We often talk about how kids process tragic events. This is a story of how 7-year old Nick and his friends dealt with the anxiety they shared with most of Los Angeles when Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker” was terrorizing Southern California.
1984-1985
It was a year of good and bad news for LA. The 1984 Olympics, hosted in Los Angeles was a huge success that gave us an unusual feeling of community spirit. But at the same time, LA had in the “Night Stalker” its second serial killer in less than a decade. The “Hillside Strangler” had been captured six years earlier.
Ramirez was unusual as a serial killer in that he was both a murderer and a rapist. His victims were dissimilar and included men, women and children. His methods were also varied, sometimes involving a gun, others only a knife. This delayed the police realizing that the crimes were being committed by the same person.
In the months leading up to his capture, Ramirez and his crimes dominated the news. The randomness and seeming potential that he could strike anyone anywhere had the whole region on alert. Often the news reports included what few things the crimes had in common, presented as ways in which we might be extra vigilant.
Kid’s Do Their Part
One night the news shared a profile of the homes where the crimes (13 as of that date) had occurred. The size, color, age, lot size, number of stories, proximity to the freeway and type of neighborhood described our and nearly every house on our block. This description was not lost on Nick nor his neighborhood buddies.
The next day, with no prompting or adult supervision, a group of eight 7 to 10 year old boys and girls rigged the backyards of every house on our side of the street with noise-making bobby traps. They laced a web of strings from fence to fence in each yard and hung all manner of pans, plates, toy parts; anything they could scrounge that would clank or clang if someone were to get entangled in the strings.
I don’t know if anyone truly felt safer, but I know that adults and kids alike felt better about taking action. Parents (me included) and kids (Nick included) were proud. Taking action, even when there was little chance of it affecting the outcome, meant a lot to the kids.
Postscript:
Fortunately the kid’s traps played no role in capturing Ramirez. Not long after, Ramirez returned to LA from Arizona. Not realizing his picture was on the front of every newspaper in the county, he openly walked into a convenience store in East LA (about 15 miles north of us) where he was recognized, pursued, captured and beaten by local citizens. Beaten to the point that he asked the arriving police for help and immediately confessed to being Ramirez.
