As a new plant breaks the ground with great difficulty … so must we sometimes push against difficulty in bringing forth our dreams.
- the I Ching
In October 1997, a day after my 28th birthday, a 9-year-old girl was raped and murdered and left in a field a block from her home. Her uncle and another man were eventually charged. They had stabbed her more than 30 times with a screwdriver. She had bite marks on her neck and shoulders. As I covered the case, I came to know her as a beautiful, spunky, impish little child. The photo of her with a baseball cap and bat appeared in newspapers for weeks and was seared into my memory. Her death would affect me – and my process of self-discovery - far more deeply than I ever would have imagined.
Child murders were not new to me, sadly. I often became close – in an odd way – to the victims, getting to know them as a reporter, through family memories, photographs and such. I kept several of their pictures on my wall at work. Bradley Sharp was one who had plagued me for months – two years old, blond haired and blue eyed and a smile that could melt the hardest of hearts - killed by a head injury so severe it was as if he’d been thrown from a two-story building, when in fact he’d been asleep in his crib at the time of the attack. The father, previously charged and cleared of another brutal murder, that of his then-girlfriend, was the primary suspect, along with his new girlfriend. Child abuse deaths are often the toughest cases for investigators to crack and this one was no different. Little physical evidence, particularly if a child has been shaken to death, and no witnesses, other than the people possibly responsible for the death. I covered that case for weeks and felt such sadness over the waste of Bradley's young life. No one has ever been charged with his murder.
A mother and three children who burned to death in a mobile home fire – while firefighters struggled to scale the 12-foot fence that blocked the road to the trailer – was another case that haunted me. The county’s fire rescue department had outdated maps. The road they were on came to a dead-end several hundred yards from the woman’s home. Neighbors could hear the screams. One firefighter, a father with two small children of his own, made a desperate and heroic attempt to get there in time but it was too late. He went home that night, hugged his own children and cried. I later got to know him and chronicled his attempt – and the pain he suffered afterward – in the newspaper. I went with him to the funeral, where he stood to the side with a small bouquet of flowers. He never approached the family. He knew there was nothing he could say. I kept a photo of those three children by my desk for nearly a year afterward.
Sara's death was different. It affected me in a way that is still painful to think about nearly eight years later. It’s almost as if I miss her though I never knew her. I was there when her body was found and stayed with the case for months afterward. I walked through a field to the tiny, child-sized grave where she likely took her last breaths. I’m sure the time I spent on the case has much to do with the intensity of emotion I still feel when I think of it today. You cannot cover a murder, particularly that of a child, without having strong feelings about it. For years afterward, Sara would appear out of the blue in my mind, always smiling, forever 9 years old. As crazy as it sounds, I felt her presence, her spirit was guiding me to places I did not want to go, both in my mind and in the world. I’m convinced she was, at least in part, the inspiration for my later work with kids. She suffered a horrible death at the hands of someone she trusted, yet she gave me a feeling of hope and strength in a way I can never fully explain.