Terror on a Sunny Afternoon

The area around Saticoy and Etiwanda is a working-class neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, made up of the kinds of people who mow their lawns, trim their hedges and see to it that their houses get painted occasionally.

Children ride their bicycles up and down the streets, and neighbors stop and talk to each other on their way home from the market a block or so away.

Larry and Natividad Zuckerman moved to an apartment on Saticoy two years ago for those very reasons. It was a place they could afford until they had a house of their own. They felt comfortable there.

The Zuckermans were looking for a change of luck. When they were newly married, the first apartment they rented was the scene of a SWAT team attack when a distraught father held his daughter hostage, a gun at her head. He was killed in a rescue attempt. The little girl was safe.

The second apartment house, the Zuckermans discovered, was peopled by drug dealers who paraded around with guns stuck in their belts. It was hardly the kind of atmosphere they wanted for their future child.

The third place, the apartment on Saticoy, was to be the charm. Megan was born there 20 months ago, a bright and hauntingly beautiful child with the kind of large, dark eyes you noticed half a block away. Their neighbors were helpful and friendly. Life was good.

The Zuckermans both work. He’s an advertising consultant, and she helps out at an attorney’s office. The sitter they hired to watch Megan was a woman from Argentina named Karina Aranda.

Everything was working out beautifully . . . until one sunny afternoon a week ago.

*

Aranda was walking Megan in a stroller on Etiwanda. The day was warm and the street tree-lined, affording shade for both the sitter and the little girl. It was shortly after noon.

They had taken this walk dozens of times before, often accompanied by other nannies. This time they were alone. A careful and conscientious woman, Aranda had strapped Megan into the stroller. It was a precaution that would avert a tragedy.

The attack came with the suddenness of a lightning strike. Aranda told investigators later that the man came out of nowhere, struck her in the back and knocked her to the ground.

“He never said a word,” Larry Zuckerman said. “He grabbed for the stroller but, even though she was hurt, Karina held onto it and began screaming: ‘Don’t take the baby, don’t take the baby!’ ”

Unable to wrest the stroller from her, the man grabbed for Megan, but because Aranda had strapped her in, his efforts to take the little girl were unsuccessful.

He was still trying to pull her out when two men in a passing car, attracted by Aranda’s screams, pulled to the curb. The assailant ran and was never caught. He’s still out there.

A terrified Aranda grabbed the baby and ran back to the Zuckerman apartment. The attack had occurred with such speed, she could offer little of the man’s description. He might have been Latino. He had a mustache.

The incident seemed surreal. Even now, Aranda can’t believe it actually happened. She still hears herself screaming. . . .

*

If they could, Larry and Natividad Zuckerman would move away from what they had once considered a safe neighborhood. They would leave the Valley, they would leave the city, they would leave the state.

“I can’t sleep and when I do, I have nightmares,” Megan’s mother says. “I’ll never feel comfortable here again.”

Her husband adds: “I wish we could leave L.A., but we can’t. Our work and our family are here. But we’re going to be very, very careful that it will never happen again.”

Juvenile Division Detective Bill Dworin of the Los Angeles Police Department says that the likelihood is it won’t. He sees it as a fluke, a one-time event.

“Why did it happen?” he asks rhetorically. “Who knows. It may be an isolated event, it may not be. This much we know: Every child in the city is at risk. It could happen anywhere.”

It didn’t happen to Megan because of the woman hired to watch her. “If I could,” Natividad Zuckerman says, “I would give her a million dollars. How can I ever say thank you enough?”

Children disappear and are never seen again. They’re snatched in custody fights, sold for illicit adoptions or murdered by deranged killers. Their faces appear on milk cartons, posters and handbills distributed by grieving parents.

The terrifying reality of that moment in the Valley is that those parents could have been the Zuckermans, and one of those faces could have belonged to a little girl with glowing brown eyes named Megan.