“She’s alive and we’re sleeping and we would wake up, sneak out and get away while he was sleeping in his car.” “It’s very vivid to me that we are together,” she said. In her dream, the two of them were in Dugan’s parked car. She refused to talk to strangers about what happened. She saw counselors two or three times, but they were men and she was deathly afraid of men.
She slept with her parents for months and could not go to the bathroom alone. In an interview before she testified, Horton said the days and weeks after her escape were jumbled in her mind now. “My biggest concern is Opal,” Ackerman said. Wolfe asked him what his biggest concern was today. “I was happy - then she told me something else,” said Horton, again breaking into tears. On June 17, a female FBI agent who had befriended the girl took her to a park and told her Melissa had been found. The teacher called police.įor the next two weeks, the police questioned Horton. She ran several blocks to the house of someone she knew, a teacher. I took off running, ducking so he couldn’t see me,” she testified. “I waited until I couldn’t see the car anymore. She poked her head out and saw Melissa through the car window. “I whispered to Melissa that we had to go.” But Dugan “grabbed me by the neck,” she said, “and threw me through a window into the car, like a ball through the window.”Īfter she ran, she testified, she hid in a tractor tire at a nearby John Deere dealership until she heard a car take off. When Dugan got out of his car, “he walked closer, saying he couldn’t hear us,” Horton testified. Michael Wolfe, who was questioning her, paused twice to keep his emotions in check. She broke down in tears as she walked to the witness stand and struggled to regain her composure. Last week, Horton told her story in court for the first time. His sentencing for the Nicarico crime is underway, with a death penalty hearing continuing Tuesday. Two years before Dugan grabbed Opal and Melissa, he had abducted, raped and killed 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico of Naperville, Ill. I still don’t talk to the Ackermans as much as I should because I always feel like, ‘Do they look at me and feel awkward or sad?’ I just don’t want them to feel uncomfortable.” “When Mike Ackerman hugs me,” Horton said of Melissa’s father, “it’s not just a normal hug. For others, she is a chilling reminder of danger and an example of fragile perseverance. For parents whose children could not escape, she is the wrenching image of what might have been. Brian Dugan was apprehended and pleaded guilty.ĭugan took something from Opal Horton that day, and has never really left her, even as she tries to deny his presence.
0 kommentar(er)
