As far as inner-alarm systems go, mine’s pretty dag on sensitive. I’m a natural people watcher but sometimes the radar registers a freak alert and I get a physical reaction—usually nausea.I wish y'all could have seen the skeez in front of me at the lawn and garden check out in Wal-Mart yesterday afternoon at about 4 o’clock CST. I had a cart full of lawn and garden plants and supplies (and Jackson). Mister Skeez was a palming a trial size KY and looking shifty. This guy had past-the-shoulder yellow blonde hair with a receding hairline rendering his coif mullet-adjacent. Too-short khaki pants with white socks revealed generic black tennis shoes. A yellow t-shirt with too-short sleeves accented his red and knobby elbows. He was what my siblings and I used to call “sharp white.” I swear I stared this guy up and down, because I just KNOW I am gonna be reading about someone who escaped from his basement dungeon sometime in the near future. Then I thought about the Kmart cashier quoted in People Magazine’s expose on the rescued Jaycee Dugard and the captured Phillip Garrido (her abductor) back in September 2009:
“Others who encountered Jaycee and her daughters say something seemed off about them. Garrido would bring the younger girls with him to the local Kmart. When shopping alone, ‘he'd buy sex things like vibrator cream,’ says cashier Survitrius Honeycutt. ‘The older girl was very clingy with him, and neither one would say anything. They didn't have any expression’”(read the People magazine article here).
I watched the cashier as she checked out Mister Skeez who turned back to those of us in line and gave a half-smile in our general direction. When he finally left with his, ahem, purchase, I asked the cashier what she thinks of sights like that. She said she didn’t even notice what he had bought. Guess I’m nosey. Whatev.
The thing is, if we look at the scenario with Garrido and Mr. Honeycutt at the K-Mart, there really isn’t anything Honeycutt could have done. Frustrating. Fortunately, some campus police officers took their hunches seriously and acted on them in what amounted to the first episode of good police work associated with this multiple sex-offender.
A couple in line behind me heard me talking about the Dugard case and we laughed nervously about paranoia while at the same time needing to keep our kids safe. Needing to believe that they are. I said to the man, “This guy may be as pure as the driven snow…” We both just looked at each other and shook our heads.
