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Eerie, elusive van man rattles Rye residents
By PHIL REISMAN
THE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: December 5, 2004)
There once was a man who drove a green van.
That sounds like the the beginning of an innocent limerick or a Dr. Seuss rhyme, but anyone following the news would instantly recognize it as the thumbnail profile of a sick, peripatetic freak-on-wheels whose single-minded purpose in life appears to be a desire to snatch and carry off children.
He is undoubtedly real, this van-driving man. But he is rapidly becoming the stuff of suburban myth.
For more than a month, he has managed to elude police capture despite the fact that he has traveled across a very short locus and has brazenly popped up over and over again in one particular neighborhood of Rye. He is like a supernatural specter, the "thing" under the bed and the bogeyman outside the window.
Indeed, he has been seen only through the eyes of very frightened children who invariably describe encounters with an aggressive, middle-aged white man with dark, curly hair, crooked, yellow teeth, raspy voice and beard stubble. No one has gotten a license plate number. He has escaped helicopter surveillance, stakeouts and stepped-up patrols. It's as if adults can't see him at all.
And yet he is every parent's waking nightmare — the invisible, primitive force of evil that waits in the shadows.
The green van which he rarely leaves sometimes changes in the telling. Sometimes in descriptions it morphs into an SUV or a minivan or a regular passenger car. Sometimes the man has an accomplice, a blonde woman with long fingernails.
We live in a strange time of Osama bin Laden terror and Harry Potter fantasy, so the police are probably faced with the constant task of parsing reality from imagination when it comes to sightings of the man in the green van. But parental anxiety can hardly be discounted or dismissed. This is also the age of Megan's Law, Amber Alerts and official notifications that arrive from schools whenever a sexual predator is released from jail and moves into the neighborhood.
They're out there, these miserable sharks. I know that firsthand.
In fact, the recurring incidents of the man in the green van brought back an unsettling memory. In 1989, my family lived in Manursing Lodge, a four-story rental apartment building on Davis Avenue in Rye, just a short block away from Grapal Street and Palisades Road, where Wednesday night two 9-year-old boys were accosted by the curly-haired man and the blonde woman.
We loved living in Rye, but the building (now a renovated co-op) was a run-down place in those days, cursed by falling plaster, cockroaches and bad plumbing. People who lived there were either on their way up in the world or on their way down. In the back of the building, on the street below, was a large garage with a leaking roof where police occasionally chased away squatters.
My two boys were little then, just 4 and 1. One afternoon in late April of that year, the 4-year-old was happily playing outside with his friend, a 5-year-old girl who also lived in Manursing Lodge, when they were approached by a man in a car.
He motioned to my son and asked him if he wanted a ride. Luckily, some older girls saw what was happening and sounded an alarm. My son and the little girl ran from the would-be predator's grasp and the man drove off. I was at work at the time, and I only got the details of the incident later from my wife, who had been upstairs in our third-floor apartment and was alerted by the commotion. The incident was reported to Rye police by the mother of the 5-year-old girl.
On Friday, I dug deep into the newspaper's electronic archives and found the news item about it. It was a brief account, only four paragraphs, and curiously there was no mention of my son, only the little girl. Apparently her mother's vanity got in the way of the complete truth.
The headline said, "Police Think Man May Have Tried To Lure Girl Into Car."
I read the piece over. A Rye detective was quoted as saying, "We haven't had an incident like that happen in quite a while."
My son and the girls gave a pretty good description. The man was driving a silver, four-door sedan. There was fishing equipment in the back seat, an interesting detail since the marshy inlets of the Long Island Sound were a short distance away and always attracted roadside fishermen.
One thing startled me in the account. The man was described as white, between 20 and 30 years and had short, curly black hair.
My God, could it be that the man in the silver sedan is now the 40-year-old man in the green van? It's highly doubtful.
But I do know a couple of things: Child molesters cannot be cured of their evil obsessions, and that stranger who wanted to take my little boy for a ride on a long-ago day in April was never caught.
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