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Etan Patz vanished from the streets of New York City 30 years ago this month. He is not living in an alternative universe as a 36-year-old man who grew up on Prince Street in Soho, the middle child of a school teacher and a photographer who then went to Brown or Reed and became a journalist or documentary maker married to his college sweetheart with a 7-year-old little girl and a boy, nearly 5. He doesn't live in Tribeca near his wife's former office at the Department of Homeless Services. The man Etan would have been, if a very bad person hadn't stolen his future, doesn't exist. The 6-year-old tow head did not grow into a handsome sandy-haired man with an open smile. Along with his parents, Stan and Julie Patz, who weathered an unspeakable loss, the world was robbed of an independent spirit full of curiosity and joy.
I've written before about After Etan, Lisa Cohen's riveting book on the effect of the boy's disappearance on his family and the community, which is excerpted in New York Magazine this week. Etan was detoured by something terribly evil along the two blocks from his front door to his school bus stop at West Broadway in Soho in 1979 and was never seen again. The primary suspect for Etan's murder (the first-grader's small body was never found), Jose Ramos, currently imprisoned for molesting another child, was not charged for the crime. "Stan and Julie recognized at some indefinable moment that their son was never coming home, no matter what they said, so they stopped saying anything, turning away from the spotlight," Lisa writes. But, as long-serving Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau prepares to retire, the victim's father has renewed demands for Ramos' indictment. With the 30th anniversary of his kidnapping approaching, it's worth reminding ourselves how the child who never grew up changed society's perception of danger to unsupervised children, adding a vigilance and parental fear that was, and sadly remains, all too necessary.
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Better safe than sorry: It's unassailably pat. But that's not the real framing of the choice. Actually, there are always nuances: How old is your child, what kind of neighborhood are you letting her walk alone in, at what time of day? And what's the cost of never letting her out of your sight? Because there is one. Wendy Mogel, psychologist and author of Blessing of a Skinned Knee, who I've written about before, calls overprotected kids "teacups" and "krispies." They get to college and they can't fend for themselves because their parents never gave them breathing room.
Maybe the risk you took was too high, Bonnie, because the vacant lot your daughter walked through was trashy and isolated. The story of Etan Patz, which I know, is undeniably and stupendously awful. Beyond the paradigmatic parent's worst nightmare. But a friend of mine whose pediatric practice consists largely of helping abused kids reminds us that child abduction in this country is extremely rare. Almost all of the time, harm comes to kids from adults they know, not ones they don't. We're so transfixed by the worst nightmare scenario that we miss the more mundane but prevalent risks. Or we snatch from our kids any semblance of independence. My friend whose kid went to the store on the corner by himself e-mailed yesterday to say she hopes he can go to the park by himself—or with my older son—in a year or two, or sooner. I hope so, too.
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Rachael, you are the same age as my daughter, making me among the lead-paint-exposing, tummy-down-crib-placing cohort of child neglectors whose Gen X children narrowly survived. In fact, I was probably among the worst of the loosey-goosey caretakers of the era, taking risks with my first-grade child that, in retrospect, should have brought the police. The cop who scolded the Mississippi soccer mom for letting her 10-year-old walk a few blocks to the playing field may have over-reacted, but, belatedly embracing my geezer curmudgeon, I say, better safe than sorry. When I was a young single mother in 1978, we lived in the unrenovated Adams Morgan neighborhood of D.C. My little girl's public school was about nine blocks west on Calvert Street from the city bus stop nearest our rented row house. Where a park would form a few years later, my 6-year-old cut daily through a vacant lot strewn with old tires to get to the 40 line stop. I walked with her to the bus stop the first few days of the school year, but after she knew the way, I let my self-sufficient grade-school child set out alone every a.m. with a bus token and a peanut butter sandwich. My daughter survived my cavalier and inexperienced parenting and took her independence with her when she moved to Manhattan for college. As so many of you Generation X achievement goddesses, she grew up fearless at facing her professional and personal challenges. The self-reliance forged in childhood has served her well. That said, I was a nitwit who acted as if the innocent were immune. My neighbors should have blown the whistle on me. That spring, another child the same age as my daughter, destined perhaps for a similar happy future, wasn't as lucky. A set of well-intentioned but naive New York City parents heard a wakeup bell that reverberates today in Mississippi; Washington; New Haven, Conn.; and Ohio. The boy's parents, Julie and Stan Patz, were loving caretakers who, like me, failed to estimate the risk of allowing their 6-year-old to walk two blocks from his apartment door to his school bus. I've just finished reading a new release, After Etan, by my former ABC News colleague Lisa Cohen (who now teaches journalism at Columbia). Lisa's book is a disturbing and harrowing dissection of the unsolved Etan Patz missing child case that "held America captive" for days, weeks, and years after his disappearance. I'm certain that National Missing Children's Day, observed every year on the anniversary of their son's kidnapping, offers little comfort to his parents.
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