Jacob Wetterling changed everything

Jacob Wetterling changed everything

There were two boys headed our way. Both wore bike helmets, but one had a rope tied to the shaft of his bike seat. On the other end was one of those plastic red wagons. The metal red wagon I played with as a kid is rusting somewhere in Dad’s garage, along with bikes and bike parts.

The boys zoomed past toward the wilderness that opens after the dead end street that Dad lives on in a Twin Cities suburb called Cottage Grove. Growing up, everyone in the neighborhood called the roughly 10 acres of what then was swamp, prairie and happenstance trees “The Weeds.”

It’s more than 30 years and I don’t know if anyone calls it that any longer. Engineers got hold of it and upgraded it. The swamp now is a wetland with a wooden bridge. Our bike trails that we tore through the rough prairie, with its bumps that served as ramps for jumping, is underwater. Down a ways they put in a skatepark with plywood ramps where an ice rink used to be.

“They’re probably going fishing,” Dad said.

Now I could see poles bouncing in the wagon as they rode out of sight.

The very scene of the boys — on their own — surprised me a bit.

I had spent the morning reading the Sunday paper. Jacob Wetterling’s bones had been found. All kids who grew up in Minnesota in the 1980s and beyond knew about Jacob.

It was traumatic in the way the Evelyn Miller case was to the Charles City area. Both were an end of innocence and both were new plantings of fear for families and their communities.

All that talk about stranger danger we were warned about became real.

Jacob was an 11-year-old kid in 1989 who was riding home with his brother and best friend from a Tom Thumb gas station where they rented a VHS movie. A masked man stepped out of the woods on the country road they were riding on and pointed a gun at them.

He asked them their ages and then told two of the boys to run into the woods and not to look back. When they did, Jacob and the man were gone.

The hunt for Jacob was massive. It turned up nothing.

It widened statewide. Then nationally. Then globally.

Minnesotans for years have made certain to flip on the porchlights at least on the anniversary of his abduction to light Jacob’s way home.

I remember the Minnesota Vikings put JW stickers on their helmets.

I was 19 and in college, concerned more with my classes, my car, my job, my dates and football. It was dreadful noise in the background.

It got a whole lot louder when my wife and I finally had kids. We’ve been protective.

My mom’s order to “Just go outside!” sent us kids away for hours, unwatched by anyone but ourselves and the retired teacher at the end of the block. He spied on us. He once climbed into the rickety treehouse the guys and I built in The Weeds and found the … um … magazines about human biology we had as treasure.

Mom told me about that. She said the neighborhood moms had a good laugh at us about that.

She wasn’t worried.

As parents, we have been.

Mom fed us the don’t talk to strangers line. We’ve told our kids to yell and scream, fight and scratch, fill the world with ruckus if strangers dared to touch them.

I was a latch-key kid who had many babysitters over the years.

I don’t remember ever hiring a babysitter for our kids. Either they were with family or with us. We have a bit of a backlog of date nights, my wife and I.

I wandered around the mall alone. Rode my bike along across two towns to buy comic books. Stayed out on Halloween night until the wee hours with buddies. We prowled until our pillowcases were full of candy.

Our kids have never gone trick-or-treating without me.

And my mother, she never told me that I needed to back off and let the kids run.

No, that kind of life for a kid was shattered.

Jacob was still missing. Nobody knew for certain how or why it happened.

The monster was still out there.

Porch lights stayed on.

Contact Managing Editor Chris Baldus at cbaldus@charlescitypress.com

Chris Baldus

Editor