by Jeff McMahon
They vanished like pebbles in a pond. We didn't see them slip away. We didn't hear them. How we wish we had. We only felt the waves that rippled from their absence. May they rock our boat forever.
Some of us knew them better than others did, so some of us felt it the stronger. But we all felt it, didn't we? Who among us has not?
We live close in this village. Often we know each other's faces long before each other's names. If we each trailed a thread in our path, our comings and goings would blanket San Luis Obispo with a fine weave.
If we could backtrack along the thread we have laid, we could rediscover the moment when Rachel Newhouse showed us to our table at the restaurant on Garden Street, or when Aundria Crawford rang up our purchase in the store on Marsh. We might come upon the day that Kristin Smart sat at the next table in the sandwich shop on Higuera.
Maybe we passed these women on the sidewalk. We must have. Maybe we exchanged a smile, or maybe we didn't.
We can never again live the moments before we knew their names so well. But what if we could? Those moments seem perfect now in their quiet ignorance of what was to come.
An English sparrow attended Aundria's memorial service last week at Cuesta College. He bathed in the upper tier of the fountain, above the offerings of cut flowers people had set out for her. He drank and stretched his wings and flew to the barren branches of a jacaranda. He faced the podium and sang while the speakers cried, participating in a ceremony he was happily unable to fathom. Much like us before all this.
We will find Rex Allen Krebs somewhere back in that weave. We will find him driving past our homes in that blue pickup with the lumber company logo on the door. We will notice him sitting on a stool in a cool and quiet barroom. We will see him walking across campus. Maybe he passed us on the sidewalk, too, with his dog at the end of a leash. Maybe we exchanged a smile, or maybe we didn't.
Many want to call him a "monster" or an "animal." He has said it himself. We do that to insult him, and we do it to push him away. It helps us explain him as an anomaly, as something unlike us. He's a monster. He's an animal.
Unfortunately, he is neither. The worst monsters of the human imagination commit one of the crimes of which he is accused, or another, but never all at once. And the only animal that does such things is the human.
He is a neighbor, this man who waits in his cell on Kansas Avenue in the long shadow of Chumash Peak. He is one of us, this living argument for the death penalty. Doesn't his mug shot have the same haunting familiarity as the smiling faces on the missing posters?
To describe him as an animal or a monster suggests we should be able to recognize him and others like him who walk among us. But they are not covered in fur or scales. They do not breathe fire. They look like us and they live among us in this village. Let us remember that.
The police probably deserve all the praise they have received, and more. They met this challenge better than anyone should have expected. But as we praise their success, let us remember that the finest police work still follows a tragedy.
The greater challenge towers before us, huge and seemingly impossible. To catch the next one before he attacks. To stop all the new ones from being created.
We should erect a memorial to these women, the ones who died solely because they were women.
We should build it where we will see it every day. We should blanket it with roses to evoke the words of Edna Saint Vincent Millay— "More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world."
We should build it in remembrance of them, in sad note of the loves and losses they will never feel, the achievements they will never know, the children they will never bear. A lost woman is more than a lost woman—she is a stairway of generations vanished.
We should look at our memorial to remember how far these women had come, from their first stirrings inside their mothers' wombs. Their first breaths, their first steps, their first days at school. First teeth, first skinned knees, first loves. Prom nights, graduations, first days at college. First days away from home.
Those who loved them saw them through so many firsts, only to come to this last goodbye.
Those who loved them entrusted them to us.
We should build that memorial. We should build it in remembrance of them, and we should build it to remind ourselves—this must never happen again.
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A lost woman is more than a lost woman -- she is a stairway of generations vanished.
This column won the 2000 Golden Quill from the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors.
This column is dedicated to the memory of Rachel Newhouse and Aundria Crawford and to enduring hope for Kristin Smart.
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