Warning Children: a Tough Balancing Act

For parents of children small enough to be carried away against their will, these past days have been a time for holding hands a bit tighter, turning casual supervision into constant vigilance and grappling with ways to gently explain a horror story.

Talk to most parents or their children Saturday--at swim lessons, at the park, at a birthday party, at home--and it’s as if a phantom had followed them on their normal routines, putting them on guard, invading their thoughts.

“My heart is twisted,” said Liliana Florido, an Anaheim mother of a 10-year-old girl.

“It clenches you up. I feel nauseated when I think about it,” said Consuelo Brennan, 36, a Burbank mother of a 2-year-old boy.

“It could have been my little girl,” said Gary Byrne, the Alhambra father of 4-year-old Janelle.

Then talk to children, and eyes open wide with concern. For them, this has been a week of sternly worded admonitions and mean-man role-playing. Never fall for the lost puppy routine. If a stranger tries to take you away, what do you do?

“Scratch, scream, try to get away,” said Elianna Florido, who has been so upset by the slaying that she and her mother went to the Stanton kidnapping site Saturday to leave a condolence card. Liliana said her daughter is old enough to understand the news, but young enough to have cried in fear on and off all week.

“I think somebody is going to come up and steal me,” Elianna said, as she gripped her mother’s hand and placed a card on one of 11 makeshift memorial tables outside the Runnion family home.

“It told her mom that I feel very, very sorry for her, and my family is praying for them,” Elianna said.

Danyelle Vasquez of Rancho Cucamonga, 12, said she decided to avoid meeting with her friends in the frontyard and instead retreat to the safety of her backyard.

Samantha’s body was found Tuesday near a mountain road west of Lake Elsinore, the city where Alejandro Avila, 27, the man suspected of killing her, was arrested Friday. The case has drawn national media attention, and authorities received more than 2,000 tips.

“I’ve been scared,” Danyelle said. “I wanted to sleep in [her parents’] bed.”

Vigilance became a full-time job last week.

“Just stay there, honey. Stay there. Don’t go anywhere else. I need to see you,” shouted Jeanette Guerrero, 37, to her 7-year-old son, who was attending a birthday party Saturday at Griffith Park.

Hers was a common plea, typical of the instructions doled out to a child in the course of a day. But Saturday, Guerrero said, her orders felt more profound.

“This is a case that hit home,” the Diamond Bar mother of two said. “The more you heard about it, the sadder and more cautious you became.”

She and her husband decided to buy a Sony PlayStation just to keep the children occupied when the couple can’t be outside to watch afternoon play.

Overnight, the frontyard seems to have become a kind of danger zone for children, a place where only supervised play time is allowed--a responsibility that can stretch into hours during warm summer evenings.

“Dinner is just going to have to be late, the housework is going to have to be neglected,” said Claudia Soto, 29, of Compton. The mother of three children, 11, 7 and 4 months, gathered the two eldest early in the week to gently explain what happened to Samantha.

Although she usually shields her children from the crime stories of the day, this was one event that she said she didn’t have the luxury to ignore. “It was my responsibility to let them know what can happen,” she said.

Soto, like others, calmly, matter-of-factly told the story of the “very mean man” who hurt a little girl, who is now up in heaven. The moral: Stay close to your parents; listen to what they say.

At Mayo Elementary School, where Soto is a parent advocate teaching English and other parenting classes, she said, the parents met this week to organize adult-supervised “walking home” groups.

“As parents, we said it is our responsibility to make sure no child walks alone,” Soto said.

Nitza Becerra, 26, of Gardena also decided to tell her girls, 5 and 8, that the Stanton girl had died after being hurt, to drive home the seriousness of the lesson at hand. Her oldest had seen the story on television and asked what happened to Samantha.

Amber, 8, “was surprised and gave me that oh-my-God kind of look. She understands death,” said Becerra, who followed up with an explanation of rules. “I know she just didn’t blow this one off. The way she looked at me, I knew she understood this.”

It’s the difficult balance between caution and paranoia that many parents said they grappled with. How much do children really need to know about sexual predators?

Nothing. That’s what Scott and Linda Folsom of Mount Washington decided. They don’t watch the evening news because it’s too sensational, they said. And their 11-year-old daughter knew little, if any, details of the killing.

Explaining the crime to an older child, they said, would have meant delving into details they felt were inappropriate.

“I didn’t want to have to explain about rape,” Scott Folsom said. “I just didn’t see a whole lot of benefit to her at this point in her life.”

Yet Linda, a production executive at Disney, said work conversations last week were dominated by Samantha’s fate.

Parents, grandparents, anyone close to a child, she said, felt violated as they tried to fathom the cruelty of the crime.

“There is no possible explanation that man could have that would cause him to be forgiven for what he did, making a child suffer like that,” Linda Folsom said.

Avila’s arrest did little to ease the minds of some worried parents, who, while comforting their children, protected them from the truth that made their hearts quake.

“The thing is, I know that this isn’t the only guy like this around,” said Byrne as he guided his 4-year-old daughter to her swim lesson. “Kids change your life so much, and then it is so scary to think of how quickly they can be taken from you .... It’s hard. It’s hard.”