My Stolen Son

by Susan Markowitz

  “We’ll talk later,” he said. “See you when I come home.” Then Nick rolled over and went back to sleep. While he was sleeping I made breakfast, a little more elaborate than usual. It was an open omelet, topped with cheese, browned under the broiler. Nick wouldn’t have liked the fresh hash browns, but he would have loved the bacon and drowned the biscuits in butter. But when Jeff got home from tennis and I went to tell our son that breakfast was ready, he wasn’t there.

  What I didn’t know then was that he was never going to be there again.

  If you knew it was going to be the last kiss, or the last smile, or the last words you’d say, what would you say?

  Somewhere between 9:30 and about 11:00 that morning, he’d disappeared from his bedroom. At first I thought he was hiding, so I went into every room of the house, calling his name, peeking behind the shower curtain. No Nick. He really had crept out of the house without our noticing.

  “Shit!” I called out to Jeff. “He left.”

  I left his plate in the microwave and waited in annoyance for Nick to come home and explain where he’d gone without telling me.

  Maybe he’d gone out to his friend’s house. They liked to swap games and music, and sometimes he came back smelling of cigarettes. I’d look him over, and he’d say, “What?”

  “What?” I’d respond back. I wasn’t ready to confront him about the smoking, but I wanted to keep him on edge, let him wonder whether or not I noticed the smell. I don’t know why I thought that would work. It sounds asinine now, but I just thought I’d let him go through his phase. It couldn’t have been a serious habit—not long ago, he had bought his uncle nicotine patches to help him quit smoking. Nick knew better, but maybe it was just something he wanted to try out, to fit in.

  Ten or fifteen minutes were all it would take to go smoke a cigarette, though. Maybe he’d gone to retrieve whatever had been in that bag in his pocket. He must have stashed it somewhere when he ran out the previous night. For now, all I could think about was my annoyance that his breakfast was getting cold.

  I had just bought him a pager as an early sixteenth-birthday present, with a stipulation attached: he had to always return my pages within ten minutes. If he didn’t, I would take the pager away for one week per minute he was late. I tested my rule twice: once, I paged him in the house. “Yes, Mom, I got your page!” he called back. The next time was when he was at a friend’s house, and he returned the page in two minutes.

  Now it had been eleven minutes. Yep, I was going to take away his pager for a week. Twelve minutes. Two weeks. But as minutes turned into hours, my anger grew.

  He had done it after all, I thought. He ran away to Ben’s house again. How could he? He promised he wouldn’t.

  Jeff wasn’t too worried. Nick probably just wasn’t ready to face us about having been high, he figured.

  We called Ben, but got no answer. It wasn’t easy to track Ben down—he was always on the go. So Jeff left a message.

  “Be expecting a call from your brother,” he said. “We had a little argument last night and he took off this morning, so he’s probably heading your way today. Please give us a call as soon as you get this to let us know if you’ve heard from him.”

  Then we waited and tried to go on with our day. By nightfall, however, there had still been no call back from Nick or Ben. The anger gave way to fear. It was a desperate sort of feeling. Where was my Nick? Even when he’d run away that one time, he still called every day to say he was OK. This wasn’t like him at all.

  Not knowing what else to do with myself, I cleaned his bedroom in anticipation of his return. His room was filled with neon posters that glow under black light, and glow-in-the-dark stars covered the ceiling. All the names of the constellations were written out overhead, a testament to his lifelong interest in astronomy. Jeff’s parents bought Nick a professional telescope for Hanukkah when he was about seven years old, and he loved to peer into the night sky. Just recently, he had excitedly asked me if I wanted to see the dark side of the moon. “Sure,” I said, and followed him outside—where he proceeded to pull down his pants and moon me. That was my son.

  The word Karma was written on his dry-erase board. I erased it without giving it much thought. I pulled the sheets tight on his waterbed and dusted off the black leather head-board. I straightened out the drawers, put the books back on the shelves; my nervous energy kept me going until his was surely the cleanest room on the block. Wouldn’t he be surprised? I wasn’t even going to give him a hard time about how messy he’d let it get. Boy, as soon as he got home, was I going to breathe a lot easier. And then I’d tether him to the doorknob so he could never get out of my reach again.

  With nothing left to clean, I had no idea what to do with myself. I paced around his room, looking at everything. Twin Dragon tae kwon do certificates hung on the wall, like the “Most Supportive Student” award he’d won as a beginner. One license plate that said “Run, Forrest, Run” and another that said “Stop, Forrest, Stop.” Two giant laser discs signed by some musician I’d never heard of. It was as if I was looking for clues, as if I thought I might find some deeper meaning in the neon alien poster hanging on his wall. I considered messing everything up again just so I’d have something else to clean. At least it kept my hands busy.

  The worrying was exhausting. I grabbed his pillow on my way back to the living room, where I took a nap on the couch under the open window, so I could be the first to embrace him when he walked back through the door.

  But he didn’t walk back through the door.

  When I opened my eyes and knew without even checking that Nick had not come back, I was gut-punched with a single thought: My son needs me.

  CHAPTER 7

  KIDNAPPED

  A woman named Pauline Mahoney was driving back from church with her three boys a little before 1:00 p.m. on August 6, 2000, when she saw a van pull over to the side of the road. Out of the van came a bunch of young men, and she saw them grab a younger boy who was walking down the street, pummel him over and over, then throw him into the van.

  Mahoney sped up to get close enough to the van to get the license plate number, then passed them and watched in her rearview mirror to see where they were heading.

  “All right, boys, this is the number,” she said to her sons. The boys repeated the license plate number out loud the rest of the way home—they didn’t have a cell phone, so they had to wait until they got home to call 911. As soon as she got in the door, Mahoney dialed 911 and told the operator what she had just witnessed:

  “They [were] beating the crap out of this kid. They were kicking and punching him [with] three or four against one. The boy [was] on the sidewalk in a fetal position trying to protect himself against a wall. Then they picked him up and threw him into the van. They started to drive off and then realized they had left one of their own behind. He got in and they are now going east on Ingomar.”

  Right afterward Mahoney’s call, a UCLA student named Rosalia de la Cruz Gitau, whose parents lived in West Hills, also called the police with the same story. A white van. A brutal beating. A kidnapping. At first, Gitau said, she thought it looked like a gang initiation. But when she saw them throw the boy into the van, she decided that it was time to call the police.

  But devastatingly, the calls might as well have been made to the local McDonald’s rather than the emergency help line. Two different emergency dispatchers both coded the incident incorrectly. The one responding to Mahoney’s call coded it as an assault rather than a kidnapping in progress, and the officers who responded didn’t take the report seriously. They drove around the area looking for a victim wandering the streets, and when they didn’t see one, they gave up. In fact, they didn’t even bother taking written statements.

  One of the officers called Mahoney back, but just listened to her account and then hung up. Although the officer looked up the registrant of the van—John Roberts—he misread the address, decided it wasn’t very important anyway because they couldn’t find the v
ictim, and never took it any further.

  That officer was the first person who could have saved my son’s life, yet failed to.

  While the officer was on the phone with Mahoney, the second emergency call came through to the Los Angeles Police Department. This time, the second dispatcher simply sent it out as a “for information only” radio broadcast, which was sent out only once, while the officer was on the phone—he never heard it. Again, it wasn’t coded as a kidnapping, or even specifically as an emergency. Although Rosalia de la Cruz Gitau left her name and number, no officer ever called her to follow up. The dispatcher didn’t connect the incident reported in the second call with the first one. No one tracked down the van.

  No one knew Nick was inside it.

  That morning I had paged Nick over and over, growing more frustrated with him as his breakfast got cold. He had to be at one of his friends’ houses, I figured. Off telling them what a drag it was to have parents.

  Just after noon that day, his uncle and cousin had been driving home from the gym and had seen Nick walking along the road from a nearby park and offered to give him a ride back.

  “Thanks anyway, but I’d rather walk,” he’d told them, waving them on. If he had taken that ride, dozens of lives would be very different today.

  Just around the corner, Jesse Hollywood, Jesse Rugge, and William Skidmore had been cruising around, plotting revenge on Nick’s brother, Ben. They had looked for him before, but Ben was hard to track down. No one knew where he was anymore. This time, Hollywood had decided, they were going to send a clear message. Maybe they would break the windows in our house as a warning to Ben. Instead, in the midst of their plotting, Nick walked straight into their view—like a rabbit wandering right into a hunter’s lair. Hollywood stared incredulously from the driver’s seat.

  “That’s Ben’s kid brother!”

  Jesse Rugge knew that. He had hung out with Nick before, because he was good friends with Nick’s best friend Ryan’s older brother. They had even wrestled under a Christmas tree at Ryan’s house the previous December.

  The van screeched over to the side of the road. Rugge called out, “Don’t run, man,” and Hollywood jumped out and pinned Nick to a tree and screamed at him, “Where’s your brother? Where’s your brother?”

  “I don’t know!” Nick said.

  They didn’t believe him, so they decided to beat the answer out of him. Jesse Rugge and William Skidmore joined Hollywood in the ferocious attack, while Nick just tried to block their punches, in the middle of daylight in front of witnesses—at least two of whom called the police. Nick was backed up against a block wall. It was a residential street, but the houses didn’t face the direction of the attack.

  “Get him in the van!” Hollywood commanded. The two others tossed him into the van and slammed the sliding door, quickly driving off . . . without Hollywood. A few feet later, Rugge realized his error, stopped, and let Hollywood catch up and get back in.

  “Your asshole brother owes me money. We’re going to find him, and he’s going to pay me what he owes me. Now tell us where he is,” Hollywood demanded.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, he moved out. I don’t know where he is now.”

  “He busted out the windows in my house, you know that? He’s going to pay for that. Now tell me where he lives.”

  “I’m telling you, I don’t . . .”

  Beep-beep. Beep-beep.

  It was Nick’s pager, going off incessantly.

  “Who the fuck is paging you? Is that your brother? Give me that thing.”

  Hollywood grabbed Nick and went through his pockets, yanking out the pager first. He recited the phone number and asked whose it was.

  “That’s my mom.”

  “Oh, great. She’s already looking for the kid!” Hollywood said to his friends.

  “What do you want to do?” Jesse Rugge said.

  “I don’t know.” He tossed the pager onto the dashboard and turned back to Nick. “Give me everything else you got.”

  In Nick’s pockets were a small bag of marijuana, a wallet that included a little phone book, and a baggie of Valium. That’s what had been in his pocket the night before. One of Ben’s friends had sold Nick about a dozen Valium pills, and Nick was going to use them with his friends when they went to CityWalk, the strip by Universal Studios. Instead, now his captors passed them around in the van, and they gave one to Nick to take, too. Within minutes, they were also all passing around a marijuana joint.

  “You say anything, I’ll break your face,” Hollywood said. “Let me see your hand.” He’d just spotted the ring on Nick’s finger—the one that had belonged to his dad, and then to Ben. Over Nick’s protests, Hollywood grabbed it and yanked it off.

  “Give me back my ring,” Nick said.

  “You shut your mouth!”

  “Come on, that’s my dad’s ring.”

  Nick reached out and tried to grab his ring back, but Hollywood slammed him back down. In a quiet moment, Jesse Rugge said, “Man, just give him his ring back.” After a few minutes of ranting, Hollywood threw the ring at Nick, who put it back on his finger.

  “This is your brother’s fault, you know. Your brother’s a shithead.”

  “Whatever money he owes, my parents will pay it to you,” Nick said.

  “No, fuck that. They’re not going to pay. Ben’s going to pay me, or I’m going to kick his ass.”

  Then there was a side excursion: William Skidmore needed his insulin, so the van went to his house so that he could get it. While they were stopped, Rugge asked Hollywood, “Where are we going now?”

  “Go get Brian, like I said.”

  Brian Affronti, nicknamed “Little B,” was another of Hollywood’s underlings, and William Skidmore’s best friend. He was supposed to go out partying with them. They were headed into Santa Barbara for Fiesta, a five-day festival celebrating Spanish culture and history. The tradition had held strong for seventy-six years, but Brian had never been to one of these festivals, and he was looking forward to the trip. When he got into the van, however, he couldn’t help but notice the fifteen-year-old kid in the back. He’d never met Nick before, but he quickly realized this wasn’t just a friend along for the ride.

  The trip lasted almost an hour. Every few minutes, Hollywood would bark another threat at Nick.

  “Try to run and I’ll break your teeth,” he said.

  It made Brian uncomfortable, but he didn’t dare speak up. He didn’t even question why the kid was there. Or why a pager kept going off from the front seat.

  Once they had stopped the car for a break, Jesse Rugge again asked Hollywood what the plan was. What were they supposed to do with Nick? Hollywood was agitated; he hadn’t thought it through very far. What he really wanted was Ben, not Nick, but now that he had one brother, he wasn’t about to just let him go.

  “Take him back to your house,” Hollywood ordered Rugge.

  “I can’t! My dad’s there.”

  “Well, we have to take him somewhere.”

  Rugge thought for a minute. “OK, I know a place.”

  They drove to one of Rugge’s friend’s apartments on Modoc Road in Santa Barbara, where a small group of young men and women were smoking pot and drinking. Hollywood told Rugge to go ask them if they had a closet big enough to put someone in. Rugge walked up to the door first and appealed to his longtime friend Richard Hoeflinger.

  “I’m in trouble, man,” he said. “I need a place to stay. Can I crash here?”

  His friend agreed without asking for an explanation. Rugge went back out to the car and summoned the rest of the group. Once inside, they brought Nick into a back bedroom, pushed him onto the end of the bed, duct taped his wrists and legs, taped a sock over his eyes, and stuffed one of his own socks in his mouth.

  The guys in the apartment saw Nick in this state, but Hollywood told them, “Keep your fucking mouth shut. You don’t say shit.”

  They noticed something p
rotruding from Hollywood’s waistband and figured it was a gun. The threat was enough to keep them quiet.

  Richard Hoeflinger had met Hollywood six months earlier, when he visited Hollywood’s house with Jesse Rugge, possibly to talk about becoming a drug dealer. Ryan Hoyt met them at the door and pointed a gun at him before letting him in. Now Hollywood was talking on Hoeflinger’s phone in his living room without asking, and Hoeflinger decided not to get involved.

  One of the women in the house went to the back bedroom to put on her makeup, without knowing what she was walking into. There, she also saw Nick tied up. Despite her shock, she went ahead and put on her makeup anyway, without saying a word, then left the room.

  Rugge explained to the guys who lived in the apartment that they were keeping Nick until they could track down Ben and make him pay back his debt.

  “Just give us a couple of hours, and we’ll be out of here,” he told the guys.

  Hoeflinger and the others summoned the women, and they all left the house together, trying to forget what they had seen, even though they knew they were leaving behind an explosive bunch of strangers and a young hostage. The only person one of them really knew was Jesse Rugge.

  Rugge was a twenty-year-old high school dropout covered in tough-guy tattoos—two scorpions, a skull, and a ripped-open muscle. His parents were divorced, and he split his time between their homes. For the most part, Rugge was a happy-go-lucky type, but he had little supervision. His dad was the greenhouse manager for the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose main claim to fame was growing a rare plant with a five-foot phallus. Rugge had just served a short stint in jail in Santa Barbara for a DUI charge rather than pay a fine, and he was staying at his dad’s house, doing electrical work with his uncle and looking for a steady job.

  Brian Affronti and William Skidmore both decided they wanted to go home at that point—this whole hostage thing was getting pretty intense, and they weren’t so sure they wanted to be a part of it, so they made up excuses. Affronti told Hollywood that he had a date back home.