Oct 21 Twenty Years

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 his 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.

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 lik 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.  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.

Cross-posted at Shot in the Dark. Comments welcome.