Silence Protects Youths Who Shattered a Girl’s Life

‘It’s amazing to me that the people who know something

about this have been able to keep this quiet for so long.’--Sgt. Jim Byler,Carlsbad Police Department detective

It seemed a typical suburban scene. A young couple zipped through the night on a motorcycle along a lonely stretch of roadway in Carlsbad, eager to beat the midnight curfew set by the girl’s parents.

As they slowed to a stop at an intersection, their world turned topsy-turvy. A white pickup truck loaded with teen-agers roared by. Without so much as a warning, someone in the truck bed tossed a wooden plank at the couple.

It may have been a misguided high school prank, it may have been intentional, but it changed Jennifer Pratt’s life forever. The length of 2-by-4 hit the San Dieguito High School sophomore in the back of the head. She slumped motionless against her boyfriend, blood oozing from her ears.

Jennifer languished in a coma for three months after the April, 1987, accident. Today, she is but a shadow of the vivacious, 16-year-old blonde who dreamed of being a model. She remains bound to a wheelchair in the hospital, her muscles stiff and twisted by seizures. Her mind seems that of a second-grader.

Crusade to Identify Assailant

While struggling with their grief, the girl’s parents have mounted a crusade to identify the assailant. Dissatisfied with the efforts of police, they hired a private investigator and littered the community with thousands of posters offering a reward and pleading for information on the case.

The parents, Diane and Garry Strom, feel certain that they know the identities of the teen-agers involved in the incident. Nonetheless, the case remains unresolved, bereft of the vital fragment of firsthand evidence needed for a conviction.

“It’s so hard when you know who it was, but you’re missing one little piece of the puzzle,” Garry Strom said. “Just about anyone you talk to says they know who did it. I think there’s hundreds of people now who know who did it.”

Indeed, at San Dieguito High School and in the neighborhoods around the couple’s comfortable Encinitas home, the rumors are rampant. Many people seem certain that the culprits come from the ranks of the high school’s party crowd, bored and unrepentant youths with too much money and too little parental supervision.

Although the Stroms’ private investigator believes that the case is a whisker away from being solved, police are not so certain. Detectives with the Carlsbad Police Department, which is handling the investigation, say they have followed up numerous leads but have little more than circumstantial evidence as to who the assailants might be.

Nonetheless, officers see an ominous thread to the episode. They remain dumbfounded that none of the youths involved in the incident, not even those on the periphery, have stepped forward to identify who committed the crime. Instead, moral purpose has been supplanted by a twisted sort of teen-age loyalty.

“They don’t seem to have that conscience inside that tells them, ‘This is wrong and I better do something to make it right,’ ” said Sgt. Jim Byler, the Carlsbad detective coordinating the investigation. “It’s amazing to me that the people who know something about this have been able to keep this quiet for so long.”

Everyone called her Jenny. It fit the bubbly personality, the bouncing mane of blond hair.

As a girl, she rode horses and did the other sorts of things people do when they enter their teens. “She was one of the nicest people I know,” said Sydney Stanger, a high school girlfriend. “She’d do anything for anybody.”

Like so many young women in the beach towns dotting San Diego County’s northern coast, Jenny grew up fast. Horses and other trappings of childhood were all too quickly replaced by clothes and makeup.

High school boys also soon became passe. Along with her friends, Jennifer began to catch the eye of men in their mid- to late 20s. “Girls around here just go around with people who are a lot older,” Sydney explained. “It’s just the way it is around here. We’re more life-wise smart.”

About a year before the accident, Jennifer started seeing Curtis Croft, an aspiring professional surfer eight years her senior. She was attracted by his sun-bleached hair, good looks and the red Porsche 911 he piloted about town, friends say. At first, her parents gave the relationship the OK, buoyed by Jenny’s reassurances that Croft was only 18.

But Diane and Garry Strom, who were married in 1982 after she divorced Jenny’s natural father, soured on their daughter’s boyfriend when they discovered that, in fact, Croft was 24--and had a criminal past.

Sentenced on Cocaine Charge

In August, 1985, Croft was sentenced by a U.S. District Court judge in San Diego to one year in prison and three years’ probation after he pleaded guilty to a charge relating to the sale of nearly 10 grams of cocaine to a federal Drug Enforcement Administration agent. He was released in February, 1986, after serving five months of his term.

“She got mixed up with a bad crowd,” Garry Strom said. “She even mentioned once that a couple of people were after Curtis for something.”

The Stroms forbade Jenny to see Croft, but the relationship went on virtually unimpeded by the parental ban. Jenny would simply tell her parents that she was going out with friends and then head over to Croft’s apartment.

As the relationship flowered, Jenny changed.

“I remember one thing she said: ‘I don’t need any friends. I have Curtis.’ ” recalled Holly Lightbody, another high school friend of Jenny’s. “Their relationship was like a fairy tale. It was like make-believe.”

Although Croft’s living costs were being covered by his parents while he tried his hand in the auto-detailing business, Jenny would often use her paycheck from work at a small shop in the commercial beehive along nearby El Camino Real to give her boyfriend money to buy food or pay for gas, friends said. When Christmas rolled around, she lavished him with gifts, they said.

Croft, meanwhile, paints a different picture.

“She used to come over a lot,” he said. “We were like brother and sister, it was that close.

“This whole town, every guy, every surfer, goes out with younger girls,” he said. “It’s not like I’m the only one who does it.”

Moreover, Croft said he and Jenny steered clear of any involvement with drugs. As part of his probation, Croft is subject to drug tests several times each month.

On April 25, after a particularly testy run-in with her parents over Croft, Jenny got a ride from a girlfriend to his apartment in La Costa, the upscale community on Carlsbad’s southern flank. As midnight approached, the couple began their fateful ride back to Jenny’s house on a motorcycle borrowed from a friend.

As they slowed for the intersection of Rancho Santa Fe and Olivenhain roads, the white pickup filled with teen-agers roared up from behind. Croft said he never saw it coming.

“I never saw the stick. I never saw who was in the truck, it went by that fast,” he said in a telephone interview. When I saw Jenny, I was freaking out crying. . . . I wish to God it was me instead of her.”

When Diane and Garry Strom arrived at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, doctors told them that Jenny was brain dead and would probably live only a few more hours.

The couple say they never gave up hope, even during the weeks the girl remained in a coma, attached to a jumble of life-support equipment. Eventually, Jenny came around, but the damage to her brain prompted her body to contort into a fetal ball. Only weeks of tedious therapy began to correct the problem.

As Jenny began to make progress, she was transferred to Paradise Valley Hospital in National City, her parents making the 100-mile round trip each day to be by her bedside.

The couple’s woes were compounded when Garry Strom left his job last fall as an assistant vice president with a financial services firm after a run-in with his bosses over the hours he was able to put in. The family has survived since on money that was in the bank, through the help of friends and on what cash Garry Strom can make doing odds and ends around the neighborhood.

As the weeks ticked by, the Stroms became increasingly troubled that Carlsbad police were not making more headway on the case.

“It’s not like the TV programs,” Garry Strom said. “Unless it’s someone like the governor’s daughter, it doesn’t seem that you get the attention or focus it deserves.”

Investigator Hired

During the summer they hired Louie Crisafi, a private investigator with San Diego-based Investigators Intelligence Network, and were almost immediately pleased with the progress he seemed to be making.

Crisafi quickly developed a theory that he continues to expound--that Croft was the target of the 2-by-4 and Jennifer Pratt simply got in the way.

According to Crisafi, the boyfriend was in a fight shortly before the accident with a teen-age friend who had taken some personal possessions from Croft’s apartment. The board-throwing incident, Crisafi suspects, stemmed from that argument.

On Aug. 13, Crisafi and another private investigator confronted Croft and demanded that he talk about the accident. During a subsequent tape-recorded interview, Croft revealed the names of three people he saw in the white pickup, including the teen-ager who threw the board, Crisafi said.

After that apparent confession, Crisafi called the Carlsbad police. But when Sgt. Byler interviewed Croft that same day, the young man recanted, saying he never got a glimpse of the suspects’ faces. Croft said Crisafi used threats of jail to force him to talk.

“I was so scared, I just made up a name, which I shouldn’t have done,” Croft said. “I told them someone I thought maybe could have done it. . . . But I’m not going to point the finger at someone unless I really know. And if I knew, I’d tell, I swear to God on a Bible.”

Lie-Detector Test

Byler said Croft subsequently took a polygraph test and passed it.

“The tactics (the private investigators) used in interviewing him were totally unacceptable,” Byler said. “You don’t take a victim of a crime and threaten him. Basically, I felt that the value of what they obtained and the way they obtained it was worthless from an investigative standpoint.”

Byler also rejected criticism from the Stroms that police manhandled the board that hit their daughter, smearing fingerprints that might have led to an assailant. He said the 2-by-4 was “processed as a weapon in a serious crime” and that no fingerprints were found, primarily because “we’re dealing with a rough-textured, worn piece of wood.”

“Any inferences that we have done less than our best on this is not true,” Byler said. “It’s a difficult case. What happens is that rumors just start flying. We’ve been going around for months tracking down rumors and fourth- or fifth-hand accounts of who did it. But as far as something to build a case on, it’s not even close.”

Croft, meanwhile, complains that the gossip floating about town has labeled him as the villain.

“Instead of being a popular guy, I’m now the bad guy,” said Croft, who is trying to make it as a construction worker.

“This is like rumor capital. I’ve never seen a little beach town so rumored out.

“If someone was out to get me for some drug thing, it would have been way more professional, not a lot of rookie kids on a truck.”

Sticks With Story

Through it all, however, Crisafi has stuck by his suspicions, saying he has the right suspects but simply lacks that last shred of proof.

“These are not Mexican Mafia,” he said. “These are little punks who have money, who can go out and buy drugs, who aren’t supervised by their parents, whose parents could care less about them. All these kids are 16 or 17 going on 30.”

Several of the youths Crisafi suspects of participating in the incident last April are students at San Dieguito High School. In the weeks and months since the accident, word about who was involved spread like wildfire through the student body.

“Everyone had a pretty good idea of who did it,” said Holly Lightbody, a junior at the school.

Holly was so sure, in fact, that she decided to make a point. Accompanied by Penny Pratt, Jennifer’s 17-year-old sister, Holly says she stole up to the house of the teen-age youth she suspects of chucking the board.

With nary a peep, they tacked a poster to the front door bearing two sharply contrasting photographs. One is a tan and smiling Jenny before the accident. The other is the sallow, twisted young woman left in the tragedy’s wake.

Jennifer Pratt is making progress these days. Her parents say the girl’s memory is returning day by day. On a visit home from the hospital on Christmas Day, she recognized the house for the first time. Her speech, slurred until a few months ago, is practically back to normal.

“It seems like she gets better each week,” her mother said. “But the better she gets, the more she realizes what she’s incapable of.”

In November, she was transferred to Scripps Memorial Hospital in Encinitas, just a few miles from her parent’s house. Medical bills in the last nine months have mounted to about $400,000. The Stroms say most of the total will be paid by insurance, but that coverage is expected to last only another 10 months.

“I don’t like to think about it,” Diane Strom said, gazing off wistfully. “I feel like Scarlett O’Hara: I’ll think about it tomorrow.”

Though Jenny pleads to come home each day, the couple realizes that she will make the most progress in the hospital.

Intense Therapy

Each day, Jenny undergoes intense therapy. She is relearning math with flash cards. She also is steadily regaining the use of her hands. Her parents hope that she will begin to learn to walk again in a few months. But for now, her legs are in full-length casts that are progressively stretching out her seizure-wracked muscles.

During a recent visit, she sat in her wheelchair, a red zipper purse on her lap filled with everyday articles she is becoming familiar with again--a pen, a bar of soap, a hairbrush. When a photographer asked to take a picture, she flashed a dazzling smile, holding it until the clicking stopped.

She read for a few visitors from a new book, “Where the Bear?” When the photographer, who entertained her by barking like a dog and trumpeting like an elephant, said goodby, Jenny looked up. “You’re the nicest person I ever met,” she said. “Bye. Have fun.”

Diane Strom said the doctors have told them that Jenny could regain 85% of her mental and physical capacity within the next decade. A hard road of therapy lies ahead.

“If I didn’t have it in me that she’ll be better, I don’t think I could make it,” her mother said. “If you lose hope, you don’t have anything left.”

Jenny’s friends come by to visit on occasion, but it is hard for them.

“You see Jenny now and she doesn’t know who the hell we are,” Sydney Stanger said. “You hope that one day she’ll remember. These are the best years of her life. She’s going to be 17 soon. She should have a driver’s license. She should be having fun.”