Good Samaritan’s Choice Generates Anger, Praise

Early one Sunday last summer, Roy Pawelski Jr. decided to take a stroll along one of the city’s busiest streets.

He climbed through a window of his family’s street-level apartment, leaving his shoes and his sleeping father behind. Then Roy--all of 3 years old--headed west onto Main Street, where cars and trucks barreled past him.

What happened during the next 30 minutes has angered some and heartened others in this city of 50,000. Most agree on one point, though: It is a most unusual “good Samaritan” story.

The account trickled first onto police blotters, then into news reports and finally to academia. Sociologists and experts there say it probes the mind of anyone who wants to help a child in need but fears misinterpretation of good intentions.

Questions continue to disturb: What would you have done if you had found Roy that morning?

For those who work with children--a Scoutmaster, a teacher--or for passersby who find a lost child, what’s the right response? What to do in this time of child abuse, child abduction, child molestation, in this age of hypersensitivity?

On a wet morning in Tennessee, that question nudged Jerry Lokey, grandfather of eight, as he drove his farm truck west on Main Street. On his way to a friend’s home, he found himself at a crossroads: moral, ethical, perhaps even legal.

A child was in danger. He had to make a choice.

Difficult Dilemma

Murfreesboro is a bustling college town about 30 miles south of Nashville. Its tree-lined Main Street borders Middle Tennessee State University and a parade of large homes before emptying into a quaint town square flanked by banks, shops and churches.

On a rough eastern stretch, though, where gravel trucks rumble from a nearby quarry before sidewalks tame the busy thoroughfare, Roy wriggled through the window and headed west. His walk began about 6:30 a.m. on June 14.

Jerry Lokey was driving west when he noticed the brown-haired boy walking along the gravel strip between grass and pavement.

Lokey looked for the grown-up. After all, there’s supposed to be a grown-up. “But I didn’t see anybody,” he recalls. “I called out of the window and asked him where his parents were, but he wouldn’t talk to me. He just kept walking.”

Lokey’s mind revved faster than his pickup.

“It was kind of chilly. I would have loved to pick him up and dry him off and take him to the police station. But if someone saw me do that--the way people are thinking these days--they’d say I was trying to abduct a child.”

Running Interference

Child abduction was the talk of Murfreesboro at the time. Nashville TV stations had dished out stories that spring about reports of such attempts in “the big city” and several surrounding communities, including Murfreesboro.

Only three weeks earlier, Nashville police issued an all-points bulletin for “a man in a van.” His crime? Stopping to keep a toddler from playing in the street. To witnesses, it looked like an attempted abduction. He had to hire an attorney and spend a day persuading investigators that he wasn’t a criminal.

Lokey had heard those newscasts. Under this veil of cynicism, he decided to let Roy continue walking while he ran interference with his truck.

They crossed Arnold Lane together.

“We’d get to an intersection, and I’d block,” Lokey says. “He’d just keep going. He wouldn’t even look left or right.”

They passed a small church and Hugs & Kisses play school, a small gray building with a Winnie-the-Pooh banner. Lokey drove so slowly that the needle on his speedometer registered zero. Cars whizzed by.

“I got a few fists shook at me. People gave me some stares,” he says. “I would point back to the kid. I reckon they understood.”

The pair crept about 300 yards when they reached the red light of Rutherford Boulevard, a four-lane highway. The child ignored the traffic. Lokey ignored the red light. They crossed all four lanes, cars slowing long enough to wind around Lokey’s truck.

More fists, more stares.

Once across, a row of small houses lined the right side of Main Street. On the left, where Roy walked, was the parking lot of B&R; Discount Furniture and Appliances. There Roy stopped to look at a truck, then proceeded across Dill Lane. Perhaps it was here--Lokey cannot remember for sure--where a woman in a red car tried to pull out into Main Street.

“She looked at me funny,” he says, recalling now that he pointed quickly at the boy. “I asked her if she would stay with me until help arrived. I didn’t think it would look as bad if there was a lady with me.”

The woman in red called police on a cell phone and drove with Lokey. But she wouldn’t pick up Roy either.

Unlikely Procession

Viola Russell sat in her bedroom, drinking coffee, when she saw the unlikely procession out her window.

“It scared me,” she says now. “I thought, ‘What if someone is trying to pick up that child?’ ”

Barefoot, clad in a housecoat, she ran outside. She heard a rushed plea from the woman in the red car, saying she had to get to work.

“She went on. I went to the child . . . and held him,” says Russell. “It was chilly and wet. He was just shaking.”

She stood with the boy in a neighbor’s driveway, under a walnut tree, while Lokey parked and waited for police.

Officer Found Trio Waiting

Sgt. Carl Watkins arrived first. On his way home from the midnight shift, he intercepted the call and found the trio waiting on Main near Arnett.

“He was just a cute little kid who had run off,” Watkins says. “I put him in the patrol car and turned on the heat.”

Other officers brought food, and Russell got a dry shirt. As Roy munched on a hamburger, his father pulled up.

“He apparently had fallen asleep in his apartment and--kids being curious--the boy got out somehow and just wandered away,” Watkins says.

“We gave him a good lecture and called the state to handle it.”

Russell went back home to lukewarm coffee. Lokey drove on to his friend’s. Roy Jr. returned home with his father.

The state later placed Roy and a brother with a relative “until certain things were fixed” in the home, says Jeni Stephens, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services. They have since returned.

Lokey was taken aback by a debate that turned very public, beginning with police at the scene.

“One officer told me I should have picked the child up. The other said I did the right thing,” Lokey says. “Every person seems to have a different feeling.”

The Tennessean, Nashville’s morning newspaper, headlined an account four days later as “Paranoia prevails over tot’s safety.”

A letter to the editor appeared the next day, from Linda Perkins of Nashville. “How sad it is that we don’t feel that we can help a child in need without fear of unfair retribution,” she wrote. She described her own attempt to help a child lost in a Target store, with her only thanks the screams of the mother. “Watch carefully, but don’t touch” is the lesson she learned.

Sheila Burke, The Tennessean’s letters editor, did not have room to print all the letters. But most, she says, empathized with Lokey. Others were adamant: Concern for a child’s safety always outweighs personal risk.

Those who study bystander involvement say it takes only a few seconds for a person to decide: to help or not? But the answer is based on a lifetime of observation and experience.

Jane Piliavin, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin who wrote a book on emergency intervention, says most people want to help, but actions rest with how they evaluate risk and reward.

“If you see someone being held up on the street, you think, ‘Oh my God, that person could get killed.’ Then you think, ‘Oh, my God, I could get killed,’ says Piliavin. “That’s a pretty high cost.”

Interests and experiences also come into play, she says. Men tend to be more mechanical, more likely to help someone with car trouble. Women are more nurturing, more likely to help a lost child.

If there is a cost to helping, getting involved is less likely when others are around. “It’s the ‘Let George do it’ attitude,” Piliavin says.

In such instances, she advises, one person should turn to the next and ask what to do. “It makes sense, but nobody ever does that. They just stand there, transfixed.”

Americans have long wrestled with when to get involved. The 1964 stabbing and murder of Kitty Genovese in New York symbolized apathy when 38 neighbors heard her screams but did nothing. After Princess Diana died in a car crash in 1997, the world was appalled at reports that some photographers were more interested in snapping photos than in helping the victims.

Law enforcement officials are frequently disillusioned with citizen apathy.

“People say, ‘That’s what the police are for,’ ” recounts Gerald Arenberg, spokesman for the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police in Washington. “In the ‘50s, we could get assistance from anybody. But today, people will sit around and watch an officer being kicked--or a child get lost--without doing anything, even dropping a quarter in the telephone to call.”

A few states have passed Good Samaritan laws making it a crime not to call or aid in an emergency. But Joel Samaha, a historian and sociologist at the University of Minnesota, says laws don’t produce good Samaritans; families do.

“This really is a comment on the character of people,” he says, “and how immoral it is not to help.”

*

Lokey, who never left his truck during the entire episode, says he’s just glad the boy is safe. He has endured some criticism but insists that he’d do the same thing again.

Watkins calls him a hero:

“He could have just rode on by and neglected this kid. But . . . he took his time, followed the kid and made sure he stayed safe until help arrived.”

“Twenty years ago,” he says, “my mother would have picked this kid up, taken him home to warm up and then taken him to the Police Department to find his family.

“But times have changed.”