No Tears for the Bad Guys

Kathleen Aberman isn’t the kind of woman who collapses in terror every time she thinks about the man who tried to rape her on a quiet autumn day three years ago, but tears that fill her eyes betray the depths of her emotion.

She sits upright in a chair in a gesture of defiance as she recalls details of the event that transformed her from what she describes as a caring liberal into a hard-nosed conservative on issues of crime and punishment.

“I’ve lost all compassion for criminals,” she says, trying hard to subdue the tremor in her voice. “I used to care so much. Now I say to hell with them, and I mean it.”

We are in a small room of her lovely old Spanish-style home, a gleaming white stucco building with a red-tiled roof. From a window looking toward a back yard, we can see a fish pond her husband built and cascades of red bougainvillea that glow in the bright sunlight.

The home is on a quiet corner in Eagle Rock, surrounded by houses with carefully tended gardens and precisely mowed lawns. Tall, willowy palm trees line the streets, and lavender jacarandas add bursts of color to the morning.

The attempted rape occurred in a room not 20 feet from where we sit. An attractive woman in her middle years, Aberman had just returned home from a meeting at Eagle Rock High School.

She had grocery-shopped on the way, and was carrying bags up her front stairs when a passing transient offered to help. She refused, but he followed her into the house, forced her to the floor and was tearing off her clothes when a friend’s arrival and her own hard struggles sent him running.

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It wasn’t the first time she and her family have been victimized by criminals. Her husband and two grown children have had five cars stolen from in front of their home, and other vehicles forced open and burglarized. Twice, their garage has been broken into and tools stolen.

This isn’t the kind of neighborhood where gunfire and sirens supply the melodies of the night, but a community where people with deep roots obey the law and raise their children according to solid moral standards.

The Abermans have lived in their home for 25 years. She is a community activist, and the meeting she attended on the day she was almost raped was to protect children from harassment by older kids on Halloween.

The story of her victimization was not offered gratuitously, but in response to a column I wrote on the dangers of pistol-packing militiamen. I said one of them could be the guy next door.

There were times, she said over the telephone, that she wished there were a guy next door with a gun. And one of those times was that horror-filled morning in 1992.

But now as we sit together in a corner of her 60-year-old home, with its stained-glass windows and shiny wood floors, she says she doesn’t really want an armed society, but worries about the growing threat of crime.

“If I can be attacked by a rapist in my own home in this kind of community, then it could happen to anyone,” she says. “When it happened to me, it happened to all the women around me. We’re all afraid.”

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She isn’t a haunted person. There’s closure to the rape attempt because the man who did it was caught and imprisoned . . . though she can describe in disquieting detail the rage in his eyes and the hard grip of his hands on her throat.

For a few months, she wanted nothing to do with the room where the crime occurred, but now enters it without hesitation, determined to walk free of the shadows of the past. It is with that same determination that she vows not to be driven from the home she loves.

But the incident lingers in the memories of her children, her husband, her sisters and her neighbors, and she thinks about the impact of crime on those who have lost someone to murder, especially those cases in which the criminals haven’t been caught.

“All my bleeding-heart liberalism went out the window when the rapist walked in,” she says. “I never thought I would say this, but now I have no problem with capital punishment. I have no tears for killers.”

Kathleen Aberman is an intelligent, caring person who always tried to do the right thing. The cost of her effort was terror from a passing stranger.

But the solution to crime doesn’t lie in a society that bristles with armed vengeance at the hands of lunatics who build bombs. In the long run, the guy next door in the camouflage dungarees can be a far greater threat to public safety than any rapist who ever walked the streets. They deserve equal attention.