‘I don’t know that I will ever get over the terror.’ : Ordeal on a Spring Afternoon
Saugus Oaks is one of those Santa Clarita Valley subdivisions of red-roofed, wood and stucco homes geared to young couples moving up in life. It has been in existence for less than a year and glows with an aura of euphoric newness on a quiet spring afternoon: new lawns, new fences, new walkways, new flowers.
Children are part of the shiny image. Not a block in the neighborhood is without infants and toddlers, from preschoolers riding tricycles up new sidewalks to babies pushed in strollers down new driveways, pampered, protected, wanted.
Hand-painted signs, their lettering fashioned with fastidious concern, leave no doubt how much the mothers and fathers of Saugus Oaks care about their kids. The signs, posted at the entryways of the subdivision, say simply, “Slow down. We love our children.”
Up until last week, this sparkling new neighborhood on a rolling hillside may have been the idyllic embodiment of what suburbia is supposed to be: a place of new hope, fresh ambitions and loving care.
Then the haunting began.
Saugus Oaks, to begin with, is not the real name of the housing tract I write about today, nor is Gerald Emery the name of the child involved in this story. The parents of the boy have asked, for obvious reasons, that true identities, including that of the subdivision, be disguised. The rest is real.
About 2:45 p.m. last Wednesday, not three blocks from the Emery home and within the blissful confines of the subdivision itself, a school bus let Gerald and some other children off at their regular corner. Gerald is 8 and a second-grade student.
His instructions have always been to come right home, but instructions, whatever their high motives, are often lost on the young. As the other children walked homeward, Gerald remained behind.
“I guess,” his mother says, “he was playing with the water in the gutter or just dawdling, the way boys do. He was alone when it happened.”
Mrs. Emery’s first knowledge of a problem came explosively as Gerald burst in the front door, breathless and panicked. Two men, he said, had tried to drag him into their car.
“He was terrified,” she says. “The men apparently had guns and threatened Gerald. When he wouldn’t willingly get into the car, they got out and tried to drag him in. He somehow got loose and ran. It was so close. I can’t stop shaking.”
Her husband, a carpenter, ran to the bus stop. Mrs. Emery called the Sheriff’s Department. Patrol cars responded almost immediately and searched the subdivision and beyond. Gerald’s father did the same. No one found anything.
I wondered at the outset whether the incident actually occurred or whether it was born in the fertile grounds of a child’s imagination. A substantiating factor is that a woman who lives near the bus stop, and with no prior knowledge of the incident, later remembered seeing a car that precisely matched the description given by the boy.
Veracity, however, is not at question here. The assumption must be that the incident did occur, but even that really doesn’t matter. What matters is the impact the report has had on Saugus Oaks . . . so freshly planted, so newly tainted.
Parents who felt safe within the boundaries of the subdivision meet in nervous clusters to talk about what they thoroughly believe to be a near tragedy on a quiet afternoon. Neighborhood watches are being considered. Private security patrols are being discussed.
No one’s child goes to the bus stop alone anymore.
“I wouldn’t have believed that a thing like this could happen out here,” one of the young mothers said. “We don’t have that kind of trouble. We don’t have any kind of trouble. We have sheriff’s deputies and highway patrolmen living all around us. This was a beautiful community. Now it feels so . . . spooky .”
There is, in truth, no place to hide. Jets link us on an international level, freeways on an urban level. The worst of the evil doers are only a madness away.
“I don’t know that I will ever get over the terror of how this might have ended,” Mrs. Emery says. “My husband is a carpenter, not a rich banker. What could they have wanted with my son?”
“I don’t even want to think about that,” Gerald’s father says.
Saugus Oaks can never be the same again. The newness is gone. What happened there is a microcosm of what happens to all of us. Actualities taint youth. Bright hopes give way to dark truths.
Many terms are being used by those in the neighborhood to describe the kinds of feelings afoot on the quiet hillside of the Santa Clarita Valley. Anxiety. Fear. Tension. Terror.
But I think the word that says it best is the one used by the mother of a 2-year-old who vows she will never again let him out of her sight. She said it felt spooky now where it had once felt secure.
It happens to all of us in a troubled society. Reality creeps in and the haunting begins.
