Sandra Cantu is a child of ours. She was born in 2001, beginning of the new millennium. She was eight years old when she was last seen. 2009, the heart-rending end of the proverbial innocence. Sandra was not alive for very long, but long enough to be loved by many, all those who knew her really, her family, her classmates, her friends and neighbors. Who among us would not love this eight-year-old child? And who among us would not wish to protect her?
Sandra lived in a Mobile Home Park in Tracy, California with her mother. They did not have very much money, and consequently, mom had very few life options from which to choose. But, like any mother, she had the hope and expectation that her child would be happy, and that with inspiration, motivation, and some fortuitous breaks, she could find her way to adulthood, and a satisfying life. Sandra would never realize her mother’s dreams, or the dreams she had of her own. Her life was taken from her prematurely. She did not die, however, in an accident, or of a childhood disease, but at the callous hands of someone who steals the souls of children because he does not have a soul of his own. Sandra was taken from her neighborhood, by an, as yet, unknown abductor. She was missing for about two weeks, and later found stuffed in a suitcase that had been discarded like garbage in a muddy irrigation pond on a dairy farm two miles from her home. Between the moment she was taken, and the time she was abandoned, Sandra suffered an unspeakably frightening and horrifying series of events, experiences no child should ever be subjected to. EVER. NOT EVER, god dammit.
Who are these people, these heartless predators who take our children from the security of the ones they love, who use and abuse them for the sake of their own perverse gratification, for the twisted pleasure of subordinating a child to their virulent fantasies? Who are these devils with devious smiles? Where do they live? And where can I go to kill them? You know this little girl. She is the pride and joy of your life. Sandra Cantu is your next-door neighbors daughter. She is the apple of your best friends eye. She is the voice of innocence in an increasingly treacherous world. She is a child of ours. She is a child of yours.
She was murdered by a bad man. We can call him sick, and we might call him pathetic. We can even call him a product of his environment. Yes we can do that, and many of us will. But I will not. I will call him what he is, a bad man who put his wants and imagined needs above the wellbeing of a blameless little angel of God. He did that because he could. Not because he needed to, and not because he was incapable of self- control. Impulse control is not his problem. He murdered Sandra because he could. What is it that nourishes that kind of wickedness in such a man? What is it that peaks the interest of, and cultivates, that kind of malevolence? If there is any complicity by our culture, it is that we have, and continue to, sexualize these children to suit our own fantasies. Not my fantasy, and probably not yours, but certainly the twisted fantasies of men bereft of conscience, men of vacuous character who have gone on to become lifeless vampires voraciously feeding on the souls of only the most vulnerable.
There are those among us who have sympathy and pity for these men. There are those among us who find them redeemable, but I’m here to say that their minimal standards of redemption are what have enabled these predators to exist outside of prison, to wander among us, and to multiply like rats in an alley. Obviously, their little son or daughter has never been sexually brutalized, tortured, killed and then discarded in a fucking swamp.
Where do these self-righteous, morally bankrupt, politically correct, and mentally crippled ‘progressives’ live? I want to kill them too.
The child-rapist/murderers, the self-loathing enablers, and the fashion, music and entertainment executives who sexualize our children are all of the same repugnant character, as far as I can see. And I can see pretty clearly.
Who would not want to kill them?
Who among us would not wish to protect Sandra Cantu.
Postscript: This blog was written after the police found the body of Sandra Cantu, but before an arrest was made for her murder. The police have since arrested Melissa Huckaby, 28, Sandra’s Sunday School teacher. I have not edited the writing to reflect that discrepancy because the vast majority of these abduction/murders are committed by male sexual predators. I feel it to be worthwhile to let my initial assumptions of the continuing story stand as written. A thousand different names can be inserted in place of Sandra Cantu’s. I trust that, as a victim, she would not feel dishonored by the inaccuracies I’ve made in assuming her killer was male, and that her ordeal was sexual in nature. Unquestionably, most are.
God bless Sandra Cantu.
