Ellie told the police the day started normally. They went down the big slide. They shared crackers on a bench. My mother pushed her on the swings and Ellie laughed and asked to go higher. It was everything a Tuesday at the park was supposed to be.
Then my mother got a phone call.
She walked a short distance away and had a conversation that Ellie could hear was loud, even if she couldn’t make out the words. When my mother came back, her expression had changed.
“Ellie, sweetie, Grandma has to go help Uncle Diego right now. You need to sit on this bench and wait for Daddy. He’s coming to get you.”
Ellie asked where she was going.
“Uncle Diego is in trouble and he needs me. But Daddy will be here very soon. You just stay right here on this bench and don’t move. That’s very important.”
Ellie nodded, because she was five and she’d been taught to trust adults. My mother gave her a quick hug, told her to be good, and walked away. She did not look back.
For almost two hours, Ellie sat on that bench in a public park, watching other families play, waiting for a father who didn’t know she was there. She didn’t have a phone. She didn’t know our address by heart. She’d been told to stay where she was, and so she stayed.
The man who eventually approached her had been circling the playground for a while before he settled on her. His name was Matthew, and he was a registered sex offender who’d been identified in connection with two other incidents at parks in the metro area over the preceding month. He tried three different approaches with Ellie: candy first, then a claim that he knew where her daddy was, then the assertion that he was a police officer who was supposed to help her. She refused each time. She remembered what I’d told her about strangers, and she held her unicorn tighter and said no.
