Meg Actually Watches the News

Why would a guy take two kids home with him? And why would they stay?

I saw this on TV this weekend. Some kid was missing for a few days and they found him at this guy’s house, along with another kid who had been kidnapped four years earlier. The older kid, for some reason, never escaped. Apparently he had plenty of opportunities to run away or call for help but he never did.

I don’t want to speculate on the motives of the guy who took the boys because that would keep me up all night with horrible images in my head but I really do wonder about the kid who stayed. He got his lip pierced. He rode his bike around the streets. He had friends visit him. He even had a girlfriend. He didn’t go to school which might have raised some eyebrows but no one ever questioned it at all. Most people just assumed he was the guy’s son so they didn’t bother them.

I’m trying to put myself in that position. What would I have done if someone had kidnapped me? Would I try to escape every chance I got? Would I try to be friends with the person so they would let me go? I guess it would depend on if I was being hurt, if I feared for my life if I tried to do anything.

Maybe this kid never wanted to go to school and the guy who kidnapped him promised him he could stay home all day and play Xbox and eat pizza.

Maybe his parents at home weren’t very nice to him. Maybe they ignored him or treated him badly.

There are all sorts of psychological reasons why victims don’t try to escape their captors. Sometimes they end up feeling sorry for them and don’t want them to get in trouble. That happens in hostage situations, they say. Last semester, Evelyn told us about this Al Pacino movie, “Dog Day Afternoon,” that she wanted to show us in class but the principal wouldn’t let her. He said it was too violent for us and they used the F word too many times. Oh please. Anyway, the story is about these two bank robbers who are trying to steal money so one of their boyfriends can have a sex change operation. The hostages in the bank took a liking to the guys and one of them didn’t want to leave even when he had the chance. This was based on a true story.

I’d like to believe the guy took the boys because he was lonely and maybe he was ugly and not very funny or smart and he figured, hey, I’d like to have children someday but I’m never going to get a girl and have some of my own so I’ll just take two boys and make them my kids. I know this sounds totally messed up and the guy would have to be utterly insane to do something like that but it’s much less disgusting than some other reasons.