Obsession (57 page)

Ninety percent of the students come from families on public assistance, which means the Hagemans are always scrounging for funds. Hans had always been good with kids, and he first considered starting an elementary school. After all, logic dictates that the earlier you get the children, the more impact you’re going to make. But he felt there were already programs and funding available for the early ages. The real challenge was the ones nobody wanted—middle-school and junior-high age: the kids who are the most difficult in the best of situations, and in this situation, kids to whom the damage has already been done and who already bear the scars of the neighborhood and environment. He knew that by undertaking this, he and Ivan would have to become not only educators but policemen, therapists, and warriors against the indigenous crack dealers who, at enormous physical risk, Hans confronted and turned away from the front of his school. Because of that, he became licensed to carry a firearm.

“The first two years were difficult,” he admits, “but now I think even the bad guys in the neighborhood respect us.”

East Harlem is a strict school with high standards. Hans believes that only in an atmosphere of discipline
and structure and responsibility can personal freedom flourish. “We try to show the kids enough of what’s out there and enough of the possibilities of life,” he says.

The motto of the school is Competence With Character, and Hans says, “If these kids can physically and emotionally survive their adolescence, just in the Darwinian sense of survival of the fittest, they can be world-beaters.” As I’ve said throughout this book, crime affects us all on so many different levels. “We can turn things around,” Hans insists. “The only thing standing between some of these kids and success is a safe place. We want to provide the one caring, nurturing space in their lives.”

He and Ivan know they’re not going to succeed with all of them. One young man recently didn’t graduate because he failed to complete his required tenpage paper. “It was his conscious decision not to finish, and he was given a lot of opportunity. Like a lot of other schools, we could have graduated him and said, ‘Go on to high school, you’re not our problem anymore.’ But he did not graduate from this school. This is someone we have known since he was an infant, and it was a tough decision. We talked to him ad nauseam. There is a certain amount of triage which had to take place here. We don’t give up on anyone as long as they don’t give up on themselves. And even when they do, we’re still available and they know that. But one of the hardest things for me is that we’re going to lose some along the way. This kid is going to have to hit bottom, and the problem is that in a neighborhood like this one, when you hit bottom, you don’t always return. He’s smart enough to get himself into big trouble.” As Hans made a choice against a lucrative career and a luxurious lifestyle, everybody makes a choice of some kind.

There is no question that the Hagemans have sacrificed
for their obsession. Ivan is divorced and Hans is candid about the stress it has put on his own marriage. Often, he and his wife have had the additional strain of one or more young people living with them. But the most encouraging thing of all is that Hans believes “there are a lot of others out there like us; there certainly are.”

One more example from the same neighborhood:

In 1992, our agent, Jay Acton, who is also a New York City attorney, minor league baseball team owner, and major baseball fan, founded Harlem RBI. It stands for Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities and was patterned after the first RBI program, begun in Los Angeles in 1989 by John Young, a professional baseball scout, in response to the problem of gang violence. Like Speak Out for Stephanie, RBI has grown, and there are now programs in more than fifty cities across America. Inge Hanson, aside from now being assistant principal of East Harlem School, is, like Jay, a lawyer and literary agent. She was the original Harlem RBI executive director. Jay and his associates located an abandoned lot on One Hundredth Street, off First Avenue in East Harlem, and with the help of the community turned it into a ball field.

The lure of the program is to provide organized, high-quality baseball experience for innercity boys and girls between seven and eighteen years of age, divided into teams and leagues. But the real aim is to help young urban teens develop greater self-esteem while learning the values of teamwork and sportsmanship, and to motivate and help participating athletes study more effectively while offering them a strong incentive to stay in school. This last consideration is important. If you want to play, you have to maintain acceptable averages in your class work. To help achieve that, RBI has organized both a tutoring program and a mentoring program. They also publish a
newsletter, written by the participants, with the advice and input of professional editors and reporters who have volunteered their time. And a speaker series exposes the young people to the outside world beyond their own neighborhoods—both good and bad—with topics that range from professional baseball and women in sports, to gun violence, drugs, AIDS, teen sexuality and responsibility, and great books. The entire operation is now under the auspices of the New York City Parks Council, and the current executive director of Harlem RBI is Richard Berlin, who holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, but who developed the obsession to give something back when he started volunteering at RBI in 1993.

Having read this book, you know that two of the greatest weapons in the war on crime and predatory violence are increased individual feelings of self-esteem and an increased individual and collective sense of responsibility. With them, fewer young men will commit violent crime, and more young men will feel the obligation to step in and do something about the violence they see around them. Self-esteem will also make them less vulnerable targets for other predators. Programs such as Harlem RBI are going a long way in this direction. They’re very much part of the effort to fight back.

We were going to call this final chapter “Fighting Back,” except that we’ve already used that title in our last book,
Journey into Darkness
. So instead we are highlighting the basic theme of this book, which, in essence, means the same thing. As Hans Hageman has proved, knowledge is power, and there are many ways to fight back.

You can fight back the way Gene and Peggy Schmidt and Jack and Trudy Collins fight back. Or
the way Linda Fairstein fights back. Or the way Carroll Ellis and Sandy Witt do. And then there are the more direct ways, the concepts and techniques that we each have to adopt to increase our chances of remaining safe.

Virtually all of the victims and survivors I encounter tell me how quickly they were forced to acquire their education in crime, the criminal justice system, and society’s attitudes toward predators and their victims. What we need to do is arm ourselves with knowledge
before the fact
, and through that knowledge, try to even the odds. The following comments and suggestions are by no means intended to be complete or exhaustive. An entire book could easily be written on each topic. What I am trying to provide here are general attitudes, approaches, and concepts about sexual predators and obsessional violent crime.

With regard to attitudes toward rape, the first one we’ve got to get across is that it is
never
acceptable. This may seem pretty basic and elementary until we remember the survey of teenaged boys and girls who thought that forcing a woman to have sex was okay under certain circumstances—mainly having to do with the length of time the parties had known each other and how much money the boy had put out.

As Gene Schmidt says, “On all our visits to college campuses, we’re finding that girls have to be taught that it’s okay to say no, and that boys have to learn that no means just what it says. It doesn’t need any interpretation.”

Alarmingly, the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, reported that 7 percent of the teenage girls surveyed who’d had sex indicated that their first sexual encounter was not one they participated in voluntarily, and almost another quarter said
that their first sexual encounter was “voluntary but not wanted.”

The other attitude we have to establish firmly is compassion for rape victims … even date rape victims … even prostitute victims. We’ve got to make sure they know that we understand that it was not their fault and that we provide an environment in which victims feel comfortable reporting and prosecuting the crime.

And
environment
is a key word in prevention, as well: awareness of your immediate environment can do more than any other single element in cutting down on sexual assaults. Remember Linda Fairstein’s case of the rapist who was able to follow a woman into her own apartment building, even though his composite was posted in the lobby?

“Do you know the number of cases I have where the pizza deliveryman gets in, delivers to 25D, and then tries the other doors on the way out?” she asks. “I would like to think that I am not what I would call paranoid, but that I have a very healthy awareness of what goes on around me.”

And, as Fairstein points out, “It isn’t just a big-city phenomenon. There’s not a week that goes by that I don’t get calls from remote parts of the country about how to handle a case or situation that’s going on there, or from victims disgruntled because it isn’t being handled.”

Before Stephanie Schmidt was killed, there hadn’t been a murder of a young woman in Pittsburg, Kansas, in thirty years. Since then, there have been two more.

Wherever you live, it’s important to keep windows and doors locked and entryways well lit. In and around the car, particularly in parking lots, always try to maintain a buffer zone around yourself and your car so that, if need be, you can drive quickly to a safe and well-lit area.

Now, you may not always be able to live your life so cautiously, and it may not even be possible for you to do so. But the one thing I do urge is that you evaluate and understand the circumstances in which you’re operating. It comes down to a simple but universally applicable piece of advice:

If you’re putting yourself at a potentially higher degree of risk, you need to put yourself on a higher level of awareness and precaution.

The Jennifer Levin and Stephanie Schmidt cases underscore the warning that you must never assume you know a person better than you do. Here were two bright and outgoing young women whose sole fault was trust—a quality we find admirable. Neither one of them did anything wrong, but because of their trust, both found themselves in situations that proved deadly.

Look after your friends and be aware of what they’re doing. Stephanie Schmidt was the ideal victim from Don Gideon’s perspective. Not only was she unaware of his predatory past, she was going home for the summer, so that none of her girlfriends would miss her in the next few days.

And don’t assume that sexual predators are going to be obvious, any more than Robert Chambers or Alex Kelly or Don Gideon. A killer or rapist can look like anyone. Fairstein has had cases in which the defendants were doctors, lawyers, dentists, even ministers and rabbis, who assaulted their victims in “professional” surroundings. The best advice is what your mother told you ever since you can remember: Don’t pick up hitchhikers, don’t hitchhike yourself, and don’t accept rides from people you don’t know well. Don’t accept drinks from people you don’t know well. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to professional waiters or bartenders, but the drug Rohypnol, for example, is easy to slip into a drink, takes effect
quickly—sometimes within minutes—is hard to trace, and leaves victims unaware of their environment, with no memory later of what happened to them.

Det. Bob Murphy sums up all of this simply and well: “You try to take away the opportunity.”

As we’ve noted, there are different kinds of rapists, and each one will react differently. So if you have enough presence of mind to be able to evaluate that individual during the crisis, by all means follow your instincts and react accordingly. The only score we keep is surviving. But since tailoring your reaction to a complex set of behavioral characteristics is difficult, there are a number of basic responses that have the odds in their favor.

If you are approached or attacked, do not get into a car with an offender. Scream, fight back, try to attract attention and/or get away. If he can remove you from a public place without any witnesses, your chances of getting out of this situation alive or unharmed are greatly diminished. Whenever you see the chance, take it.

In a stranger-rape situation, if he allows you to see his face, you get his name, or you can somehow otherwise identify your attacker and he knows it, it’s all the more important to get away from him, even if he has a knife and you are risking injury. Because unless he’s quite inexperienced, he’s likely to kill you to leave no witnesses. As difficult as it may be to do, don’t let your concentration falter. Channel your energies into survival.

If he knows you can identify him and you can’t get away, then you’ve got to try to establish some kind of human connection. I always tell police officers, for instance, that if they find themselves in hostage situations, not to let the gunman get them facedown on the ground. In that posture, it’s too easy for him to depersonalize you and then too easy to put a bullet
through the back of your head—much easier than pulling the trigger when you’re staring him in the eyes. By the same token, a rape is a hostage situation of sorts, and you could win survival points by not letting him depersonalize you, either. Even a predator as extreme as Gary Heidnik treated differently the one prisoner with whom he felt he had a human bond, and she was the one he allowed to get away and ultimately save herself and the remaining survivors.

I think our societal attitudes about stalking are beginning to change, but it’s still important to understand that these men—and women—are not love-struck Casanovas. They are potential killers who, like all potential killers, are best dealt with sooner rather than later.