A Sad Resolution

I was attending St. Cloud State University in 1989. St. Cloud is a city with a population somewhere between sixty and seventy thousand, close to the center point of Minnesota. During that autumn, St. Cloud made national news when an eleven-year-old boy named Jacob Wetterling, who lived in a small town on the rural outskirts of the city, was riding bikes with his best friend and younger brother. On their way home, they encountered a masked man who pointed a gun at them and told them to throw their bikes in the ditch. Jacob’s brother and friend were told to run away or they’d be shot. Jacob was abducted, and a nightmarish, generation-defining mystery began. 

I’ve rarely seen populations so profoundly changed as St. Cloud was in the weeks and months that followed, including our mostly insulated university community. Jacob’s favorite song, something performed by a children’s artist who never would have otherwise received mainstream radio airplay, was in heavy rotation on local stations. The front and back end signs of city buses rotated between displaying their routes and the thematic refrain “Jacob’s Hope.” Enormous billboards showing his most recent school picture along with tip line telephone numbers were all over town. It was a conversational topic in dorm lobbies, church services, coffee houses, and classrooms. I had one professor tell our class about conversations she’d had as her young daughter came home from school each day with so many questions.

Along with many university students mobilizing to volunteer in any way they could, several fund raisers were conducted. I bought an armband, really just a narrow strip of yellow felt, to show my support, and kept it tied to a handle on my college backpack until graduation. After college I kept it tied to the overhead projector in my classroom until that piece of school technology was rendered obsolete, then pinned it to the bulletin board behind my desk for several years to follow. I wanted it there to remind me about the awesome responsibilities I was taking on by becoming a teacher, and how important it was I was serious about them. 

During those first disorienting weeks after the kidnapping, I was working at an after-school program run by the Boys and Girls Club. We gave the kids snacks, programmed a variety of games and activities for them, encouraged them with incidental bits of character education, and gave them a safe and happy place to be until their parents could pick them up.

I was there with those kids watching as the much of the innocence in their lives was replaced with uncertainty. Many of the youngest ones in the program, down to Kindergarten, could tell something bad had happened but didn’t really understand what it meant. I clearly remember one little girl, a second grader, coming up to me with a paper fortune teller she had made, asking me to play. After I chose my favorite number and favorite color, she revealed not only my answer but all of the others as well. Written on one small flap, along with such fortunes as “You will get a puppy” and “Your birthday is tomorrow,” was “Thay will find Jacob.” I was taken aback to think someone who was so young she still couldn’t reliably spell words only four letters long had all of this tragedy as a part of her life. 

The abduction hit the older kids harder, since they were all within a year or two of being the same age as Jacob. Some of them even knew him from youth league sports. One of these kids was a girl who had been having some problems in her neighborhood with a man following her while out walking. Since our program was housed at an elementary school and she attended a nearby middle school, her parents were now afraid to let her walk between the two buildings unsupervised. They expressed their concern, and I was assigned to walk to the middle school each afternoon to escort her, and a handful of others, back to the program. Such was the climate in town, where twelve-year-old kids didn’t feel safe walking from one school to another only five blocks away in the middle of the day. 

Being about halfway through my education program at this point, and acutely aware of the impact a missing child had on so many, this was not a responsibility I took lightly. On my first walk over to pick her up, I calmly decided that in the unlikely event anything did ever happen, I would put myself between the kids and any threats we might encounter. It seemed like the only reasonable choice I had.

Eventually her problem went away, but even though Jacob’s abduction faded out of daily immediate attention, it was always a presence. In the twenty-seven years following, stories about false leads or human interest reminders would occasionally come up in local news. Photos would be released showing computer simulations of what Jacob would look like five years older, then ten, then fifteen. Jacob’s mother became the face of child safety advocacy in our state, and refused to stop hoping she would see her son again someday.

The news broke early this morning that a person of interest being held by police on different charges recently led investigators to human remains identified as Jacob’s. When I first read that, one of the first thoughts I had was back to that little girl’s fortune teller. It took nearly three decades, but she was right: They, or thay, found Jacob. But not with a resolution that anyone ever wanted to see.