father who lived an hour away to let him know. I contacted her former stepfather, who lived on the same street as the library to see if she was there. I did not want to call the police prematurely, so I drove back and forth to the various locations, expecting she'd show up at one of them sooner or later. I wrote a note and taped it to the library door, and left another at the apartment telling her to wait there for me. I spent over an hour covering the same ground.
Somehow, I ended up at the home of a boy she used to have a crush on, who lived between the library and the ex-stepdad's house, on the same road, and she was there. The mother told me my daughter had showed up cold and wet some time after the library had closed. She had been making calls every fifteen minutes hoping to reach me, but my daughter had accidentally transposed two of the digits of our phone number.
I was upset and relieved, all at the same time. As we drove home, she told me to stop at a little bridge so she could get her "stuff". When the entire story came out, she told me that she had tried to walk home from the library when it closed, but it was cold, and drizzling rain, and her bookbag got heavy. She made it about 1/3 of the way before she realized she could not go on. She decided to go back to the boy's house, which was closer than home, but left her bookbag beside the bridge.
If I had noticed it there prior to locating her, I would definitely have called the police. To me, the idea that she would just walk away from her bookbag was unthinkable. I'd have been certain she'd been taken. Luckily it ended well, but she got a cell phone shortly thereafter.
So because her route, from house to park and then park to school, was entirely in these sorts of suburban, stay in the neighborhood sorts of roads, it just seems to me that the person who did this either lives there, or was there on a job. Or had been there on a job before. I just don't see how it could be different and make any sense. What would lead someone to just happen to be driving around in there at that time of morning for it to be a crime of opportunity from outside that neighborhood?
I remember the same question being asked when Sierra Lamar disappeared on her way to the bus stop. She lived on a cul de sac, and had apparently been grabbed on that road. It was suspected that a neighbor must have been involved for exactly the reasons you stated. When they arrested her killer, it turned out he had no connection to her neighborhood, and did not know her before abducting her. For this reason, I am keeping an open mind about Jessica's kidnapper.
