{"id":1539,"date":"2022-03-13T09:38:39","date_gmt":"2022-03-13T16:38:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pauldearing.com\/?p=1539"},"modified":"2022-03-13T09:38:39","modified_gmt":"2022-03-13T16:38:39","slug":"the-night-stalker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/?p=1539","title":{"rendered":"the Night Stalker"},"content":{"rendered":"

We often talk about how kids process tragic events.\u00a0 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<\/a>” was terrorizing Southern California.<\/p>\n

1984-1985<\/b><\/p>\n

It was a year of good and bad news for LA.\u00a0 The 1984 Olympics, hosted in Los Angeles was a huge success that gave us an unusual feeling of community spirit.\u00a0 But at the same time, LA had in the “Night Stalker” its second serial killer in less than a decade.\u00a0 The “Hillside Strangler” had been captured six years earlier.<\/p>\n

Ramirez was unusual as a serial killer in that he was both a murderer and a rapist.\u00a0 His victims were dissimilar and included men, women and children.\u00a0 His methods were also varied, sometimes involving a gun, others only a knife.\u00a0 This delayed the police realizing that the crimes were being committed by the same person.<\/p>\n

In the months leading up to his capture, Ramirez and his crimes dominated the news.\u00a0 The randomness and seeming potential that he could strike anyone anywhere had the whole region on alert.\u00a0 Often the news reports included what few things the crimes had in common, presented as ways in which we might be extra vigilant.<\/p>\n

Kid’s Do Their Part<\/b><\/p>\n

One night the news shared a profile of the homes where the crimes (13 as of that date) had occurred.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0 This description was not lost on Nick nor his neighborhood buddies.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Taking action, even when there was little chance of it affecting the outcome, meant a lot to the kids.<\/p>\n

Postscript: <\/b><\/p>\n

Fortunately the kid’s traps played no role in capturing Ramirez.\u00a0 Not long after, Ramirez returned to LA from Arizona.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Beaten to the point that he asked the arriving police for help and immediately confessed to being Ramirez.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yes, Richard Ramirez. That “Night Stalker”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[104],"tags":[168,167],"class_list":["post-1539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-old-stories","tag-night-stalker","tag-richard-ramirez"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1540,"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1539\/revisions\/1540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pauldearing.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}