The Latest Little Girl on the Missing Posters

The images of a home video scroll through my head like a machine stuck in replay, repeating the same scene over and over: a little girl dancing and running toward the camera, then suddenly turning away and glancing back to flash a smile that fills the frame. Her name is Danielle van Dam, and she has vanished from the Earth like a sun sprite in the rain.

I can’t get the images out of my head, even though television has ceased to show them as frequently as they had in the days immediately following Danielle’s disappearance more than three weeks ago. She was allegedly taken from her bed sometime during the night and has not been seen since.

The video was released by her parents, Brenda and Damon van Dam, who have mounted an intense campaign for the return of their 7-year-old daughter. Police have questioned dozens of neighbors, focusing attention on David Westerfield, a self-employed engineer who lives two doors away from the Van Dams, but no one has been charged in the girl’s disappearance.

Hundreds of volunteers have searched the hillsides that surround the community and an area of the Imperial Valley desert visited by Westerfield in his motor home the day that Danielle was kidnapped. A Web site has been created, a bloodhound brought in and a toll-free phone line established in the search.

But for all of these efforts and more, a little girl with a smile as bright as heaven remains only an image on a home video, a magic moment now laced with grief.

Among the crimes that can drive me into a rage are those committed against children. I think about the 1993 rape and murder of 12-year-old Polly Klaas, taken from a slumber party in her Petaluma home. And I think about 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey, the sad little beauty queen beaten to death more than five years ago in her Colorado home.

Polly’s father called his daughter “America’s child” to stimulate interest during a nine-week search that brought Hollywood celebrities into the mix and made Polly’s name a metaphor for innocence betrayed.

Her body was found under a sheet of plywood not far from her home. A drifter named Richard Allen Davis was convicted of killing her and sentenced to death.

The murder of little JonBenet, its investigation seemingly bungled by police, has never been solved. Seen in photographs, she was the personification of a child thrust into an artificial world of beauty competitions, her face painted in an almost clownlike imitation of adulthood, her smile posed and wooden.

Her beauty, both real and cosmetic, was destroyed by a killer who covered her mouth with duct tape, fractured her skull and tightened a nylon cord around her neck. She lay like a ravaged doll in the basement of her home, a child whose final, terrifying moments of life we can only imagine.

And now Danielle.

She enters the world of missing children emulsified on posters and handbills, of playful sprites prancing before video cameras in the days of their innocence, of young lives turned to statistics before they’ve had a chance to imagine their own future.

One grieves already for what is bound to be the conclusion of a sad and desperate quest for Danielle. Hope remains because hope is all that’s left, but deep inside where fear abides, we know ... we know.

It is instinctive among sane and reasonable adults to protect their heritage, to guard the lives and well-being of their children from monsters that prowl the nights. Girls especially seem vulnerable to men like Richard Allen Davis and to the faceless demon whose shadow fell over the life of JonBenet.

I remember protecting my own two daughters with the intensity of a guard dog when they were young, and now I do the same for two beautiful teenage granddaughters whenever they’re in my charge. More than instinct causes me to be alert to the dangers that lurk in a world where the young suffer.

My career as a journalist has been filled with experiences I wish I’d never had, including the search for a 14-year-old girl named Stephanie Bryan, whose disappearance 46 years ago made national headlines.

A pretty and outgoing girl, she was kidnapped from in front of her Berkeley school on a sunny day in April and vanished into what seemed like another world. For three months we searched--volunteers, police and journalists--until the hunt became an obsession, and I began searching alone in areas where she had been last seen.

When I wasn’t searching, I was staking out the Bryan home.

I remember sitting in my car near their house one evening when all the other reporters had gone home. Stephanie’s mother came to the door. She walked to the end of the porch and looked up and down the street, both ways. Her lips moved but I couldn’t hear what she might have been saying. I’ve wondered ever since if, in her hope and her pain, she might have been calling her daughter’s name one last time.

Stephanie’s bludgeoned body was found buried in the mountains near the cabin of a University of California student named Burton Abbott, who was convicted of her murder and executed two years later.

I think of Stephanie, I think of Polly, I think of JonBenet and now I think of Danielle. And I wonder how many of America’s children we will add to a growing list of statistics that will ultimately define who and what we are in this strange and often terrifying age.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He’s at al.mar tinez@latimes.com.