It is Late Again!

It is 2:30am and I’m still wide awake. I know it is the stress I’ve been under lately – even my prescription sleeping pill hasn’t made a dent in my restlessness. My alarm will go off at 7:30 am though so I need to get to bed. I have a 12 hr day tomorrow. Maybe I can get someone else to take my OT on Monday so that I can have three full days off again – I think I need them.

Cascades of rain have fallen this evening. It is accompanied by high winds that sends my wind chimes clanging like some neurotic tea-toddler who insistently rings the bell for the maid to bring her more tea. Sometimes the roar is so loud from the wind beating on the tin roof that I could almost swear a tornado must be afoot. But of course it is just Florida weather. Would rather have a good rolling thunderstorm then just wind and rain.

The weatherman on Ch6 cautioned that tomorrow was going to be severely cold here in the Sunshine State. It will barely reach a high of 55 degrees. You can tell he’s never been to Iowa where the high the other day was -7. Guess it is all relative. I hate, repeat hate, being cold but we Iowans know how to put on layers to keep warm. Floridians have a harder time because, face it, how many layers of shorts and t-shirts will actually keep you warm? Some people don’t own pants or sweat pants…crazy as that seems.

I have a niece who won’t wear pants or shorts – always dresses or skirts. Bet she never gets her fingernails dirty – never jumps in mud puddles during rainstorms, never climbs trees – can’t do cartwheels in a dress, can’t roll down hills until you puke, can’t be spontaneous at all. I would never last a week at living the way she does – I like getting my hands dirty…like the feel of the earth between my fingers and toes. Course, she wasn’t always that way – she was raised a out on a farm with cows, horses, and chickens. She was almost as big of a tomboy as her younger sister.

Um…I’m sure I had a point there but it is late and my brain is slowly shutting down. I’ve had a movie in the dvd player though my back is to it and I’ve had it on mute the whole time. Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?

Unconfirmed Death

The announcement was made this afternoon that a young woman’s body was found today. They won’t confirm it is Denise until the autopsy but of course it is. They found her body buried within the search area they had designated – mere yards from where the killer was caught on the interstate.

Denise was kidnapped from her home by this man. He made several stops with her tied up in his car and several people saw her but did nothing to lift a finger to save her. I find this inexcusable. It, in fact, makes me go back to weeping for society in general. How can we call ourselves “civilized” when we are anything but? Civilized people wouldn’t let that man go with a young girl who obviously didn’t belong with him and who begged to go home. Civilized people would have gotten involved – they had many options open to them.

Denise is dead. It makes me cry. The pleas she made on the phone to go home to her children, to be allowed to live, were all for naught. Denise did everything a woman should do if she is abducted – she used every opportunity she could to make noise, scream, be noticed but no one paid attention. She used his phone after he laid it down close enough for her to get without drawing attention to herself. She called 911 where she gave as much information as possible for us to find her. She pleaded with the man – reminded him she had a loving husband and children, that she wanted to live, that he didn’t have to do this. But she is still dead.

When one of the supervisor’s, who wasn’t there that day and not the least bit involved in the whole thing, told me that we did all we could I wanted to lash out at him. I wanted to tell him he hadn’t done anything. Instead I looked him in the eye and said “Really? Tell that to Denise. Tell that to her husband, her children, her family.”

Again, we really did do an awesome job – her call to us was a huge break in the case and we immediately had the word out to the surrounding jurisdictions. We did every kind of research at our disposal to do and called every resource we could think of to get the outcome we wanted. We prayed, we stood vigil at our stations barely getting up to run to the restrooms for fear we’d miss a clue or the latest news. Our team was fantastic and I’m very proud to be working with a group so very dedicated to the welfare of the masses.

BUT, Denise is still dead. I know sometimes a person does everything right but the outcome is still bad. We have analyzed the call and all subsequent information to death – as has local law enforcement and the FBI. I don’t know what we could have done differently – but I believe that there had to be a way to save her life and we just didn’t find it.