When I was 11 years old, I lived in some very small apartments in my old hometown with my mom and my younger sister and my (now) step-dad. The people who lived right across the hallway from us in the apartments used to babysit my sister and me when my mom and step-dad would go out. Our neighbors were Pam and Bob Linkey. They had a daughter who was a year or two older than me, her name was Elizabeth (or Liz). When my mother had gotten back on her feet and completed college, we moved across town into a small house which we rented for about a year. Our old neighbors from the apartments, however, would still watch us from time to time when my mom and Kevin went out to the bars or went out of town and needed a babysitter. I remember the last time we went over to be babysat like it was yesterday. It's been so long now that certain memories from that night have faded away, like the exact time and date it all happened, but the events that took place that night will always remain freshly burned in my skull. I still even remember the movie "Caddyshack" playing in the background while my sister was asleep and he was sitting next to my chair. I'm not scarred for life, I never had to see a counselor for it, I went on living a normal life and am not psychologically damaged by what happened that night, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm still just as angry as I ever was at that man...and nothing will change that. I will never rest in peace knowing he's still alive and walking the face of this earth, along with so many other sexual predators. I want people to know my story. I don't want people to have sympathy for this man. When this type of thing happens to little girls, I don't want them to think it was in any way their fault or that they did something wrong to deserve it. I don't want little girls to think this is right and never speak up and tell someone about what happened. That night, our old neighbors had some extended family staying over at their apartment, on top of babysitting my sister and me. There were a few points in time that I couldn't keep track of where everyone went. I know the cousin and the girlfriend and maybe a couple of kids went to the store or left to go home, Pam, his grouchy wife went to bed early, and Elizabeth, the daughter was either asleep or at a friend's house. I wasn't alone in the house, I was with my sleeping sister, the sleeping wife Pam, and possibly the sleeping daughter Elizabeth, and Bob...who was not asleep at all. Everytime I think back on it, I think about how Bob was paralyzed from the hips down and wheeled himself around in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and even still in that state, he still made an 11-year-old girl feel so powerless. It was late, Bob sat in his wheelchair in the kitchen, I slept in the reclining chair in the living room, and my little sister slept on the couch next to my chair in the same room as me. You know that feeling you get when you can't get to sleep, but you lay there anyway with your eyes closed because you don't know what else to do? Well, that was me. The entire apartment was quiet, except for Caddyshack playing on the television. I was just about asleep when I felt a presence next to me that I hate remembering. Bob, in his wheelchair, was next to my reclining chair while I was pretending to be asleep. He slowly reached his hand through the sleeve of my t-shirt and under my hand-me-down training bra and kept feeling my non-developed breasts. I, being only 11 at the time, had never been touched like that by anyone before, and I was very scared, I didn't know what was happening, and I couldn't believe that it was happening to me. I didn't know what to do except to just keep pretending I was alseep and hope with everything in my heart that this would all end soon. It didn't. In school, they tell you if something like this ever happens to you, if someone ever forces you to do something you don't want to do or touch you where you don't want to be touched, you should scream "NO" and tell another adult. Well, I'm afraid it just doesn't always happen like that. When something like this ACTUALLY happens to you, it's not like you've had practice doing it, and when you're that young, it's not like you really know what to do anyway. I, of all people, didn't know what to do, and I was a very bright 11-year-old girl. So I kept pretend-sleeping with my little sleeping sister lying next to me on the couch and him sitting on the other side of my chair, his hand in my t-shirt and his grimey gritty fingers violating me under my tiny bra. He leaned over and whispered in my ear "I love you", and I wondered if he thought or knew I was awake at that point. I continued to lay there helplessly pretending to be asleep, and after a while, he stopped. I kind of kept an eye on my 6-year-old sister, hoping she wouldn't wake up and see this gross old man with his hand in my shirt, and most importantly, hoping he wouldn't do to her what he'd just done to me. Luckily, I'm pretty positive he didn't touch my sister. I hoped and prayed my mom would knock on the door at any minute, but my parents were at the bar that night, so it was quite a while before they came to pick my sister and me up. Unfortunately, that wasn't the end of it. After he stopped the first time, a couple minutes passed and I "woke up". I figured if he did that to me while he thought I was sleeping, maybe he wouldn't do it anymore if he knew I was awake and comprehensive. I was wrong. He wheeled himself to the side of my chair again, and I just stared at Caddyshack. He started to do the same thing as he did before, only this time I was OBVIOUSLY awake, and he had turned the dining room light off so that the only light beaming on us was the light from the television. I thought my life couldn't get any worse than at that very moment, and I never wanted my mother so badly in my entire life to come save me as I did during those excurciating moments. He kept rubbing around in my bra through the side of my sleeve, then, leaving his arm under my bra, continued moving that hand downward toward the rest of my body. I remember wondering if the pressure of my tight little bra hurt his fat chubby arm because the pressure of the back band pulling on my back was beginning to hurt me with his arm stretching the front of it. He crept his hand into my little pants and under my underwear and I was so scared. I just really didn't want to be in that chair at all. I didn't know what to expect, I didn't know what was going to happen, I hoped and hoped and hoped that my sister would just stay sleeping because I didn't want her little baby-sister eyes to get a glimpse of anything so horrible. He leaned over again and whispered at me for me to spread my legs while his hand was tucked inside my jeans. The only thing I did in response to him telling me to spread my legs was to keep my legs closed while tears began streaming from my eyes. He then pulled his hand out from my pants and back from under my bra, and I remember feeling so uncomfortable, not only from where he was touching me, but also because he'd messed up my bra and it wasn't placed correctly over my breasts anymore, but I didin't want to fix it with him still sitting next to me. He sat there next to me for a couple more minutes doing nothing, then finally said "You're not going to tell anyone about this, are you", except it wasn't really a question, it was more of a manipulative demand. I usually don't tell lies, especially when I was 11, but I know he thought I was a freaking idiot when I lied to him and shook my head "no" and he believed me. He wheeled himself back into the kitchen and turned on the light, and I was so glad it was over. I heard him jumbling around in the kitchen, and he later hollered from the dining room and asked if I wanted any tea, like tea was going to make me forget about it all. I'm not sure if he asked me if I wanted tea to hear my voice and see if it was still trembling from crying, or if he actually thought I might want some tea from him. Yeah right. And I declined his offer for tea, I didn't want him to have any reason to come near me again. So I waited and waited and waited awake for what seemed like days, but I'm sure was only another half hour or so for my mother's knock at the front door to come pick us up. When she got there, everyone was cool, my mother never would have suspected a man in a wheelchair of such a thing at that time, especially with both my sister and me in the same room, and his wife and daughter sleeping down the hallway. My sister was clueless, and I remember being glad she didn't know anything. I remember walking to our car in the parking lot and not knowing exactly when or how to tell my mom what had happened...but I do remember not having one ounce of doubt that I was going to tell her what he did to me. My step-dad was carrying my sister to the car, she was still sleeping. We all got settled in the car and put our seatbelts on for the trek across the small town to our house. The entire ride home, I silently cried in the backseat, dreading having to tell my mom what happened, because I didn't even know if my 11 years of life experience at that time had prepared me for enough words to express to her what and how everything happened exactly. And when you're so young, you're not even used to talking about sex and touching and things like that, it's very uncomfortable. When we arrived home, my mom and I went into the house while Kevin stayed outside trying to carry my sleeping sister from the car and get the car locked up. I figured now would be my chance since it was just my mom and me...and I still remember my exact words through watery eyes, "mom, I don't know if you'll believe me or not, but Bob touched me" and she...flipped...out. I've never seen any situation escalate so quickly. Kevin came in and saw that something was the matter with my mother and me. He put my sister in her room and my mom told him what happened. Kevin is such an easy going guy, until that point, I'd never heard him curse, I'd never even seen him get angry, but I think that took the cake. He was in such shock and disbelief that such a horrific thing had just happened to his girlfriend's daughter, the front door opened and he said "I'm taking a walk". We heard the car start up outside, and I later realized he wasn't "walking", but that he'd driven back over to Bob's and banged on the door and was badly wanting to kill that man, but no one ever answered the door. My mother called the police...and I remember while she was on the phone she called to Bob's house. I heard my mother saying to his answering machine through gritted teeth something along the lines of "if I ever see you again, you better believe I'll be gouging your eyeballs out with my bare fingernails, and that's a promise". My mom loves me a lot. The police arrived to a house that had been completely turned upside-down. The police questioned me and asked if I'd be more comfortable answering questions with my mother there or if I wanted her to leave. I didn't really want to talk about it to ANYONE, let alone my mother, but I trusted her and I knew she probably wanted to know exactly what happened to her poor daughter, so I told the police she could stay. The fact that my mom was at the dining room table with me and the police officers made it even harder for me to talk about. They told me just to start from the beginning and tell them everything that happened and they asked questions alone the way. I was pretty frazzled the entire time while telling my story, but the worst was when I got to the part about him putting his hand down my pants and him telling me to spread my legs. I started crying and my mom started crying too and she knelt down on the floor next to my chair and we just hugged each other crying. I told them every last detail I could remember. My times, I know, were incorrect because at 11, you don't really have a good sense of time, so they asked me if I remember anything playing on tv so they could check times and I told them Caddyshack was playing. I even told them about him asking me for tea later. They wrote it all down in tiny notepads. After they left, my mom called my grandpa (her father...and also my favorite person in the world) and my mom put me on the phone with him after she had finished talking to him. He told me that if I was more comfortable sleeping in my mom's bed with her that night that I could do that. I didn't really feel ANY comfort that night, and sleeping with my mom at 11 was a little weird to me (my mother and I always got along very well, but I was just a very independent kid). Anyway, I figured since my grandpa had suggested it, it would be ok if I did...and I think my mom probably felt more at ease knowing I was right next to her as well. I'm sure she felt pretty helpless to the entire situation, I figured it was the least I could do. I think the next day or that weekend I was supposed to have a slumber party with some of my friends, but I wasn't really up for it, however, I told my mom I still wanted to have the sleepover because I didn't want my friends to think anything was wrong, I definitely didn't want to tell them what happened. The next few weeks or months or so, they sent a social worker named Heather to our house to check up on me and give us the down low on the situation with Bob and the police. Of course he denied everything at first. There was even talk about me having to appear in court. I think my mom was concerned, but I told Heather even though I didn't really want to tell people in court, that I'd still do it because I didn't want anyone to think he was innocent. I guess the police were very persistent and went over on several occasions to question him. They even came back to our house and questioned me a second time. I tried to do my best to tell them everything I could remember again, but after time had passed, certain little details slipped my memory. At the end of the second time they questioned me, I probably got all the times mixed up again, and forgot to tell them about him asking me about tea again. And so the police hinted at me and said "and he asked you for something at the end of the night?" and I said "oh, yeah, he asked me if I wanted tea". I'm sure the police might have questioned me because I kept making up different times of the night and forgot to mention the tea the second time around...and I'm sure it's easier to believe a wise old man over an 11-year-old girl, but the police officers who came to our house were always very nice and seemed to take interest in everything I said and made sure to write everything down. I'm not exactly sure how much time had passed, it had been a few weeks, and Bob finally confessed to everything that happened. He later said he did it because earlier on that night we were having fun throwing pennies at each other, and I threw one and it landed on his groin which made him embarrassed. What a crock of shit. Yeah, we threw pennies, and he was in a freaking wheelchair. If a penny bounces off your chest while you're sitting in a wheelchair, where else is the penny going to go besides down? Gravity, hello. And when my mom told me that, I said "well, there was one point in time when a penny went inside my shirt and inside my bra and I was very embarrassed to and got it out later in the bathroom". That didn't give me grounds for sexually molesting him. Freaking pennies, my ass. Heather told us he recieved 12 months probation, a $350 fine, lost his right to bare arms for a certain amount of time, couldn't be with anyone under the age of 18 for the next two (or three, I don't remember) years without another adult supervising, and his name would be on the registered sex offenders list for Illinois for the next 25 years. For some reason at the time it seemed like enough for him to just admit to what happened and be punished, but now that I'm older, I don't think that was enough punishment for what he did, especially because I see now that he's had a second offense. When all that went down, Liz the daughter didn't talk to me anymore, and when we passed each other in the hallways at school we pretended we didn't know each other. I think Pam even stuck up for Bob and said something like "well if Lori (my mom) hadn't been out getting drunk that night, maybe it wouldn't have happened", but honestly, come on. When you send your kids off to a babysitter you don't think to yourself "hmm, since I'm going to a bar right now, I think my daughter deserves to be sexually assaulted". No. No matter what reason for taking your children to a babysitter, whether it's to go out and have a nice time with your boyfriend at the local bar in town, or to go grocery shopping, or to go visit your grandmother in Nantucket, you expect your babysitter to babysit, not babymolest. My mother has NEVER done anything bad to me, never would, and never will. I know if she had any feeling that our old neighbors were not well-suited to watch my sister and me, she wouldn't have taken us there in the first place. I know my mom would never purposefully put me or my sister in that situation, and I couldn't have asked for a better reaction from my mom when I told her what he did to me that night. I wondered if my mom was going to believe me or not just because nothing like that had ever happened to me and I didn't know what to expect. But my mom and Kevin and grandpa and the police and Heather were all wonderful during that horrible period in my life, and I couldn't have asked for a better group.