My parents moved us out of Newark a year ago so that we could escape what crime and poverty have done to the city. A week before we moved into Colonia, N.J., we heard the news:
“The governor of New Jersey called for a review of a state youth services agency on Friday after a 10-year-old boy was charged with kidnapping, sexually abusing and murdering a three-year-old.
“The younger boy, Amir Beeks, was found, badly injured, in a drainage ditch early on Wednesday evening, a half hour after he was reported to have vanished from a local library. The three-year-old, who police said had been beaten with a baseball bat and sexually assaulted, was placed on life support at a local hospital, but died on Thursday morning.”
You never hear about this sort of thing in Newark. Sure, you hear about the armed robberies, the drug deals gone bad, and even the gang wars, but nothing like this.
This crime hit so close to home that I’m reminded of it every time I step into my backyard. I should be happy that I actually have a backyard now, one with towering oak trees, a pool, and even a shallow creek that runs through a wooded area, Instead, I am troubled and upset.
My fourteen year old little brother went for a walk along the creek with me one day. We often go there often on nice, sunny days and ride bikes on the trails that the kids who lived in our house before us made. We had fun, but one spot in the creek sparked a memory in my brain. I try not to imagine what it must have looked like, but I see it anyway: a three year old boy lying face down in the shallow waters, with tadpoles swimming by and fallen leaves floating past him. I never tell my brother what I am thinking, although I’m sure that he will catch on one day. I don’t want him to have the same memory as I do every time we’re back there.
I don‘t want to, but I find myself imagining riding on those trails without my brother. It seems tragic to think that this young boy, a boy that I never knew, can’t ride on those trails with his family. Then I imagine, what if that were one of my siblings? What if my other brother, also ten, was in that library instead of Amir Beeks?
Would we be better off in Newark? Nothing ever happened to us in Newark. Do we really need a bigger house with a big backyard, a pool, and oak trees? I didn’t want to move anyway.
I suppose that this is just my imagination running away with me or my older brother instincts kicking in. The odds of this, or something similar, happening again are slim. But what were the odds of this happening right when we were moving?
Around this time of year, as the leaves are falling off the trees, plants are dying, and everything is going through the season’s changes, we are easily reminded of our mortality. I try to remember that with death comes the starting over and rebirth of something new and just as beautiful. It just takes some time to get over it and for those leaves that have fallen into the creek to grow back on the oak tree in the spring.
Anthony Bradfield wrote this essay and took the accompanying photograph in Mike Zeugin’s fall 2004 class, “Writing Nonfiction, at Rutgers-Newark. Posted September 2005.
