THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 13, 1994 TAG: 9411130068
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
Lock the doors. Bolt the windows. Pull the curtains.
And then, remember, the enemy comes from within.
That's the lesson we learn from Susan Smith, the mother charged with strapping her children in car seats, then watching them roll slowly into death.
For nine days, her carjacking tale persuaded me to lock my car doors every time my children were strapped snugly in the back seat. I looked suspiciously at anyone who came near my car. I placed myself between my children and a world I thought had gone mad.
She made me believe in the bogyman, a crazed lunatic who had completely lost his head, someone waiting to snatch my children.
When the remote fishing lake in South Carolina offered up its silent victims, Smith drove home a haunting fact: Children die less often in the grip of strangers than in the hands of someone who once dried their tears.
Smith wouldn't be the first mother to take the lives of her children, just the most recent and most dramatic. We've all heard of shaken infant syndrome, where a parent tries to quiet an infant, only to rattle the child to death. Discipline gone out of control, frustration and anger have turned parents into murderers.
Smith was different, though. She is charged with planning the death of her children. Standing and watching it unfold before her. Then walking away and exploiting our fears of a mythical stranger, and throwing in race to draw on prejudice.
And now we're left piecing together the puzzle of why. There's not much to go on. There's the piece where she thought of suicide. The piece of a failed marriage. The piece of a romance soured by children.
But there's also the piece where she got her sons' portrait taken, threw a birthday party, and earned the neighbors' description of a devoted mother.
None of it fits, and the two pieces that I have the hardest time jamming into the puzzle are Alex and Michael.
I, like the rest of the nation, know them best as sitting in a white wicker chair, their chubby legs intertwined, their mouths slightly ajar in broad smiles.
Three years ago, I would have found their story tragic. Now with two children the same ages, I go one step further, imagining the kinds of questions my 3-year-old would ask on a three-hour car ride down darkened blacktop roads.
``Mommy, where are we going? Mommy, what's wrong? Mommy, let's go home. Mommy, don't leave me.''
I can imagine the look of my 22-month-old when she's left behind, her plump arms outstretched, her tiny voice saying, ``Hold me.''
But I cannot imagine standing on the ramp with Susan Smith.
As scary as a stranger abduction would seem, how much more terrifying it is to look into the eyes of the mother who always protected you - only to see her look away when you need her most.
The horrifying truth is there are hundreds of Alexes and Michaels out there. These two boys simply let us try on their lives for a moment so that we might make our own children's lives a little warmer, and those children around us somehow safer. Not just from what's outside the window, but inside.
Susan Smith made me lock my car doors against the world, but Alex and Michael made me hold my own two children a little tighter. by CNB