Dani's Story: A Journey From Neglect to Love (25 page)

She told us that it had turned into something much bigger, not just the length of the story, but its presentation. That it was actually going to be a “multi-media package.” I asked her what that meant. Lane explained that in addition to the print story, there would be audio, a slide show, and even some video on the website. We knew that we had been recorded, and we knew Melissa had a small video camera, but it didn’t occur to me that there would be anything but a story in the actual newspaper. I was definitely not media-savvy.

I think Lane was trying to prepare us for the size of the story, especially since we were so reluctant in the first place. Then she told us that she had also spoken to Michelle Crockett, and the birth mother was included in the story.

My heart sank, and my stomach knotted. “We asked you not to talk to her,” Bernie said, his voice very testy. Lane said that her editors had insisted on “balance,” and if she had not given the mother the opportunity to speak, the story likely would have been pulled. Honestly, that would have been fine by us.

Bernie asked Lane when it was going to run, and she said in a couple of days. She could probably hear me gulp over phone. She told us she would make sure we were e-mailed the copy before that and that she hoped we would feel as if it had been worth it.

As it turned out, we didn’t get the copy until the night before it was supposed to run. I sat down in front of the computer, with Bernie looking over my shoulder. It was even more nerve-wracking to read than I thought it would be. It’s so unsettling to see your life spread out in public like that. Some of the things we said sounded pretty goofy in print, others I couldn’t remember at all, and we worried that some of what had been written about Dani when we first met her might embarrass her. Did the fact that she couldn’t read the article and in fact wasn’t even aware of its existence make it any less of an invasion of her privacy or more?

The first thing that I read made me cringe. “Part One: The Feral Child.” It reminded me of when we first saw Dani’s photo at the Heart Gallery and the social workers suggested we look up the term. I know it is used to describe children like Dani and other children who are much worse—like the boy raised in the woods with wolves or the girl raised by dogs—although Dr. Perry had once written that those children have an advantage over severely neglected children, because they have at least been nurtured by something. But the word just sounds ugly and dirty, and “feral” is not at all how we ever saw Dani, even at her worst. Yet there it was, in bold print for everyone to read. We felt as if the word was used to grab people’s attention and was sensationalizing, and that seemed to be a slight to Dani.

Bernie was very impressed by Detective Holste and said he was going to call the Plant City Police Department to thank him for the role he played in saving Dani.

I was glad Lane had talked to Mr. O’Keefe, though I know he really didn’t want to talk to her. And Leslie Goldenberg said nice things. We smiled at what Dr. Armstrong said about her first impression of Dani: “My hope was that she would be able to sleep through the night, to be out of diapers, and to feed herself. . . . If things went really well, Danielle would end up in a nice nursing home.” It was good to know we had already surpassed those expectations.

And then we came to the part with Michelle Crockett—“Part Three: The Mother.” Bernie walked away. He has said all along that he doesn’t want to know anything about her; that the past is the past, Dani is with us now, and that’s all that matters.

I’ll admit to some curiosity but from a psychological point of view—how could any mother do this to her child? She had cared for her two boys; how could she have done this to her own flesh and blood?

Michelle was still living in Plant City, in a mobile home with her boys near where she had lived previously. According to the story, the trailer was clean, which was surprising, considering the appalling conditions of the shack Dani had lived in.

It’s impossible to know where, if anywhere, Michelle Crockett was telling the truth. She admitted to meeting a man in a casino whose name she couldn’t recall—Ron, or maybe Bob—and going back to his hotel room. She claimed that she took Dani out for pizza once, to the park, and to the library, but she couldn’t remember where they were or the names of the places.

She actually showed Lane copies of the abuse reports from 2002 but only because she thought that they proved that she was not an unfit mother, because the DCF did not remove Dani either time. She claimed that she was “shocked when the police took Danielle out of my house that day.”

Maybe the reason she was able to do what she did to Dani was because she lived in such denial; she refused to accept responsibility for anything. It was all someone else’s fault, everything happened to her and not because of her. It made me sick but not as sick as I felt when I read that she and her sons had sneaked into the hospital the day after Dani was taken into custody and taken a photo of her in her hospital gown. Michelle showed it to Lane; I hate that Michelle even has this photo. That she’s not in jail is a travesty.

There were a couple of inaccuracies I definitely wanted to be taken care of. For one, the story said that the reason we adopted was because I couldn’t have any more children. That’s not true. We just knew we couldn’t do any better than Willie, so we stopped there. We had always told him this when he was little and would ask for a baby brother or sister. And it was true. We couldn’t do any better than our sweet Willie.

The other inaccuracy was more upsetting. Lane wrote that when Dani came, we moved Willie into the laundry room, squeezing a daybed between the washing machine and Dani’s rocking horse. That was totally untrue. Poor Willie! He had actually been in the biggest bedroom in the house, the one that Paul and Steven had shared when we first moved into that house. The room had two single beds that had been theirs, and neither one was squeezed up beside the washing machine! It was true that Willie sometimes got scared down there, but he was the one who came up with the walkie-talkie idea, and he went upstairs to sleep any time that he was anxious. We knew he would grow out of it and eventually, as a teenager, would cherish his privacy on the lower level—as well as his easy access to the pool.

When we called Lane about those two things, she told us that the story had already been printed because it was a special package. I pointed out the errors, and she apologized and said they would be corrected in the online version. But meanwhile, readers would come to believe we were monsters for squeezing poor Willie into a laundry room, too scared to sleep. For the first time since we had moved, I was glad we weren’t living in Florida, and I wouldn’t have to hide my face in the grocery store for being a terrible mother.

The story went online the night of July 31 and was published in the paper on August 1, 2008.

Bernie and I e-mailed friends and members of the family to warn them. “Hello, everyone. Danielle’s story hit the
St. Petersburg Times
website tonight. She is ‘The Girl in the Window’ story. Willie does NOT sleep in the laundry room, he has his own room! I don’t know where that came from! Dani continues to progress. A couple weeks ago she said ‘reee’ and handed mom a book to read to her. Thanks for all your prayers and encouragement! We miss you all!”

Carolyn Eastman had told us that stories about the Heart Gallery and successful adoptions always generated a big response and lots of interest. But nothing could have prepared us for the reaction “The Girl in the Window” got.

Within forty-eight hours of the story being online, the paper’s website crashed because of all of the hits. They got it back up, and it crashed again.

I had never paid attention to reader comments before. I hardly knew they existed, but these were at the bottom of the story, so I started to read them. The first came in before the paper was on the stands, at 1:09 a.m. on August 1. “Anonymous” gave credit to the DCF for doing something right. I was surprised, considering that the DCF left Dani in that house three years longer than it should have.

Five comments later, another “anonymous” said that it wasn’t right that we were “making William sleep in the laundry room next to the washer and it sounds like he was being a little abused.” I got mad all over again about not being able to fact-check the story.

I read on. Most people expressed outrage at Michelle, heartbreak over what Dani had gone through, and gratitude that she was in a safe place now. I had to stop reading, though, after about the fifth mention of Willie being in the laundry room. It was maddening, but there was nothing we could do about it.

The paper and Hillsborough Kids were being inundated with calls from people wanting to know how to help. Other members of the media called the Heart Gallery looking for us. It was the second time in two days that I was glad we were at a relatively safe distance from the hullabaloo. If we had still been in Florida, we probably couldn’t have left our house.

Carolyn called us to see what she could do to help, and I nearly cried in relief. She asked if we might consider setting up a website for Dani, which would take some of the traffic away from the paper and the Children’s Board and the Heart Gallery. She really stepped in for us, finding someone from a graphics company in Tampa to donate his time to design and create the site. We talked to people at the graphics company a couple of times, they got permission from Melissa to use some photos, and within days “Dani’s Story” was up. The owner of the company was so touched by the story that he decided he wanted to adopt, and we advised him on what to expect and how to work the system.

That helped us process everything. We had said all along that if hearing our story inspired just one person to adopt, then it was worth going public with it. There was one, and we felt as if a prayer had been answered.

People started coming to the website as soon as the paper added a link to it on “The Girl in the Window” story. There were also links to child abuse hotlines, the Heart Gallery, and information on how to foster. We asked the designer to put links to the Heart Gallery on Dani’s home page as well. I imagined hundreds of people going to those sites who never would have without the story, and the laundry-room issue shrunk to its appropriate size, compared with the enormousness of what this story had done.

On Dani’s website, the designer had added a link so that readers could send e-mails to us. This was better than an address or a phone number. We decided to connect it to Bernie’s e-mail address because he never uses it. Mine is full of everything from family news to school things to goat sales.

The first time Bernie checked his e-mail after the website was up, he yelled, “Holy cow! What is going on?” He sat dumbfounded in front of the computer. There were dozens and dozens of e-mails. Bernie went from getting maybe one e-mail a week from Bass Pro Shops to hundreds. We felt as if we had to answer every one, but we were just completely overwhelmed.

It got even crazier after the story was picked up by other papers in Florida and I guess around the country and then the world, because we were getting e-mails through Dani’s website from everywhere, places I had never heard of in my life. The senders ran the gamut from people who had special needs kids of their own and wanted us to know how much they related to us, to people who had never had children but were moved by our story. We heard from people who promised to pray and light a candle for us. We heard from friends of relatives, relatives of friends, and friends of friends. We heard from people who had “cures” and suggested links, books, and websites. We heard from teachers who had collected cards from their students and wanted to send them to Willie and Dani, from professors who wanted to use the story as a teaching tool in their classes, and from grandmas who wanted to sew quilts for the kids.

We even got an e-mail from a young woman who offered to babysit for free, which practically made me reach through the computer to hug her. We had never even tried to find a sitter, knowing that any normal person would run for her life once she heard the job description. Back in Florida, the Kennys and the LaPiccolas had been happy to have Dani in their own houses for an hour or so, if I really needed to get something done, but we barely knew any of our neighbors on Gilbert Valley Road.

Lots of college students contacted us, explaining that they were studying children with special needs and wondering whether they could interview us about Dani. I wrote back to all of them and answered as many of their questions as I could, either via e-mail or on the phone. We also heard from students who had been inspired to change their majors to do something that would help children, and that was very gratifying.

There were many media inquiries. We heard from an editor with the Readers Digest Association, and because we were fans of
Readers Digest
, we were open to the magazine’s proposal. The editor wanted to condense and reprint Lane’s article with Melissa’s photos and do a short follow-up interview with us. Their focus would be on faith and inspiring others to open their hearts to fostering or adopting.