What kind of man are you, Joseph P. Smith? Did you, as charged, do this to Carlie Brucia? If so, how could you? You, with three little girls of your own.
Surely, you've been moved by their giggles, their hugs, their cries. Surely, you could not imagine a world without the music they played in your life.
What did Carlie represent to you? You must be cursing your luck, wishing the video camera had never been invented. For without the camera that captured the moment you grabbed Carlie, you wouldn't have been caught so quickly. You might not have been caught at all.
Without the tape, you wouldn't be feeling the heat you're feeling now. I'm not talking about heat as in police. I mean the outrage of ordinary strangers bearing down on you. Without the tape we would have been angry, but not so fiercely, not so strong.
With the tape, this charge is no abstraction, no mere compilation of facts in a police report. The tape gives you a face, sets the scene, has us at the edge of our seats, wishing we were there to snatch Carlie back. It is the first act of the drama. The sheriff provides the last act, when he makes the tearful pronouncement that Carlie is dead. The community cries with him.
Now your lawyer wants a gag order to silence the prosecutors and police, to keep them from talking to the press. Luckily, it can never apply to ordinary people, we who can't fathom the crime, we who cling to the quaint idea that in a civilized world, grown men don't snatch children and slaughter them.
Many of us are parents. At home our children's artwork clings to the refrigerator door. Their stuffed animals and toy spacemen spill over from one room to the next. At work, their pictures are scattered on our desks, so they are never far from our thoughts.
Now we have to sit them down and explain what they have seen on TV. We have to explain a child killer to them. And you know what? We can't. Even if our children are old enough to understand our words, still we grope for those words.
The person who did this did more than end the life of that blond-haired child. He made parents more worried, more vigilant. He made the world of children more constricted. Don't take shortcuts, we are told to warn our children now. Never walk alone.
Don't think for a moment this makes us powerless. We'll have the last word on what happens to you, Joseph P. Smith. Prosecutors and a jury will see to that. They'll decide whether you are guilty, and if so, whether you get the death penalty.
I'm usually against it, the killing of killers, but my emotions have taken over. I'm a parent, too.
I get to watch my child bloom and grow.
When she plays alone in her bedroom, I stand by the closed door and listen to her talk happily to her imaginary friends. When the door opens, she comes out to ask me unanswerable questions about God and what happens when cats die.
How she hates it when I try to dress her or put on her shoes. She so wants me to see how she can do it herself.
Every day, she changes. Every day, she steps closer to the future. I find myself looking into her eyes and wondering what she'll look like at her wedding. What a gift those moments are - moments stolen from Carlie's parents.
Was it you? How dare you. Could it really be what news reports said, that you flipped out because your wife wanted a divorce? What connection could exist between your rage at life's inevitable hard knocks and this 11-year-old walking home from a sleepover?
They're doing a lot of praying in Sarasota now. They're asking why, if there is a God, he could let a disturbed man be on the loose and at the right place and time to grab Carlie.
We need a lot of faith to come to terms with what happened to this child. My own faith runs short. I ask, and I don't get a single answer. Just the fact of this one senseless act, and the absolute necessity that a killer be made to pay.
