All you webloggers out there, don't assume your entries go into the ether totally unnoticed. It feels like that sometimes, but the following story will prove that people you don't know can trip across you or find you if you are writing on a subject of interest to them.
A Jane Doe murder of a 15-year-old girl in Santa Ana, CA on January 19, 2004 struck me deep into my soul. A beautiful young girl, I just kept staring into the victim's eyes in the photo in the newspapers and on television and thinking how cruel life can be sometimes. I kept thinking of my kids, my grandkids, the kids at school I work with day in and day out. I wrote about her death on Sacred Ordinary in an entry called Santa Ana Unsolved Teenage Murder Haunts Me. I named the unknown girl Victoria in my prayers and kept hoping her family would be found and the killer apprehended.
Then the unnamed girl was discovered in April to be Hanna Denise Montessori of Georgia and Maine and the story was run nationally in the media. As it turned out, her family had been frantically searching for her for months and somehow she had fallen through law enforcement's cracks. The family coincidentally found out about Hanna's death via an Internet site called the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I wrote again in an April 21 entry Murdered Childs Family Found about the story. One family member expressed anger in an e-mail about my initial speculations regarding their Hanna, but she quickly apologized realizing I wasn’t criticizing anyone. I genuinely cared and was moved by this girl with the big eyes. As the months passed a few other members of Hanna’s family and one of her high school girlfriends began occasionally e-mailing to ask if I was reading of any progress on the case in the L.A. papers—and just telling me endearing stories about her. I’ve never read anything again in the media about Hanna. I have been Googling occasionally and can only assume the Santa Ana detectives are working on it with no results as the references are the ones in 2004.
I got an e-mail from one of Hanna’s Georgia relatives today asking again if I had heard anything in the media and expressing the family’s continuing grief and frustration. She told me that today would have been Hanna’s 17th birthday. She said, “It would be a great day for our beloved Hannah, if we know that the killer or killer(s) were incarcerated. Please don't let her death go unnoticed.”
Hanna’s death does not go unnoticed. I, for one, will carry her in my heart always, even though I never met her. I believe in the interconnection of all beings and on some level I do not understand I am particularly connected to her. Please join me in sending comfort to Hanna’s family on a day that would have been a happy one under different circumstances.
