Aarone

If Aarone Thompson had been a white girl, you would have heard of her by now. Her case is more chilling than that of Jonbenet Ramsey, the Denver area's winner and still champ in child cause celebre cases. I guess I don't need to keep on going about how there's a deep and disturbing racial divide here, more so than in the South. I started to write about this when Kathleen wrote so movingly about New York's reaction to the death of Nixzmary Brown. Unfortunately, the reaction here to Aarone Thompson has been more muted, in part because the case just isn't as clear-cut, in part because her brown face doesn't fit with Denver's image of itself as a playground for the upscale bourgeoisie.

Aarone (her name has an accent aigu on the "e," but I don't know how to do that with HTML) would be seven years old, if only anyone could find her. She lived with her father and his girlfriend in Aurora, a city next door to Denver, supposedly until the beginning of November. (Her mother, at least at the time, lived in a homeless shelter in Detroit.) For two days, news coverage here revolved around the massive hunt for the sweet-faced little girl who had allegedly wandered off from her home on a freezing cold afternoon, supposedly after a dispute with her father's girlfriend over a cookie.
Two days into the search, the police abruptly called it off. Then came the announcement: Aarone had been gone for a year and a half. She hadn't been seen by the other kids in the house, hadn't been seen by neighbors, hadn't ever been enrolled in school, nothing. A little girl had disappeared into the ether.
Nobody ever has been charged in Aarone's disappearance. Nothing was found in a grim search of her house and yard and surrounding areas for her remains. Friends of her family continued their door-to-door search for a live child. Nothing.
Now, four months later, the police and press have grown eerily quiet. Every once in a while, someone comes forward and swears they have seen Aarone -- getting on a city bus, walking down a sidewalk. For me, there is the equally horrific thought that, if she didn't meet a terrible end nearly two years ago, she's wandering around out there, somewhere in the world. I see her in my dreams sometimes, the little girl with braids and a wry smile. If I were the praying kind, I would do it for her.
This is the first mention of Aarone in the Denver Post in months. The Aurora police chief takes the occasion of the father's girlfriend's arrest on traffic charges to talk some smack about her. I'm going to take the politician's route and avoid saying whether I think this is deserved. Rather, I would ask him to focus his energy on finding this little girl, dead or alive, and rounding up the person or people who might have hurt her. There's always evidence. There's always a way to bring justice to the deserving.