Word: runnions
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...murdered. Officials expect this year's total number to dip to near 100, hopefully dragging down the murder rate accordingly. And despite what you might reasonably think after hearing the terrible stories of Elizabeth Smart (who was returned safely home more than nine months after her abduction) and Samantha Runnion, the specter of kidnapping by strangers should not be parents' primary concern; parents themselves perpetrate more than 98 percent of all kidnappings, according to the DOJ. While about 700,000 missing children reports were filed in 2001, only a tiny percentage of those cases were non-family abductions. And here...
...face of an upturned blossom, but she was born under the sign of the lion and her heart belonged to Hercules. The first-grader adored Disney's version of the hero and hung a poster of him over her bed. So Samantha Runnion, 5, reacted as her idol would have when a stranger first asked her to help find his chihuahua and then--as she bent down to show how small the dog might be--carried her into his car. She fought with all the might of her tiny arms and legs, and screamed to her friend, "Help me! Tell...
Avila is not a drifter. He lives in Lake Elsinore, only 60 miles away from the Runnion home, and has worked since September as an assembler at the Temecula, Calif., plant of Guidant Inc., a company based in Indianapolis, Ind., that manufactures pacemakers, defibrillators and other medical supplies. Disturbingly, he has a history of molestation charges: the daughter of his ex-girlfriend Beth Veglahn, along with another girl, accused him two years ago. The Veglahn girl lived with her father in the same condominium complex as Samantha, Veglahn's foster brother Lewis Davis told TIME. A jury acquitted Avila...
...experts can tell us that a child's being snatched by a stranger is rare and that these kinds of kidnappings are not on the increase. But every time it happens--and it happened again last week when Samantha Runnion, 5, playing just outside her apartment, was taken, screaming, and murdered--it strikes at our primal fear that we cannot protect our children against the incidental malice of the universe. But experts say parents can teach some basic safety lessons and reinforce them regularly...
...Runnion and Van Dam were taken and brutally murdered; Smart stolen from her home and still missing. Those girls, white, middle-class and taken from neighborhoods where those kinds of things don't happen, you've heard of them. But you probably wouldn't have heard of Erica Pratt, a seven-year-old kidnapped from a sidewalk near her home Monday night, because she is from a neighborhood where those kinds of things happen, or at least where we think they do; the area of Southwest Philadelphia where she lives is a poor place where drug-dealing is common...