The Black Cadillac (18 page)

Zach pursued a career in basketball and earned a sports scholarship to a big college school. The kid could play basketball and dreamed of playing professionally. He never forgot the day he and his friend exposed the man in the black Cadillac.

Cody ended up pursuing a communications degree at a nearby college. Cody wanted to be a public and motivational speaker. He wanted to inform children of the dangers of talking to strangers. Every now and then, he would pick up the pencil and draw still. His mother couldn’t have been any prouder of her son.

Mandy went on with her life and became good friends with Cody and Olive. She had years of therapy and nightmares, but she would be forever grateful to the boy that saved her life.

The parents of Sam Jennings finally found closure of their daughter’s murder. For years, they had given up hope on finding the person that took their daughter out of their lives. Though the pain of not having their daughter loomed, they were also grateful to the boys for uncovering Wermer’s horrible secret.

Many years after, now a grown thirty-two-year-old man, Cody sat at the kitchen table of his home looking at his ten-month-old daughter in her high chair. The smile on her face was priceless as he scooped a spoonful of baby food out of the bowl and fed his baby girl.

He thought back to that day he was walking to school and looked at his daughter. He realized the world had changed since he was a boy. Technology had taken over, but it was still a bad world full of bad people. He thought about Sam Jennings’s parents and how they no longer had their baby girl. He thought about the relief he saw on Mandy Coefield’s parents’ faces when they held her in their arms.

He looked at his daughter again, told her how much he loved her, and kissed her on the forehead. It was at that moment that Cody realized how precious life was and how it could all be ended in a heartbeat. With one last thought, Cody would do it all over again to save his own daughter.

EPILOGUE

We live in a society today of feast or famine. As time has passed previously in history, the youth is the future of the world. Every forty seconds in the United States, a child becomes missing or abducted.* Protecting our children must be top priority as the world evolves.

Where there is good, there is always evil. Though this is a fictional story, people like Melvin Wermer exist in the world today. As individuals, it’s our job to keep our children out of harm’s way and out of the grasp of people like Wermer.

Child abductors, child molesters, and child kidnappers all have different ways of thinking. Their brains are wired differently than a normal human being’s. Some people are just pure evil. It is not normal to have feelings to kill or not feel remorse for terrible things that have been done. They are not able to feel and never will. Unfortunately, there is no helping people like Wermer. We may never understand why, but that’s just the way it goes.

Be aware of the things going on in your child’s life. If you have a daughter, know that 74 percent of the victims of a nonfamily child abduction are girls.* Care enough about your child and talk to them about the dangers of the world and how to react to difficult situations. As a society, we have become too busy with our lives and have lost focus of the bigger picture: our children.

My mother once told me that once you had a child of your own, you would do anything for that child. It wasn’t until I had my beautiful baby girl that I fully understood what she meant by that. If it came down to it, I would sacrifice my life for my baby girl.

Taking things for granted is something that people have become accustomed to. We need to be grateful to have our children because, in the blink of an eye, they can be taken from us. Thousands of families have a lost or missing child in a missing person’s case across the country. We need to think about those parents and their loved ones in times of despair.

We must teach our children at a young age about stranger danger and bad people. We, as parents, must outsmart evil men like Wermer and stop incidents before they can happen. In the guarded world we live in where no one even says hi to anyone anymore, we must be aware of others around us.

If you see something out of the ordinary, speak up. If something doesn’t seem right, it probably isn’t. Be on the lookout because 80 percent of child abductions by a stranger happen within a quarter mile of the child’s home.* Get involved in neighborhood-watch programs in the community.

As parents, if we can’t do these simple things, then we have failed as guardians.

* Facts found on parents.com.