Over 26 years ago, Brian Dugan brutally raped and murdered a young girl. I wrote the below in memory of Dugan’s victims and today, the date he got sentenced to death. Although there is no bliss in this decision, it does prove that the scales of justice will eventually balanced out.
Jeanine and Missy’s Legacy
“There’s a man at the door wearing a tracksuit. I don’t know what he wants. I didn’t answer,” that was the text I got from my daughter last Tuesday when she was home alone from school. My heart leaped into my throat and images of my daughter being raped, beaten, and bludgeoned before I could race the five minutes home to save her tormented me.
“Lock all the doors, “ I texted her back and sat fidgeting in my chair as I waited for the message light to come on my phone signifying that she was still there, whole and in one piece. One minute passed, two, when it hit three, I prepared to make a quick exit to rush home and I debated whether the text I had warranted a call to 911.
Finally, the red light came on and the text that seemed as if it was centuries in the writing flashed across my screen, “He’s gone. I locked all the doors.” I settled back into my chair and no one in the room realized the life and death drama that had played out in my mind as I waited those endless seconds for my daughter to text me the all clear.
At seventeen, my daughter is seven years older than Jeanine Nicarico was on the day she was attacked and ultimately murdered by Brian Dugan in her own home. Like my daughter, Jeanine had been home sick from school at her seemingly safe home in the Chicago Suburbs.
Despite my daughter’s almost adult status, I still think about Jeanine every time I agree that she can stay home from school. I think about all the things that can go wrong in my seemingly safe suburb. The day Robert Maday escaped, my daughter was safe at school, but she was going home to an empty house with several doors unlocked. Fortunately, one of her friends took her home and made sure she was safe before heading to his own house.
I was a junior at Kaneland high school when Jeanine Nicarico was murdered and at the time I was, like all teenagers, invincible and bad things like what happened to Jeanine would never dare to invade my pristine world. Two years later when Missy Ackerman disappeared in Somonauk, the tragedy still seemed far removed from my safe little world even though I happened to be in Somonauk while they were searching for Missy and saw the buttons with her name on them.
It was only when I had kids of my own that the horror of what happened to Jeanine and Missy hit home. I realized that life was indeed very fragile and I now had two innocent and defenseless children that were mine to protect from the great big scary world. My husband and I kept our kids close as they were growing up and we made sure that up until they were in Junior high they were never home alone for more than a few minutes. We made sure we knew where they were and who they were with at all times. Memories of Missy haunted me whenever I thought about letting our daughter take her bike and head out for a few hours.
Our son was six foot something and 175 by the time he hit high school so I wasn’t very worried about leaving him home alone as I figured he could fend off any would be attacker. Our daughter’s another story as she’s just over five feet tall and just over 100 lbs and it would be pretty easy for a determined attacker to overpower her. Unfortunately for her, her size has meant that her father and I are much more protective of her than we were her brother and every time I leave her home alone, the specter of what happened to Jeanine and Missy haunts me and I agonize over whether or not to truly let her stay home alone. Most times I don’t want to endure the “Oh Mom” eye roll that would ensue if I shared my concerns, but every now and then I share my concerns and reinforce the rules of staying home alone: lock the doors, don’t answer the door, don’t have anyone over, etc. etc.
If life were fair, Jeanine would be thirty six now and Missy would be thirty-two. Maybe they’d be mom’s themselves, worried about the safety of their kids running out to play, but instead because of a single madman, they’re both frozen in time as smiling little girls who’ve left a generation of parents hugging their children just a little bit closer at night because they know the boogieman’s real.
Cairn by Cairn 