There’s No Safety in Numbers

My daughter’s elementary school sent home a note with the kids the other day. A man had been spotted shadowing two girls after they got off the school bus. The girls ran, jumped in some bushes, and then the man drove off.

This same man, the note said, had been spotted in the area before. A parent had found his behavior suspicious enough to report. The Sheriff’s Department wants to find this man now. It hasn’t yet.

So we, as parents, have been warned. Your child may not be safe .

We’ve known this, of course; only the terminally naive have not digested this news long ago. Still, we are shocked, angry and scared. We do not want to confront an ugly truth.

My older daughter is 5 years old, a kindergartner who says she will not grow up because being a kid is too much fun.

From what I can tell, her childhood is how every child’s should be. Her biggest worry is that her baby sister will stumble upon the hiding place reserved for her “special stuff.”

So I was careful when I presented the news that she should be extra vigilant when leaving the bus. I told her that she must never walk alone. I said what I have in the past: Even “nice” people can be bad.

The next morning, my daughter told me that she did not want to go to school. “The bad man is out there,” she said.

I didn’t tell her that there is more than one.

I am not going to turn this column into a general lament about innocence lost, even though for the most part, I believe that my daughters’ childhoods will be “less pure” than my own.

Nowadays when people indulge in this type of nostalgia, they use the description “and nobody even locked their doors” as the ultimate metaphor for better times. Such innocence never returns.

We are forced to go on, just a little harder around the edge.

My neighbor, the mother of my daughter’s friend, was even more jarred by the sighting of the suspicious man than was I. She told me she didn’t know what to tell her girls. Later it was decided that a police officer should visit the girls’ Daisy Girl Scout troop after school.

This wasn’t possible, however. Too many other parents had called to ask the same. We all fear the worst. Any cop will tell you that these kinds of incidents can quickly evolve into crime.

Now I read in the newspaper that parents in San Juan Capistrano have been warned that a “very dangerous” man exposed himself to a 6-year-old girl walking home from the bus stop after school. Earlier, this same man reportedly molested a 6-year-old boy.

Parents at Palisades Elementary School were lining up to retrieve their children themselves directly after class. One mother said she had been driving around looking for the suspect all day.

A few months back, a man (still not found) abducted a young girl in Garden Grove. Parents there reacted in the same way. Nobody likes to play the odds with their child.

But, invariably, we must.

This is a conclusion that I don’t like one bit. You take precautions, you warn, you scold when safety procedures are breached. And then you simply hold your breath. Please, oh please, don’t let anything happen to my child.

The truth is, luck does count. Laws on their own just aren’t good enough; all systems have cracks.

William L. Suff, recently arrested for murdering at least two women in Riverside County, was questioned about severely abusing his baby daughter last year. The child nearly died. Suff was not charged. Insufficient evidence, the prosecutor said.

Later, the detective on that case was shocked to hear that Suff had been convicted of murdering another infant 18 years before. The detective said a computer error probably prevented that conviction from showing up in the files.

The state Department of Justice says that as of Jan. 1, there were 3,305 registered sex offenders in Orange County. For Los Angeles County, the number was 19,167.

These numbers, however, don’t mean that there are only that number of people who could be considered at risk for repeating their crimes.

The law says people convicted of certain sex crimes must register with police. This is intended to make it easier to gather suspects later on. But, alas, convicts simply do not register, in droves.

I could go on, compiling a roster of unsettling facts, but personally, I’ve already had my fill. It’s hard enough to realize that most children will never be safer than when they were in the womb.

Not long ago, my baby had relatively minor surgery for which she was put under general anesthesia. A nurse called me the night before, as she does all parents, to assuage any fears that I might have.

“I know that if you could, you would do this for her,” the nurse told me even before I suggested as much. “That’s how we all feel. I’m a mother too. We are all parents here.”

That means that we all fear for our child.

Dianne Klein’s column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.