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Over time, 'meanness started happening'

Despite crime's decline, people still live in fear, thinking the world is more dangerous than it is.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published October 16, 2006

	[Times photo: Edmund D. Fountain]
	Lori Krasemann Bolesta takes out the trash in front of her home south of Brooksville on Friday as her son Carter, 12, checks the mail. Bolesta is afraid to let Carter or 15-year-old Kelsey check the mail or take out the trash by themselves.

BROOKSVILLE - Kelsey Bolesta is a 15-year-old honor student who plays varsity volleyball and wants to be a doctor. Carter Bolesta is 12 and takes tae kwon do. But they can't ride bikes outside their fenced-in property, or take out the trash, or go to the end of the driveway to pick up the mail, or go alone to the movies or the mall or even the public library.

Their mother doesn't let them.

"There's just too many freaky, weird people out there now," Lori Krasemann Bolesta said. "People are scary now.

"I've almost gotten to the point of telling my kids: 'Don't have kids.' It's just such a worry."

The Times talked to dozens of longtime locals in the months leading up to this week's celebration of the town's 150th anniversary. One topic that kept coming up: Brooksville's not as safe as it once was.

The facts: Violent crime actually is going down, and has been for decades - in Hernando County, in Florida, across the country as a whole - and that includes child abductions, murders and sexual assaults. Stats say it's safer now than arguably it has ever been.

But this is also a fact: The people who have lived around here for some time don't feel safer, which, in a way, is just as real as what those numbers show.

"The one thing that's very clear is that, for whatever set of reasons, contemporary Americans have become bad estimators of the risk of abduction or sexual predation," said Peter Stearns, a history professor at George Mason University in Virginia and the author of Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America. "We consistently think there's a higher chance of it than there really is."

But this gap in perception and reality, here and in lots of other places, according to Stearns and other anxiety experts, has less to do with crime rates and more to do with a dwindling sense of community and social togetherness.

Some history:

Back in the 1930s parents here told their kids to be careful around the hobos who during the Depression knew they could stop at George Maillis' grocery store downtown and get a free four-pack of cinnamon rolls.

In general, though, at that time and then into the '40s, '50s and '60s, people didn't worry like they do today.

"We never locked our doors," said Barbara Breen McKeown, Hernando High School Class of '46. "Nobody ever did. Never, ever, ever do I ever remember anybody taking the key out of their car."

Martha Steen Lambert and the late Ginger Garnett were in the Class of '57. When they were kids, they said, they stood out on the side of U.S. 98 north of town, near where there was an old artesian well, and smiled and waved at passing truck drivers to make them stop.

"And we'd give them water, and they'd drive on," Lambert said over the summer. "We never even thought about anything bad happening."

"You weren't afraid," Garnett said.

Joe Mason, Class of '61, is an attorney in town now, and Dan Merritt Sr., Class of '60, is a judge, but back when they were boys, they rode their bikes all day long up and down the hills of downtown and played cowboys and Indians with dime-store cap guns in tangerine groves.

Other boys played sandlot baseball in the summer and sandlot football in the fall or climbed trees and built forts in the woods or lobbed wild Florida potatoes as make-believe grenades in shoot-'em-up war games. "You were free to roam about town," said Bruce Snow, Class of '65, a local attorney. "You just didn't worry about kids being kidnapped by predators."

"You were pretty much booted outside," said Ernie Chatman, Class of '67, the veteran cross-country coach at Hernando High. "Go outside. Time to play."

"The carefree stuff was a gradual thing," said Mark Browning, Class of '72, who works in the family's downtown insurance business. "It was lost over time."

"It seemed like meanness started happening," said Buddy Selph, Class of '74, a local real estate broker.

"We rode bikes forever," said Darryl Johnston, Class of '81, an attorney with an office downtown and the brother of the mayor. "You'd leave in the morning and go and explore and you'd come back for dinner."

But he's a dad now. His daughter is 7. And she doesn't get to do that. "We played all over, who knows where, even at 7 or 8 years old," he said, "but there just seems to be a whole lot more bad people out there today. That probably started to change even 10, 15 years after I was a kid."

Folks here say a few key events stripped them of the sense that their kids could play on their own and not get hurt or killed.

Hernando Deputy Lonnie Coburn was shot dead in 1978 after making a traffic stop out by Interstate 75 on the eastern end of the county.

Jennifer Odom was 12 in 1993 when she was kidnapped from a bus stop in rural northeastern Pasco County. Her body was dumped in an orange grove over the Hernando line.

And last year, of course, Jessica Lunsford, the 9-year-old from Homosassa, just to the north, was taken from her bed in her home in the night and raped and buried alive in trash bags.

Data, though, show these were awful but isolated incidents.

From 2004 to '05, the population in Hernando went up 3.8 percent, but arrests went down 4.2 percent, and sex offenses dropped 16.8 percent, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. The number of sex offenses in Florida - a state notorious for recent high-profile cases of this kind - in fact has gone down every year since 1997 except one.

It just doesn't feel that way.

"People are getting kidnapped, killed for no reason," Kelsey Bolesta said earlier this month before one of her volleyball games. "School shootings, molestations, stuff like that. It's just not good."

"I can't just go wander wherever," Carter Bolesta said, "because I might get stolen or something."

Their mother gets sad.

"Because they can't have the childhood I had," she said. "Brooksville used to be such a trustworthy town."

"Every parent was a parent to every child," said Bernardo J. Carducci, a professor of psychology and the director of the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast. "That's the point. There was more social connectedness, and when you had social connectedness, there was accountability there - there were lots of eyes.

"Predators bank on this sense of social isolation. So here's what you do:

"Volunteer.

"Get involved in your community.

"Let people know who you are."

That's one possible solution.

Lori Krasemann Bolesta's solution?

When she was a teenager, she hung out with her friends in the same spots where all the high-schoolers here hung out in the '70s and '80s - the Pizza Hut and the A&W, the 41 Drive-In, the Brooksville Twin movie theater, the old Publix parking lot, open fields out Croom Road.

Not her kids.

Kelsey Bolesta spends Friday nights doing homework.

A few years ago, she had to sell candy bars for a fundraiser for volleyball, and Lori Krasemann Bolesta and her parents bought the whole box from her, for $100, so she wouldn't have to go sell door to door.

She goes to Nature Coast Technical High School. Her mother works next door at Chocachatti Elementary. And she calls her mother on her cell phone to tell her she's walking across the parking lot to go meet up with her.

Kelsey Bolesta sometimes swims in the pool or jumps on the trampoline at home.

Carter Bolesta likes playing PlayStation 2. Some of his favorite games, he said, are Dead to Rights, Devil May Cry and Resident Evil. "Terror lurks inside," that last game's Web site says.

[Last modified October 15, 2006, 20:39:18]