Neighborhood Tragedy

I'm just trying to get my thoughts and reactions down, before they're gone....

Saturday lunchtime. The neighbor girls are playing out front with my grandkids, and some other neighborhood kids. The oldest girl is 14, but has Down's Syndrome, I'm guessing mental capacity of about a three or four year old. The younger girl, her niece, is 2 and a half. Three weeks younger than my own granddaughter.

At 1:30, we need to take my oldest grandson to a birthday party / sleepover at a friend's house. (15-yr-olds and XBox360s. Go figure.) I send the neighbor girls home. No, you can't go into my house. No, you aren't going in my car. I point them in the right direction, and give them a gentle push. We get my grandkids loaded into the car, and, as we leave the house, I see the older girl sitting on her front step, and the baby opening their front screen door.

We drop the oldest grandson off at his friend's place, and chat for a few minutes with the parents. Then we take the rest of the kids to Dairy Twist for an ice cream cone. About 2:30, as we are driving home, just a few blocks away, my wife points out the window. "Isn't that Monica? What's she doing up here, by herself?" The older neighbor girl is walking up the hill, away from her house. Since we aren't sure if she knows us well enough to get in the car with us, we drive the last few block to home, and see a police car in the neighbor's driveway.

We asked if they were looking for Monica. They said yes, so we told them where we had just seen her. Her brother took off right away, and the policeman foll wed a minute later. Then her sister asked if Katie, the two-year-old, her daughter, had been with her. She was missing, too.

My wife immediately headed across the street and through the playground, and up the hill, which was the most direct route to where we had seen Monica. If Katie had been with her, she might have been lagging behind, up the hill. Other neighbors came over, and started searching in other places. One said she had seen them in the park behind our houses, watching the planes from the Air Force Week Air Show going on just then. A couple of neighbors headed to check out the obvious routes back from the park, since they hadn't just used the gate to their own back yard.

Time passed. My wife and the brother were asking people out watching the Air Show if they had seen Katie. Nobody had. The police were trying to get whatever information they could from Monica. All she said was that Katie was at the pool. There is no public pool in the neighborhood. It had to be a private, backyard pool. People immediately started checking every yard for a pool.

About 3:15 a motorcycle cop went screaming down our street, siren blaring. A moment later, a police car followed. A few minutes later, we heard an ambulance siren in the distance. Then a neighbor's 16-yr-old daughter came running up the street as fast as she could. They had found Katie, face down in a pool, about 3 block away. Nobody was home. They were trying to resuscitate her now. They family jumped in a car and headed that way. A little later, we heard the ambulance leaving for the hospital.

Around 5:00 the grandfather, our neighbor, got home from the hospital, in tears. They hadn't been able to save her. She was gone.