Her Sense of Security Died With Samantha

We are riding home from camp in the car, our radio tuned to an all-news station. It is the day after Samantha Runnion disappeared; a few hours before her body would be found, well before a suspect arrested. Accounts of the manhunt and the crime provide the backdrop for my daughter’s account of her day--a dip in the pool, a morning hike, an afternoon at a Dodgers game.

When she finishes, the radio reporter’s voice fills the car. Five years old ... abducted ... lost puppy ... carried off screaming. I hit the button to turn it off, but not soon enough. My daughter’s eyebrows knit and she turns to me.

“Somebody took a little girl? Why would some man steal a child?” For a moment, I’m not quite sure what she’s asking. Until I see the bewilderment in her eyes.

At 11--heading for middle school, inclined to wear glitter on her cheeks and the kind of skimpy tops Britney Spears wears on TV, familiar with the suggestive lyrics of a host of rap CDs--this little girl is still too naive to conceive of what is happening.

Why would anyone steal a child, indeed? “Maybe she was kidnapped,” my daughter suggests. “And her parents will have to pay to get her back. Or maybe it’s someone who wants a kid of his own. Maybe his daughter died or moved away, and this little girl might look like her.”

She turns to me for confirmation. And I have to tell her how wrong she is; that this has nothing to do with greed or grief or misplaced longing for paternity. That some people are simply so evil or sick, they have sex with 5-year-olds for kicks. That there will be no happy ending, just death and depravity. “It’s hard to explain,” I tell her. “But there are people out there whose minds are so twisted, they want to have sex with little kids. And sometimes they wind up hurting those children. Or even killing them.”

“Oh,” she says. And she gets quiet, pondering this new idea. And I am as saddened by the silence as she is chastened by the notion of monsters who prey on little kids.

This isn’t the first time that interpreting the news for children has been difficult. There are challenges whenever we are forced to explain grown-up scandals and tragedies.

It was uncomfortable, to say the least, having to define “oral sex” during the Clinton-Lewinsky era. And in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, I struggled to explain religious fervor so extreme it led to the death of 3,000 innocents.

But somehow, the brutal death of this young child seems more intimate and threatening, and harder to put into perspective as we search for its message and meaning. “Tell children not to talk to strangers and what to do if approached, but don’t give them the sense that the world is an unsafe place.” That was the advice from experts, but it seems woefully inadequate. Because the world is a dangerous place. And, as parents, we constantly straddle a line between our responsibility to teach our children how to live safely and comfortably in it and our desire to shield them from it. Each parent draws the line in a different place, and each new tragedy forces us to redraw it.

Things that seemed reasonable to me before last week now suddenly seem foolhardy. Like letting my two young daughters play alone in the park while I sat inside its gym watching their sister’s basketball game. They were only 8 and 10, armed with nothing more than rules I’d given them: Stay together at all times. Don’t venture beyond the swings. Run back to Mommy as fast as you can if anyone you don’t know tries to talk to you.

How could I have believed that would protect them?

And parents who once seemed to me irrationally overprotective now seem like models of perspicacity. Like the friend who wouldn’t let his teenage daughter baby-sit for me because she wasn’t allowed to be alone “outside the walls” of his family’s gated community.

We all buy into the illusion. That same sort of logic led Samantha’s family to move from a tough neighborhood in Garden Grove to a Stanton condominium complex, filled with friendly young families like hers. Samantha was playing outside with a friend, just steps away from adult supervision. She screamed and fought when her killer grabbed her, just as her mother had taught her to.

And none of that was enough to save her. How do we tell our children that truth?

There’s nothing to worry about, I tell myself, as I lock the door and head for work, leaving my daughters home alone. At 13 and 11, they’re not babies. They’ve spent plenty of time on their own.

Yet midmorning, when I call and no one answers, I am seized by the urge to run home. Minutes later, I pull into the garage and sit, listening to the barking of our dogs, taking comfort for once in their noise.

Then the door to the house swings open and my bleary-eyed 11-year-old appears, roused from sleep by the dogs’ commotion and startled by the sight of my car. “I didn’t know you were here,” she says.

“Then why did you open the door?” I ask her. She wanted to make the dogs be quiet, by showing them the empty garage, she says. “Well, what if it wasn’t me?” I say, and now I’m on the verge of yelling. “What if someone had sneaked through that side door and was waiting to grab you right here!”

Puzzled by all my interrogation implied, she glanced at the door--blocked by bikes, gardening tools and laundry piles--which had never been considered a threat before. “You mean I’m not safe here, in my own house, in this garage?” she asks. I walk to the door and jiggle the lock, then come back and take her in my arms. “I’m sorry, I just got carried away,” I tell her. “Go back to bed. Of course, you’re safe in this house.”

But what I’m really thinking, I’m afraid to acknowledge ... not at home, not anywhere, not now. It doesn’t matter that Samantha’s killer may be in jail. The horror is that he exists at all.

Sandy Banks’ column is published Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes. com.