At 1:00 p.m. on October 6, 2002, an 11-year-old boy in Richwoods, Missouri, a rural town southwest of St. Louis, was going to his friend’s house. He was riding a green mountain bike and wearing jeans and his Little League team’s T-shirt. It was about 70 degrees outside. The boy was expected home at 5:00 p.m., but he never showed up. Shawn Hornbeck vanished, as the saying goes, without a trace.

Shawn’s parents went on a crusade. Police and over 200 orange-clad volunteers scoured the region’s two-lane roads, the thickset woods, and the harsh hills. Dogs, horses, all-terrain vehicles, the FBI, the Highway Patrol, and heat-detecting helicopters all found nothing. By the 11^th, the story had made the front page of the Post-Dispatch, but the search parties began to peter out even as the family continued to ask for volunteers. A pond was dredged and a ravine was searched, both to no avail. Volunteers entered strip mines, wells, cisterns, lakes, and woods, and demonstrated outside of the sheriff’s office.

Stories about Shawn Hornbeck still appeared now and then in the Post-Dispatch, but they had faded from the front pages. Posters with his picture appeared across the St. Louis area, Shawn’s parents campaigned for the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation for missing children, and the story never entirely vanished from the St. Louis-area’s consciousness. As years passed and “age-progressed” photos replaced the original picture on benches and posters, most assumed that Shawn was long-dead.

When a 13-year-old boy named Ben Ownby vanished on January 8^th this year, the circumstances rang a bell. Beaufort, Ownby’s home, is another rural community outside of St. Louis. Search parties on horses, ATVs, and helicopters searched the area unsuccessfully. The boy’s parents lobbied hard for help; the story ran big in the Post-Dispatch. This time, however, one lead existed – a friend had noticed a white, rusted Nissan truck speeding away. One clue was all that was needed. Four days later, police spotted a truck matching the description outside an apartment building in Kirkwood, a St. Louis suburb. Police questioned the owner of the truck, an Imo’s Pizzeria manager named Michael Devlin, and searched his apartment. Inside were both Ben Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck; Hornbeck had been living with Devlin for over four years.

All of a sudden, an old regional story turned into a media sensation. Neither boy talked at the press conference, but their presence was a picture of opposites. Ownby walked quickly and had to be guided to his seat as if the excitement of safety made him not care where his feet took him. He kept grinning broadly; when he closed his lips, the corners of his mouth twitched, unable to resist the impulse to smile. Hornbeck, on the other hand, was gloomy. He walked as if going through the motions, and his smiles were infrequent and hesitant. It seemed he was trying to act as people would expect him to while he only half-knew the role he was supposed to play.

Statistically, missing children found alive long after their disappearance are exceedingly rare: they are either rescued quickly or not at all. The story of the so-called “Miracle in Missouri” spread across cable news, the Internet, and newspapers worldwide. But for many in the St. Louis region, the story was – and is – as bizarre as it is miraculous.

I grew up in an inner-ring St. Louis suburb; I was a sophomore in high-school when Shawn Hornbeck was kidnapped. It was one of those stories you turned away from because there was no happy angle at which to tackle it: a boy silently plucked from his family. No clues, no hope – and yet, the parents still plugged away with no sense of the obvious futility of their quest. The stepfather quit his job to run the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation, the posters lined the walls of grocery stores and bus stop benches, and vigils were held on the anniversaries of Shawn’s disappearance.

When Kirkwood was revealed to be where the boys’ kidnapper lived, it fit on some level: Kirkwood is Every Town, or perhaps, Every Suburb, USA: large, blank, and anonymous. Shawn Hornbeck lived there for four and half years, in an apartment complex so nondescript it didn’t have a name – playing with neighborhood kids, pitching a tent with his kidnapper, picking up a lost cell phone from a neighbor. “It goes back to everybody minding their own business, not wanting to get involved, not paying attention…and worrying about themselves and themselves only,” Hornbeck’s stepfather said. “We’ve lost our sense of community.”

On one level he must be right. Innumerable people saw Shawn regularly for years, even while his picture ran on television, in newspapers, on streets and in grocery stores. Everyone just assumed. Devlin’s co-workers assumed he lived alone. When Devlin’s landlord once entered the apartment, he saw Shawn sleeping and assumed he was Devlin’s son. One time, Devlin got into an argument with a neighbor over a parking spot. Shockingly, Devlin called the police; in front of the cops, Shawn got out of the pickup undisturbed and walked into the apartment. A worker at Imo’s once saw a boy come in looking for Devlin, before Devlin brushed him off. “I thought it was some kid that lived next door, maybe coming home from school,” she told the Post-Dispatch. “It was a weird encounter.” Shawn “was always riding his bike and stuff,” next-door neighbor Shavonne Butler said. “He had friends in the neighborhood … we just thought it was his son or something.”

Have we really lost our sense of community? Or did we ever really have it? In 1964, a woman named Kitty Genovese was sexually assaulted and murdered outside her New York apartment. The New York Times headline the next day read, “Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police.” The facts aren’t as dramatic as the headline, but a diffusion of responsibility enabled Genovese’s death. The plain-sight imprisonment of Shawn Hornbeck was not anything new. In addition, the supposed lack of community in a quiet suburb like Kirkwood may enable dangerous loners to hide secrets in their homes, but it may equally prevent kidnappings from occurring in the first place. Of ten children abducted from the St. Louis area in recent years, including Hornbeck and Ownby, only two occurred in urban St. Louis or suburban St. Louis County. Perhaps a rural community, in which everyone knows everybody down the road, prevents someone like Devlin from living in its midst while simultaneously enabling predators to snatch solitary children from the areas’ isolated roads.

“The people I met in Beaufort didn’t need an Amber Alert to mobilize,” Post-Dispatch columnist Sylvester Brown Jr. writes. “By the time I arrived, ‘Missing’ fliers were everywhere and searchers were still putting them in strangers’ hands. Business as usual had stopped. I doubt that would happen in St. Louis or any other major metropolis. In our hurly-burly, get-up-and-go, grab-a-cup-of-Joe, never-move-too-slow world, how often do we note or act on the details – a suspicious car on our block, a child’s face on a milk carton, a neighbor or co-worker who doesn’t seem quite right?”

Maybe – but maybe not. Who in St. Louis, four years on, truly believed that Shawn Hornbeck – Shawn Hornbeck! – was still alive? This was, as the media proclaimed, a “Miracle in Missouri.” Can one, should one, expect a miracle? Even in Shawn’s hometown, most people figured he had been accidentally killed by meth cooks. Truth is stranger than fiction. If a Richwoods inhabitant, thinking of lawless meth chemists and visiting a relative in Kirkwood, had passed Shawn Hornbeck in the grocery store, would he have noticed? Would the new face have even rung a bell?

Back to the pictures on the posters. The one abiding image for over four years was Shawn’s school photo that ran in every news story and lead the FBI missing person’s page. His hair and eyes are dark brown, but with his light eyebrows, his off-kilter smile, and the gold-colored background, his face shines. An earring on his left earlobe seems incongruous for someone 4’8’’ and 90 pounds. He is a little boy: innocent, it seems, but not unworldly.

The age-progressed photos however, look radically different – both from the original picture and from the newly rescued Shawn Hornbeck. In fact, Hornbeck’s stepfather told the media that when Shawn had seen his own age-progressed photo – as he must have had many times, living in St. Louis for over four years – he called it “insulting.” The face in the progressed photo looks like a stretched-out version of the original – the mischievous smile copy-and-pasted from the original, but discordant within the teenaged face; the cheeks similar, but the forehead stretched, the eyes flat, the nose oddly polygonal. It looks altogether alien.

And then, finally, the real 15-year-old Shawn Hornbeck. His eyebrows are dark, almost black. His hair flops down over his forehead, making his face seem smaller. His lip is pierced, his ear now has three piercings, and one photo he posted online shows a pushpin through his right eyebrow. Most striking are his eyes: they are dark, blank, and almost dead. When he smiles at the press conference, it looks honest, but then his teeth disappear and he is questioning, sad, and uncomfortable. While sitting, he looks small, but when he stands up, he is tall and thin, his body enveloped by a dark sweatshirt. This Shawn Hornbeck looks nothing like the 11 year-old-boy he came from, and even less like the age-progressed estimation. Connecting this teenager with the missing child of four years ago seems almost ludicrous. Who could have recognized him? In short: I find it hard to blame Kirkwood residents for letting Shawn Hornbeck fall through the cracks.

The central question of Shawn Hornbeck’s captivity is this: Why didn’t he run? The easy answer, the surface answer, is “Stockholm Syndrome,” in which captives sympathize with their captor. But Stockholm Syndrome is little more than a buzzword used to describe a captive’s actions. Abductors’ threats and psychological control gives them immense power over their victims: Elizabeth Smart, for example, tried to hide her identity from policemen even after her kidnapper was jailed. Shawn was just 11 when he was kidnapped; simply staying alive for four years is a major accomplishment.

To outside appearances, Devlin treated Shawn Hornbeck as his son. Shawn had startling freedom for a captive. He had a cell phone and online profiles on sites like Mindviz (similar to MySpace) and Yahoo. While he didn’t go to school, he left the house frequently. Neighborhood brothers Tony and David Douglas were his best friends: they played videogames, had sleepovers, walked around Kirkwood, were even stopped by cops when out late. “There was times when we would see something about Shawn Hornbeck on TV,” Kelly Douglas, Tony and David’s stepmother, told Fox’s St. Louis affiliate. “He would be in the room. We would even kind of giggle, you know, ‘you look just like Shawn Hornbeck.’ He never acted upon it, no response, nothing. He didn’t look sad, get up and go out of the room, anything that would lead to us believing that he was actually Shawn Hornbeck.” David Douglas agreed: “I said, ‘you look exactly like him.’ He’d say, ‘whatever’ and stuff like that. It wouldn’t faze him.”

No one suspected anything, but there were clues. Neighbors above the Devlin apartment, for example, report that they heard yelling from below that sounded like physical punishment. They did nothing. Out of respect for privacy, nothing about abuse has been asked publicly, but one must suspect that Shawn was regularly sexually abused for years on end. Details of what happened will eventually come out. As yet, however, the picture that has emerged is two sided – the happy, normal teenager on the outside, and the murky, unknown victim on the inside.

Murky indeed. His online profiles give a glance at how he saw himself. Under “Religion” he put “Atheist,” under “My Pet” he put “Cat,” under “Kids” he put “Some day.” He lists nicknames such as “devil” and “vampire.” He is, as they say, emo. On December 1, 2005, someone calling himself “Shawn Devlin” left a haunting, terrifying post in the guestbook of the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation website. It asked: “how long are you planing [sic] to look for your son?” Was this a desperate cry for help? Did Michael Devlin know what Shawn wrote – or did Devlin even write it himself? A little over twelve hours later, “shawn” left another message: “hey sorry about that last thing i put on there,i write poems and i was wounding if it would be ok to write a poem for the hornbeck fam. and they son ‘shawn Hornbeck’ it would be cool if i could but if you dont want me to i can understan why i guess but i was wounding if i could write a poem in his horner (sorry i dont know how to spell that last word)” [sic]. “Wounding” for “wondering,” “horner” for “honor”: Hornbeck, remember, hadn’t gone to school since the fifth grade. What was he trying to say? On a poetry website, one of Shawn’s screennames posted a poem titled “death.” It reads in its entirety:

Little Shawn smokes six Ax’s a day.

He started smoking when he was three.

Now he’s burried under the willow tree.

The closest mirror to Shawn Hornbeck’s case is that of Steven Stayner, a boy kidnapped at age seven and sexually abused for seven years. When Stayner entered puberty, his abductor dug a grave behind the house and kidnapped another five-year-old boy. Hornbeck wasn’t buried under a willow tree, but like Stayner, who took the young boy and fled, he may have only narrowly missed that fate. As Shawn’s story spreads, some – notably, Bill O’Reilly – have preposterously accused him of being almost complicit in Devlin’s crimes. But other bloviators take an opposite and equally wrongheaded tack. For example, Larry King invited the host of America’s Most Wanted on his show, asking “Are we winning the war on pedophiles?” Pedophiles are dangerously disturbed people who need to be prevented and helped, in that order. Creating an analogy with the “war on terror” and framing child molesters as a nebulous network of homegrown terrorists does not help matters. Contrary to opinion and media coverage, the danger of child molestation does not come from strangers preying at playgrounds. The vast majority of missing children are either runaways or abductions by family members, according to the Department of Justice. Even the 58,200 children categorized as victims of “nonfamily abduction” were kidnapped by a friend or acquaintance. In fact, of the almost 800,000 missing children reports in 1999 (the most recent available year), only 115 were caused by “stereotypical kidnappings” – “abductions perpetrated by a stranger or slight acquaintance and involving a child who was [either] transported 50 or more miles, detained overnight, held for ransom or with intent to keep the child permanently, or killed.” That’s just 0.01 percent.

The danger to American children comes not from sex offenders looming in the shadows, but from parents, relatives, and trusted acquaintances. Studies show that at least 10 percent of all children are sexually abused; because of underreporting, the actual percentage of abused children may be significantly higher. Between 75 to 95 percent of victims knew their perpetrators. Child molesters are parents, uncles, teachers, coaches, Boy Scout leaders, and clergy.

The massive attention the Shawn Hornbeck case received was a welcome break from the never-ending stream of bleak headlines: violence in inner cities and deaths in Iraq  Ultimately, however, by only emphasizing the unforeseeable abductions of a few children, we hide the ongoing, equally harmful, and far more pervasive abuse that is happening now behind our own doors. The “stranger danger” of lone-wolf predators is easier to think about and harder to confront than the abusive stepfather who rapes his teenage daughter. By blaming horrific crimes on shadowy others, we exonerate the society we know. We can see the enemy, as the saying goes, and it is us.