Twenty Years
By Mitch Berg
The Strib has been covering the twentieth anniversary of the kidnapping of Jacob Wetterling.
Today, they interview Aaron Larson, the boy who went walking to store with Jacob Wetterling and his brother on that Sunday night.
I was a little less than two years away from having kids myself, back then. And Wetterling’s was one of a series of kidnappings that shocked the region at the time; Jeanne North disappeared in Fargo; a young girl was kidnapped, molested and murdered in a Northeast Minneapolis second-hand store by a fat, long-haired loser who canoodled with Satanism and whose mug shot alone could have been used as dispositive evidence that he was a child-rapist/murderer; another little girl in Cottage Grove was abducted and killed by his mother’s boyfriend.
And as they got older, the examples didn’t get any less fresh; Dru Sjodin was abducted and killed about the time my kids got into their teenage years, tempering my joy about their growing independence and giving me a date to take a quick vacation from my opposition to the death penalty for the party I’ll throw the day they finally stick a needle in Alejandro Rodriguez’ arm.
The story stuck with me as a new parent – especially stopping by Saint Joseph almost exactly a year later, when the posters were still up and the place still oozed hope for the boy.
“The first thing I remember was the flash of the gun, and a guy saying, ‘Stop, I have a gun,'” Larson recalled. “I caught my breath. I thought it was a high school kid pulling a joke on us. … Then it hits you: this is happening, it’s no joke.”
The man ordered them to lie face-down in the roadside ditch.
Larson remembers his heart “going 1,000 beats a minute,” but having no clue what was happening. “You didn’t hear about people being kidnapped or abducted. It didn’t cross my mind.”
The man asked Trevor to look at him, then asked his age. He did the same with Aaron, then Jacob.
“Then he told Trevor to run as fast as he can to the woods. Trevor was not gone that long, maybe 10 seconds, and he said the same to me or he’d shoot,” Larson said. “I ran as fast as I could to catch up to Trevor.”
After running 100 yards, Larson looked back — and saw nothing but darkness.
Frantic, the boys ran to the Wetterling house. The baby sitter called her father, who called 911. Within minutes, the cul-de-sac lit up with squad cars.
Petrified, Larson looked out a living room window and kept telling himself he would see Jacob again. “Sooner or later, he’s going to come and he’s going to get out of the car and this will all be over.”
Twenty years later, there’s a part of him still looking out the window, waiting for his friend.
It seemed incredible at the time; kidnappings, especially in little towns like Saint Joseph, just didn’t happen as bolts from the blue.
The kidnapping popped an awful lot of bubbles.
I’ve told my kids ever since then; if someone pulls a gun on you, run; moving targets are harder to hit; a 9mm slug has about a 17% chance of killing you even if it does hit you, even if the shooter does opt to shoot (because nothing screws up a hush-hush stealth crime like ekidnapping like, y’know, gunfire). That’s an 83%-plus chance to survive if you run and run fast, as opposed to about a .1% chance of surviving at a secondary crime scene.
Kids disappear every day, of course. Most of them turn up again. The Wetterling case swept Minnesota 20 years ago, and is still virtually synonymous with “kidnapping” in the minds of most Minnesotans old enough to remember the case. It was especially traumatic in rural Minnesota, which got dragged out of the world of Laura Ingalls Wilder and into the cold, windy real world.
The case still reverberates, of course. Some good did come of it; it launched a raft of child safety legislation; Patty Wetterling went on to found the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is the single most important group on the issue. And the realization that Minnesota, even its vast hinterland, wasn’t as safe as it used to be helped erode support for the DFL’s traditional “catch and release” policies, and built support for reform of Minnesota’s paternalistic, racist handgun permit laws over the following decade. Being a child molester got a little more dangerous in Minnesota after the Wetterling kidnapping.
I do urge you to read the interview with Aaron Larson. He’s 31, now; it’s a fascinating look at a survivor, and what that means.
October 21st, 2009 at 1:00 pm
There has been greater awareness and focus on sexual predators, though we still don’t know what to do with them. Twenty years after Jacob, Minnesota is building $45 million offender treatment centers (at which no one has yet been “cured”) complete with two dozen 50” plasma televisions for civilly committed sex offenders who have served their sentences but are judged to be too dangerous to be returned to society. Rubber bands and shears would cost a lot less and would be no more cruel and unusual than the crimes these men have committed. It would also be a more fitting sanction than getting to watch Nickelodean and “Sex in the City” on big screen, high-def television.
October 21st, 2009 at 2:16 pm
I’ll slightly disagree, NightWriter. I know prison psychologists who deal with sexual predators, including pedophiles. They offer some small amount of hope of rehabilitation for the usual predator, but the only solution they know of for pedophiles is to lock them away forever. (They also suggested that for Rodriguez, if you remember, but were overruled.)
October 21st, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Of course, no punishment or confinement is necessary as long as you’re an artiste or auteur such as Roman Polanski, in which case society owes a debt to you.
October 21st, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Mitch writes:
“a 9mm slug has about a 17% chance of killing you”
According to who or what study? I am not disagreeing with your practical advice, I am just genuinely curious.
According to the FBI there is no valid scientific data on the topic.
http://www.firearmstactical.com/hwfe.htm
see page 16.
October 21st, 2009 at 5:32 pm
It was a figure I read about 20 years ago that I’d have to dig a bit to find. It’s in one of three books I have in my library, and I can’t remember exactly which, but I’ll try to find it tonight.
It drew from some federal source that analyzed mortality of gunshot hits in police shootings by caliber. 9mm came in at 17%; big revolvers and .45 ACP were higher.
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:32 am
“a fat, long-haired loser who canoodled with Satanism and whose mug shot alone could have been used as dispositive evidence that he was a child-rapist/murderer”
Good old Swiftee.
October 22nd, 2009 at 7:43 am
That’s a great story.
October 22nd, 2009 at 8:26 am
Thought-provoking piece as usual, Mitch, but it’s important to note that the catch-and-release policies had already been closed by the time Dru Sjodin was murdered. It was Dennis Linehan’s near-release which led then Gov. Arne Carlson to force the Legislature to reconfigure the law that allowed Minnesota to lock up sexual predators (the previous law had been declared unconstitutional because it put the burden of proving they could be released without re-offending on the “patient,” who of course couldn’t prove it while incarcerated).
Alphonso Rodriguez was a Level 3 sex offender, the type most likely to reoffend. He could’ve been put away. Instead he was released in May 2003. Now THAT was a bonehead decision for which nobody ever was held accountable.
But you’ve adequately captured the fear of parents. My kids are in their 20s now. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll ever exhale again.
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:03 am
Oh I’ve got you beat for having child abduction feature as significant backdrop to my childhood. I was the right age and lived in Oakland County, Michigan when the “Oakland County Child Killer” was active in the late 70s. There were four kids that they linked to the same probable killer and there were several more abductions at the time that may or may not have been done by the same person. Kids would disappear and their bodies would show up somewhere by the side of the road somewhere in the county. Never caught the killer. Later in the early 80s, a girl disappeared who went to my high school who had gone to apply for a job at our local mall. She was never found.
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:13 am
Bob,
but it’s important to note that the catch-and-release policies had already been closed by the time Dru Sjodin was murdered.
Stipulated! I’m asserting that the response to Wetterling was a huge step on that path.
Margaret,
I vaguely remember the OKCK from when I was in high school, probably from some story at one of my first radio jobs. Which I mention more as a testament to the ficklesness of memory than anything.
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:43 am
So many missing/taken children seem to be custedy battles, or runaways from troubled homes, or those that go willingly (think the 15 eyar old runnign off with the 25 year-old). St Joseph and Barnum events where truly randomn. The victims where normal kids with no connection to their attackaters.
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:52 am
I don’t believe a source was listed, but someone on a gun forum mentions the stopping power of various types of handgun rounds, including the 9mm:
http://www.firearmstalk.com/forums/f14/most-lethal-handgun-round-1428/
October 22nd, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Thanks for the link Badda. Any luck Mitch?
October 22nd, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Mitch – another GOOD reason for the death penalty out of Illinois….
http://www.suntimes.com/news/1839349,CST-NWS-dugan22.article
I remember both the Jeanine Nicarico case and the Opal Horton/Melissa Ackerman case. If EVER there was a person who deserved the death penalty (besides Dru Sjodine’s killer) it is Brian Dugan…oh and John Wayne Gacy.
LL
October 23rd, 2009 at 11:07 am
Rick,
Yes. It was in a book by Mel Tappan, “Survival Guns”, from about 1979. It cited an FBI study of handgun lethality from the seventies (by way of advocating the .45ACP for self-defense). Not available online.
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Mitch:
OK. It would seem like the FBI does not have much confidence in the original study Tappen cited. But there does not seem to be much in the way of hard scientific evidence. It is probably the best available.