The blemish, of course, on Orange Park, is the least of it.
Word this week that a child was missing in Orange Park came as something of a shock. That is my hometown. And it is an idyllic place to raise a child. Little 7-year-old Somer Thompson, unfortunately, has been killed and then dumped into the trash. I can't explain logically why that particular bit of news is all the more infuriating but it is. It is. Her body was found in a landfill and now the hunt is on for her killer(s).
I look at her picture (how can you not?) and I imagine her walking home and getting angry, running away from her siblings:
And you just say to no one in particular, but you do just say it: "You can't run away from the pack, baby girl! You have to stay with the group!"
So we've lost a precious little child and beautiful Orange Park gets a blemish.
Orange Park remains a great town. Life continues, but this pain will surely linger around the town. Many, many people move to O.P. because it is such a great town. It has grown tremendously, however, and "Orange Park" is now a very broad region covering most of northeastern Clay County and part of Duval County close to the I-295 intersection with Blanding Boulevard. So I wasn't really, really initially tuned in to the news about this girl because so much has been going on at work, and I was still recovering from a road trip to witness a beautiful niece getting married up in Carolina, etc.
But then I heard "Grove Park Elementary."
Oh my goodness! That's just up the way from my family's house and actually located well within the town limits. That school used to be known, in the days of segregation, as "T.C. Miller" and it was my school for first and second grade. It isn't actually located in Grove Park (which is an Orange Park subdivision); it's located in one of the primary black communities in town. Like so many casual insults inflicted on black communities in the wake or integration, the school was closed and we were shipped off to W.E. Cherry Elementary or S. Bryan Jennings Elementary. Later, the school was greatly expanded and renamed Grove Park to placate (I'm sure) the white parents that would now have to send their kids to a school in the middle of a black community.
No perfect place exists on this planet, however, and Orange Park is idyllic. Just a great place to raise a kid. An online friend who grew up in Grove Park and also graduated from the University of Florida was discussing just how surreal the news of this missing child was for him. He, too, attended Grove Park Elementary and walked home from the neighborhood school.
Now that memory is blemished by the evil obsession that lurks. And lurks. An evil that prowls great neighborhoods waiting for the chance when some child, somewhere, will let down his or her guard and in an instant be gone.
I pray that the Lord will give strength to the family, especially the siblings who were walking with her that beautiful Orange Park day . . . and then -- all of a sudden -- weren't.



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