Member-only story
My Direction Changed
At Nineteen
I was a nineteen year old young woman before Princess Diana, before 9/11 and the war on terror. While I was aware of the realities of life, I never thought someone I knew would be killed. My first laptop was given to me by Neal because he knew I needed one, back then laptops weren’t as common as they are now, and it was an expensive gift, but that didn’t matter. Neal was a generous man. He wouldn’t have known that a short time after he gave me that laptop, he and his twelve-year-old son would be murdered, that a mother’s life would be upended. And a woman who because she persisted, because she moved on with her life would be looked at with eyes of suspicion.
The damp newspaper on that chilly morning, the smell of rain, the phone calls that came far earlier than normal, and the reality of a situation we couldn’t understand are still fresh in my mind. Father and son were murdered, but this wasn’t just any Father and Son, it wasn’t some tragic headline, it was something far more impactful, and heartbreaking when you know the man and the child.
In a small upper middle class Bay Area town called Hercules, murders like the Abernathy Murders aren’t supposed to happen. The place was supposed to be safe, especially at home, but sadly, that wasn’t the case.
