WHEN the teacher handed me a note last week, I feared I’d been busted for slipping peanut butter into my daughter’s summer-camp snack bag – a private-school felony.
Don’t I wish.
“We feel that you need to be aware of a recent incident,” the missive began.
“On June 20 and July 1, a woman approached the caregivers of small children and introduced herself as a friend of the family. After a period of small talk, she asked to take the children.”
Fortunately, the caregivers called the cops.
The stomach-churning news zipped through Brownstone Brooklyn like the plague. Not here!
From Salt Lake City to suburban California, precious children, like adorable Samantha Runnion, lately are turning up missing or murdered. But who could imagine that here, in the pleasant, tree-lined, yuppie-concentrated enclave of Brooklyn Heights, a child-obsessed maniac could be on the loose?
“Oh, my God!” exclaimed one mom as she perused the letter, which advised us to “take this situation seriously, but please, do not overreact.”
“Not overreact?”
On Tuesday, our deepest fears were allayed – for a moment. The Brooklyn Heights predator, cops say, turns out to be an unstable 35-year-old woman from Florida named Tara Ann MacDonald, who was picked up on Tuesday after trying to snatch an 8-month-old baby as she strolled with her mom.
That’s the good news. Now, listen to this: MacDonald has been arrested five times before for trying to take other people’s children.
So why the hell was she on our streets?
The problem, say prosecutors, is that authorities have a hard time locking up someone who hasn’t hurt anyone – yet.
“In misdemeanor cases, the mental-health authorities keep her as minimal a time as they wish, and there’s nothing we can do,” said a Brooklyn prosecutor. You have to prove the predator was ready to back up her child-fixation with force to win a felony conviction. Not easy.
“I’m a Brooklyn Heights mom, too,” said the prosecutor. “This is of concern to everyone I know.”
The FBI says we’ve little to fear, statistically speaking. Abductions by strangers are extremely rare – maybe 100 a year.
But that does little to soothe frazzled Brooklyn parents, who’ve made the continued incarceration of MacDonald into a quest.
So how can we protect our kids – without traumatizing them?
“I’ve had The Stranger Talk with my daughter,” said one mom.
It also doesn’t hurt never to take your eyes off your young ones.