Mother's warning saved her life

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

It was a book that alerted me, 'Beyond Belief' by Emlyn Williams. I read it when my youngest child was in nursery school. She had a sweatshirt with her name painted on it. After I finished the book, I tossed the sweatshirt in the trash.

'Beyond Belief' is a true story about a man and woman who kidnapped and killed children in Great Britain in the early 1960s. At a carnival one day, they followed a group of young girls and listened as the girls called each other by name. When one was alone, they raced up to her, used her name and told her that something horrible had happened at her home and that they had been sent to get her.

She went with them, and they killed her.

I repeated this story to my children. I told them never to go with a stranger, no matter what the stranger said. I told them that if someone in a car slowed down to ask directions, not to approach the car, just to keep walking. I told them that they were never to wear anything with their names on it and that they had to be always alert, because people can seem nice and not be nice at all.

My oldest daughter said I frightened her so much that when a neighbor offered her a ride during a torrential rainstorm one day, she said no and ran all the way home, terrified that even he might not be what he appeared to be.

How do you ever know? That's the question. You teach your children to be aware, to be careful, not to assume, because someone's a police officer or a teacher or a priest or female or a family friend that this person is to be automatically trusted. You teach them to be wary and to trust their instincts. Christine Paoli taught her daughter a lot more. It was personal experience, not a book, that alerted her. When her 12-year-old daughter, Rebecca Savarese, who foiled a would-be abductor last Friday, was just 2 1-2, a teacher at her day-care center in Pittsfield was arrested for molesting kids in his care. Professionals came into the school to counsel parents and children, to teach them the difference between -- appropriate and inappropriate behavior.

This program continued through Head Start, kindergarten, through every grade. Counselors and police under the auspices of the DARE program regularly came into the schools and talked to children about what they needed to do to protect themselves. 'I can't say enough about the DARE program,' Paoli says. DARE stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education but its focus is teaching children safety. 'The kids learned so much. Becky would come home and show me pamphlets she had colored and pictures she had drawn and we would talk about what she had learned.' The talk, the constant repetition and reinforced awareness, almost certainly led to Becky's instinctive reaction last Friday, an action that no doubt saved her life. The seventh-grader was walking to school at 720 a.m. when a man came up behind her, showed her he had a gun and ordered her into a black pick-up truck. She pretended she couldn't breathe, undid her back pack and when he grabbed it, that's all he got. She ran away down the street, around a corner, and screamed to a snowplow operator for help.

'She knew if she got in that truck it was over,' Paoli said. 'I told her, 'If somebody comes up behind you, you kick, you punch, you bite, you spit - you do anything to get away and anything to cause attention to yourself.' I never stopped saying it. Her head would bob up and down like, 'Sure, Mom, I've heard this two million times. When are you gonna stop telling me?' But I never stopped because the moment you stop, they're not gonna remember. I even warned her Friday.'

Lewis Lent Jr., 43, of North Adams, the man police have arrested in connection with this aborted abduction, has since been charged with the 1990 slaying of 12-year-old Jimmy Bernardo and has confessed to murdering 12-year-old Sarah Ann Wood. Paoli is understandably, 'trying to put all this out of my mind. I always said this was a nice place to raise your children. It's still a great place. There are wonderful people in this town.'

But she knows that even among wonderful people, even in a small, safe-looking town, terrible things happen.

'Twenty years ago I was molested by a friend of the family. I still carry it around with me. But I survived it.' She also learned by it. She learned a wariness and a resolve that she passed on to her daughter. She learned that innocence, like ignorance, is a liability.

'You want your children to be safe. You don't want to terrify them. But I needed to warn her so that she would have some sense in her head in case it happened to her. I just felt I was giving her the tools to handle the streets.'

In this case, the tools intended to help a 12-year-old handle the streets helped her survive them.