I Know My First Name Is Steven by Mike Echols Read Free Book Online

Stevie. "It really hurt me that I didn't get to see him before he left for school that morning," Del recalled sadly. "He was really the little guy . . . I think he was so cute. He would go in the bathroom and comb his hair in themornings before he went to school. He would pat his hair into place . . . he was so sharp. Then Kay and me'd stand in the house and watch him leave for school. . . ." Del's voice trailed off emotionally.
    Chief Kulbeth first learned of Steven's disappearance from Knutsen. "My captain came into my office and informed me that we had a missing child, which is not unusual. The thing is, most police officers fear having a missing child more than anything else. Fortunately, most of them turn up down the block, over at a friend's house, or playing in somebody's backyard. But nevertheless, it's something that I had strict orders to my department all of the years I was there, that when we had a missing child I wanted to know about it immediately.
    "But in Steve's case, as time progressed, we became more and more concerned. As with most missing child cases, we did the routine things first. We put out the broadcast, had the juvenile officers check the neighborhood, the school, and with friends . . . that sort of thing. Of course, on into the first evening we suspected that we had something more than just the ordinary missing child, so we started throwing everything we had into the investigation. I told my juvenile sergeant, Jim Moore, to do everything he could to try and find the boy."
    "The Stayners were pretty upset," Sergeant Jim Moore recalls. "I dealt mainly with Kay. Kay was kind of the spokesperson for the family . . . she kind of ran it. And she was very concerned about it, because she said that this hadn't really been a serious problem with Steven before. And we talked to the people along the route he took home from school over and over, andwe determined that, well, the last time he was seen by anybody was at the Red Ball Service Station on Yosemite Parkway, and nobody saw anything at all after that."
    The next day Moore assembled virtually all off-duty law enforcement personnel in Merced County for as complete a county-wide search as possible. Additionally, Moore and his officers interviewed virtually everybody within a ten-block radius of Steven's school and the Stayners' home, put out an all-points bulletin on Steven over California's statewide law enforcement teletype, and requested that news bulletins on Steven's disappearance be broadcast on all area radio and television stations and printed in all area newspapers.
    Lieutenant Bill Bailey, the evening shift's watch commander on the night Steven disappeared, said, "Nothing like that had ever happened to a citizen of this community before, and we on the police department were so frustrated about his disappearance that we became very involved in looking for him. You know, I was thinking that the little guy can't just disappear from Yosemite Parkway while he's on his way home from school."
    That afternoon Cary and his sisters were collected at school and brought home briefly, very confused by the frantic activity: people coming and going, police officers talking with their parents, friends and strangers alike bringing in covered dishes. Said Cindy, "The first thing I asked was, 'Is Steve back?' And he wasn't. And after a little while we had to go back over to the Scoggins', where we stayed for about a week. And it was real quiet and strange when we did finally come back home."
    That night Mac Scoggins drove Del to see Kay's father, Bob Augustine, at his trailer in Cathy's Valley so that Del could tell him in person about his grandson's disappearance. Unknown to Steven, Bob had moved his trailer to Judy's Trailer Park in Cathy's Valley just two weeks earlier and was then living just 200 feet from and in sight of the little red cabins. Del said he loaded his shotgun and took it along. "Just in case."
    At about the same time that night, Parnell