'Tara, please come home'

[Times photos: Michael Rondou] Rebecca Exposito shows a flier with Tara’s photo to cashiers at the Kmart on Pasadena Avenue. She heard her daughter had been seen in the store’s parking lot.

By LANE DeGREGORY
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 12, 2003

Police say the Gulfport teen ran away. Her family isn't so sure, so her mom is doing the detective work to find her.

GULFPORT -- Some guy up at the convenience mart told some girl Angie knows that this guy named Will might know where Tara is. And Will works down at the car wash, supposedly.

"So let's start there tonight," Rebecca Exposito says.

She's standing in the driveway of her Gulfport house, in the dark, holding a new batch of fliers with her daughter's face. It's a windy Wednesday in December. A week before Christmas.

Her daughter has been missing for more than a month.

[Family photo] Tara Exposito

Tara is 14. She has hazel eyes, a heart-shaped face, honey-blond hair past her shoulders. She likes listening to Creed and No Doubt, playing football on the beach, singing Jewel songs to her baby brother until he falls asleep.

The fliers say she is 5 feet 2. Weighs 100 pounds.

Please Come Home, they say. Please, if you are able, come home. Love, Mom.

At first, Rebecca thought her daughter was at a friend's house. Sometimes Tara stayed out late, even though she wasn't supposed to. But when midnight went by and Tara still hadn't come home, Rebecca called the police. "Tara's had her trouble," she told them. "But she's never run away."

Days, then weeks, then a month dragged by. Every second Rebecca was awake, at work, taking care of her other four kids, making dinner, trying to sleep, she was worrying about Tara. Was she cold? Or hungry? Or hurt? Why wouldn't she come home? What if she couldn't come home?

If the police thought Tara had been abducted, they would be investigating leads, knocking on doors and calling in other law enforcement agencies. But because they're calling her a runaway, they say there's not much they can do. They're keeping their eyes open, they say. But running away isn't illegal, even if you're only 14.

So Rebecca quit her second job, the evening shift at a Ross Dress for Less store. Now, after she works all day processing paperwork for student loans, after she catches a ride home and makes dinner for her other kids and puts the baby to bed, she does her own investigating. She spends her nights on the streets, combing the darkness for her daughter.

Tonight, she and her friend Debbie Piscitella are going to post fliers from Clearwater to South Pasadena, flash Tara's photograph in front of countless strangers, go places Rebecca never wanted to know existed.

Rebecca can't afford a car, so Debbie drives.

"So this guy Will, at the car wash, does he have a last name?" Debbie asks, opening the passenger door of her pickup.

"I don't know it," Tara's mother says, climbing in. "But if we find him, maybe he can at least tell us if Tara is alive."

Like Tara

Every day in America, 1,200 children run away from home, the Children's Defense Fund reports. Every year, experts estimate, 1.3-million children in this country disappear.

At least for a while.

"Tragically, approximately 5,000 runaway and homeless youth will die from assault, illness and suicide this year," says Maureen Blaha, who directs the National Runaway Switchboard in Chicago.

Runaways are especially prevalent in Florida, where the weather is warm and it's easier to survive outdoors. From January 2002 through October, 40,450 children were reported missing in Florida. That's more than 700 kids a week.

Tara Exposito is just one more runaway. Except to the people who love her.

A sweater in the driveway

The day Tara disappeared, she had gotten into a fist fight with a girl at school. She had been suspended from Boca Ciega High for two days.

Since middle school, Tara had been skipping classes, blowing off her homework, beating up other girls. Gulfport police caught her drunk once last summer and sent her to detox. She did time at the juvenile detention center for hitting a classmate.

When she got suspended Nov. 6, she called her mom at work to tell her.

"Mom," Tara said. "It's me. I just want you to know this is the worst day of my life." She told her mom about the fight. About the suspension. There was a pause. Then the message continued.

"I love you," Tara told her mom on the tape. "And I'll talk to you when I get home."

Those are the last words Rebecca has heard from her daughter.

After school that day, Tara got a ride from a boy in the neighborhood. Police say he dropped her off a few blocks from her house. Other students saw her getting out of the car.

She must have walked home from there, her mom says, because the sweater she had put on that morning was crumpled in the driveway. A little farther down the street, the opposite way from which Tara would have come, Tara's ponytail holder was lying in the grass.

In the house

The home Tara used to live in is a one-story, concrete-block house off 49th Street, a couple of lots behind a pawn shop. She lived there with her mom, two sisters, two brothers and a cat. Her grandfather left them the house when he died.

A Little Tykes slide is parked in the sandy front yard. Orange peels, Little Debbie wrappers and plastic foam cups line the walk. A rusty clothesline and metal shed are in the back.

Inside, in the living room, it's dark. There's no overhead light. No table lamp. If you want to hang out there, you have to go into Julian's room and borrow the desk light. Two worn couches face a pressboard bookshelf with no books. Baby photos of the five children fill the shelves. In one, Tara is about 4, proudly propping a lace parasol on her shoulder.

Tara shared the back bedroom with her older sister, Angie. They swapped clothes and doodled on the walls. HOT BOYS Tara wrote in magic marker. Only god can judge me -- By Tara 8/22/02, she scrawled across her closet.

Tara, the second of three sisters, craves attention. She'll mimic people's walks and gestures, act out scenes from movies, playing every part.

Often, after Rebecca got home from her second shift, Tara would try to talk to her mom. Tell her things. Get her alone for a minute.

But the baby, Isaiah, was always screaming; and Michael, who's 10, kept running around; and Julian, 12, was needing help with something all the time; and Angie, well, she's the pretty one all the boys adore, and she's 16, so she's been having issues of her own; and her mom was trying to take care of all of them, plus work two jobs and make all the meals.

"I wanted to have more time for Tara," her mom says through tears. "Maybe then she wouldn't have run away . . . or had whatever happened to her happen."

Rebecca has been a mom since she was 16, for half her life. Her husband, the father of her five children, is in jail. After Angie was born, Rebecca says, he started getting in trouble. He got charged with burglary and cocaine possession, with resisting arrest and escaping prison. He lost dozens of jobs. He was ordered to stay away from Rebecca after they had a run-in at home. He's been in and out of custody so many times, his kids can't keep track.

"It's killing him, being in jail," says Rebecca, who has no police record, "not knowing what happened to Tara -- and not being able to do anything about it."

Finding Tara has fallen to her.

When Tara Exposito disappeared Nov. 6, she left behind her mom, Rebecca, holding 15-month-old Isaiah; older sister Angela, 16, right; plus younger sister Julian, 12, and younger brother Michael, who just turned 10.

Home for Christmas

The Pasadena Car Wash is closed. Rebecca's friend Debbie steers her pickup through the parking lot, around the right side. There, on a wooden table filled with buckets and sponges, three men and a woman are drinking Budweiser in the dark.

Debbie parks and cuts the headlights. She rolls down her window.

"Is Will here?" Debbie asks. "We heard he worked here."

The woman looks back at the men. They shake their heads. "Well, he worked here. But he don't no more," she says. "Not for a few weeks now.

"He got into a fight. A spitting match with some guy, right here at work. Got himself fired for it," the woman says, shaking her head. "Fighting over some 14-year-old girl. Can you imagine?"

Debbie turns from the woman. Rebecca is sitting motionless, staring out the windshield. Had she heard? Did she want to hear?

Fliers with Tara’s photograph are hanging in gas stations and convenience marts from Gulfport to Clearwater.

Debbie reaches into Rebecca's lap and takes a flier. She hands it out the window. "My friend, here, her daughter's run away," Debbie says. "This guy Will supposedly knows where she's at. Can you take one of these and hang it up?"

The woman stares at the fuzzy photo, at Tara's long, straight hair, at the slightly crooked smile. The woman's eyes widen. She starts pointing at the flier, poking it with her finger.

"Oh my God! Oh my God!" she starts shouting. "That's the girl they were fighting about. Will had a picture of her in his wallet. She was his girlfriend, he says. But this other guy, Shane, I think his name is, he used to work here, too. He says he's with that girl. So they get into it right there on the picnic bench."

Debbie's mouth drops open. This is the closest they've come to a lead. She turns to Rebecca, who is trembling.

When Rebecca finally speaks, her voice shakes.

"Those boys, Will and Shane, where can we find them?" she asks. "If my daughter's out there, I'd sure like to bring her home for Christmas."

Anyone's kids

All kinds of kids run away. White kids. Black kids. Rich kids. Poor kids. Kids with one parent or two. With four siblings or none. Kids whose parents are too strict. Kids whose parents are too permissive.

If a child has run away before, or has been in trouble with the police, investigators might not treat another disappearance as seriously as they would the first one, Pat Gerard says. She's with the nonprofit Family Resources Inc., which supports runaway shelters in St. Petersburg and Clearwater.

"It's kind of sad to say," Gerard says, "but police have to put their energies where they think they can do the most good."

Gerard has been working with runaways for 30 years. The longer they're gone, the more dangerous situations they're likely to be in, she says.

For a 14-year-old girl such as Tara, who has been missing for more than a month, the possibilities are grim.

"It's not likely she's in a safe place right now," Gerard says.

She's probably staying with an older friend or acquaintance. Maybe a boyfriend her mom didn't know about. She might even have left the state. She could be in an abandoned building, or staying behind a shopping center, or sleeping on a bench.

"You could go to Tyrone Square Mall today, if you were 14, and find all sorts of folks who would take you home," Gerard says.

But as time goes by, when you wear out your welcome, whoever is giving you a place to stay will start expecting something in return.

"We see a lot of substance abuse among runaways. A lot of survival sex. A lot of pregnant girls," Gerard says. "I'm sure all this has occurred to her mother. I know she must be going over every awful thing in her mind."

While she's gone

Runaways never realize what happens at home, while they're away.

If Tara is alive, if she's out there, is she seeing her face on the 500 fliers her grandmom photocopied? Is she reading the ads her mom has been putting in Gulfport's Gabber every week, the ones that say, It feels like someone has ripped out my heart since you've been gone? How would she feel if she knew that her family didn't have Thanksgiving, and that Christmas, still a few days away, doesn't seem worth celebrating because she's not home?

What if she knew that her baby brother cries himself to sleep every night because she's not there to sing him Jewel songs? Or that her 10-year-old brother didn't have a birthday party because the only present he wanted was for her to come home and that he spent all day with his face pressed against the living room window, watching for her? Or that her 12-year-old sister isn't allowed to sleep over at friends' houses anymore because her mom can't stand for any of the kids to be gone?

Angie, her big sister, won't leave the house, hoping Tara might stop by. She's blaming herself because she used to run away from her dad.

"But I'd never stay gone more than a day or two. And I'd always call Mom, at least, and let her know I was okay," Angie says. "If Tara was okay, I keep thinking she'd call."

Tara's grandmom thinks something happened to her. "Every day that goes by, it just gets worse and worse," says Paulette Peckham, 54. Tara is the second-oldest of her nine grandchildren.

Every week at work, Tara's grandmom makes more copies of the flier, puts on new photos, hands them out to everyone she sees. She's been sending Tara e-mails, hoping she might log on to some computer and at least know she's loved. On the weekends, she's been going to BayWalk in St. Petersburg because she heard runaways hang out there. She's been making lists of questions for the police and calling them constantly. She doesn't want them to forget that her granddaughter is still missing.

"Even if she did run away, and wasn't abducted, she's still gone," Tara's grandmom says. "She's still out there, where anything could happen to her."

A new message

Rebecca thought she knew her neighborhood. She grew up in Gulfport, a few blocks from where she's raising her kids.

But during these long, last few weeks, while she's been probing the nights to find Tara, she has stumbled into a netherworld she never knew existed.

It's a place that doesn't come alive until nighttime; where iron bars and plywood cover the windows of broken-down duplexes; where no one will open his door unless you know the right knock. In this world, dogs are bred to bite you and neighbors won't admit to knowing each other. Even police are scared to venture in alone. No one seems to have a last name here. Or an address. Rumors are the only source of information.

"It's dangerous out here. We could get shot," Rebecca says late one evening while she and Debbie are dredging the parking lots of fast-food stores.

Angie runs into that guy, Will, up at the convenience mart one day. He says he was hanging with Tara a couple of weeks ago, partying. Rebecca takes heart. At least Tara's alive. But Will says he doesn't know where she is now.

He says that he and Shane were fighting over some other 14-year-old girl down at the car wash.

Rebecca posts Tara's picture on Amber Alert, a national network of missing and abducted children. She and Debbie hang 200 more fliers, talk to dozens more people, knock on doors of places they hear might be "drug traps."

"People have been telling us that these older guys get the young girls in there, get them messed up, keep them around for a while," Rebecca says. "I've heard about those places in movies. I just didn't think there were so many around St. Petersburg."

A couple of days before Christmas, as Rebecca is heading out to hunt for Tara, Detective Sgt. Ron Howeth of the Gulfport Police Department stops by. "No news yet," he says. But he has some papers for Rebecca to sign. Permission to examine her daughter's dental records. "In case something comes up to match at the morgue."

Tara's mom signs the papers.

"Oh, it makes me sick," she says.

When the phone bill comes, Rebecca can't pay it. Her phone gets turned off. What if Tara tries to call home? So Rebecca borrows money from her mom. And when the phone gets reconnected, she records a new message on the answering machine:

Hello. This is the Exposito residence. If this is Tara, please come home. You're not in any trouble. We love you, and we miss you.

All you have to do is walk through that front door.

Wishes in the windows

Christmas Eve, Tara is still missing.

Tara's brother and sisters say they've seen signs she's okay. Angie searched Tara's closet and says that some of her clothes are missing. The Polo capris, a green sweat shirt, that fleece pullover. "We shared clothes," she says. "So I should know what's not here."

Michael says he saw a hand one night. More like a shadow, maybe. He thinks he saw it, at least, moving across his bedroom window from the outside, shooing away the cat or something. Maybe he just wanted to see it. Maybe if you live inside your head enough, you can make things happen with your mind. The day after he saw the hand, Michael says, the shed door was ajar. A couple of trash bags filled with old clothes were ripped open. "I bet Tara came back to get some of her sweaters," Michael says.

Surely, Tara will come home for Christmas if she can, her grandmom says. She has bought Tara a new outfit this year: sweat pants and a white tank top. She invites Rebecca and her kids over to spend Christmas Eve, to try to salvage some holiday spirit.

Rebecca won't come. She stays at home, hoping, in the dark.

On Christmas, Rebecca fries a chicken and cooks yellow rice. Tara's favorite meal. She seals the food in a plastic bowl. Fills an old green Thermos with steaming hot chocolate and takes it outside. She puts it on the windowsill of what used to be Tara's bedroom. And she writes her daughter a note:

Tara, I just want you to know that I love you. I don't understand why you've been gone so long. We all miss you so very much. . . . I promise we can talk about whatever you want . . . I'm sorry. Please come home.

Angie writes a note, too, and hangs it in the side window. It has two hazel eyes with tears dripping from the corners.

Hey. I put your Xmas presents in the window. I know somebody put warm clothes in one. So knock. I promise I won't tell Mom. I just want to know if you're okay.

At the bottom, Angie drew a heart in red crayon.

It's broken.

Tara’s family members believe that she has been coming by the house, so they have left Christmas gifts, food and letters on the windowsill of her bedroom.

Some guy up at the convenience mart told some girl Angie knows that this guy saw Tara at Save On Seafood. Someone up there might know where Tara is. At least that's what he said.

It's January now. A new year.

Tara has been missing for more than two months.

-- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this story.

Tara’s mom has been running ads in the Gulfport Gabber, hoping her daughter will see them and want to come home.

For help

If you have seen Tara Exposito, please contact the Gulfport Police Department at (727) 893-1030. If you're a teen or parent, Family Resources Inc. offers free counseling and two shelters in Pinellas County. Call (727) 449-8336 or (727) 384-8336.

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