His crimes went undiscovered for five years
Seared by a Peeping Tom’s Gaze
By DEBRA GWARTNEY, NYT
Finn Rock, Ore.
MY daughter Mary, 14 years old, was undressing for bed one night when she noticed a light in her window. She stepped onto her chair to read a word hanging in the dark night air: Panasonic. Nine floating letters. She saw knuckles, a curled fist around the handle of a video camera, and an arm dropping away as the person who had been filming her disappeared.
I jumped into the hallway when I heard her scream. I found Mary crawling on her hands and knees. While she managed to get out a halting account of the man at her window, I grabbed my phone to punch 9-1-1 and, though my thumping heart warned me not to, hurried across our cool grass in bare feet, to the side yard outside Mary’s window.
No one was there. Whoever had spied on my daughter was gone. The bucket he’d taken from our carport was upside down in the flower bed. Twenty minutes later, a policeman picked up that bucket and tipped his flashlight toward the ground, illuminating circle lapped upon circle in the soil. The bucket had been used many times as a step there.
I hadn’t protected my daughters — neither Mary nor her three sisters — in their own home. That’s a failure I’ve had to live with for more than a decade now. Reading recently about the young victims of sexual abuse in the Penn State case, my old anguish returned, rushing in as raw and frightening as when I first discovered the predation my daughters had been victim to. I remembered the unimaginable bind I’d struggled with: whether to become involved in the prosecution of the man who had invaded our privacy, or to avoid it, utterly — to look the other way.
(More here.)
Finn Rock, Ore.
MY daughter Mary, 14 years old, was undressing for bed one night when she noticed a light in her window. She stepped onto her chair to read a word hanging in the dark night air: Panasonic. Nine floating letters. She saw knuckles, a curled fist around the handle of a video camera, and an arm dropping away as the person who had been filming her disappeared.
I jumped into the hallway when I heard her scream. I found Mary crawling on her hands and knees. While she managed to get out a halting account of the man at her window, I grabbed my phone to punch 9-1-1 and, though my thumping heart warned me not to, hurried across our cool grass in bare feet, to the side yard outside Mary’s window.
No one was there. Whoever had spied on my daughter was gone. The bucket he’d taken from our carport was upside down in the flower bed. Twenty minutes later, a policeman picked up that bucket and tipped his flashlight toward the ground, illuminating circle lapped upon circle in the soil. The bucket had been used many times as a step there.
I hadn’t protected my daughters — neither Mary nor her three sisters — in their own home. That’s a failure I’ve had to live with for more than a decade now. Reading recently about the young victims of sexual abuse in the Penn State case, my old anguish returned, rushing in as raw and frightening as when I first discovered the predation my daughters had been victim to. I remembered the unimaginable bind I’d struggled with: whether to become involved in the prosecution of the man who had invaded our privacy, or to avoid it, utterly — to look the other way.
(More here.)
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