A Knife in the Heart. Michael Benson
stayed away for the entire weekend before returning.
“Why do you keep running away?” a cop asked.
“Because I’m fed up with my parents,” Rachel replied, scowling.
On August 6, now sporting a nose piercing in addition to her nine earrings, Rachel took off with her friend Natasha—no surname given—and didn’t come back. When she returned the following day, she said she’d been at Natasha’s house in St. Pete. No, she didn’t know Natasha’s last name. A week later, she was missing again, and the brevity of the resulting police reports demonstrated how routine it was getting to be. She did it again. Said it all.
Janet said next time she was going to have the cop take her straight to juvenile detention.
But she did take off again, on August 19, this time explaining that she went to the Countryside Mall in Clearwater with an unnamed friend. Rachel was not taken to juvie.
Rachel next disappeared on September 9, this time perhaps because she feared an upcoming court date from when she attacked her mother. Janet suggested cops pick her up at her telemarketing job in the Winn-Dixie Mall. Police did go there, but they discovered Vici Financial had moved to another unknown location.
Police located her on September 10, at a party where alcohol was served. So in addition to being a runaway, Rachel was picked up for underage drinking. Barry came and got her, but she was upset and gone again the next day, calling home to tell her dad that she was in Tampa. Barry Wade told police that contrary to anything his wife might have said, he did not want his daughter taken to juvenile detention. She was to be brought home to him, and a report was to be filed.
The battery charge against Rachel for the fingernails to her mother’s forearm was eventually dropped. Janet showed no inclination to help with her daughter’s prosecution, which caused the state attorney’s office to drop the matter.
Even when Rachel wasn’t in trouble, she lingered in trouble’s vicinity. Done with Jose and looking forward to bigger and better things, Rachel moved on with her life. On September 16, 2006, at ten o’clock at night, Pinellas Park police responded to a call that someone had been jumped in the street. By the time police arrived, the crowd of young people had dispersed, but four young pedestrians—two guys, two gals—in the area were stopped and questioned. One of them was Rachel Wade.
Why was Rachel in such a hurry to grow up? A lot of fifteen-year-old girls wanted to have boyfriends, but they understood that the security of living with parents outweighed the advantages of being without a safety net. No one could figure out what the unscratchable itch was. Was it just normal adolescent chemistry?
It was a proven scientific fact that a “normal” teenaged brain, with its still-developing frontal cortex and immature neural structure, came replete with impulsivity, social anxiety, and poor judgment.
Although it was true that adults also felt anxiety, teens and adults grew nervous over different things. The immature brain did not grow as anxious when encountering physical dangers (which is why teenagers tend to be reckless drivers) but became much more anxious over feelings of being left out and not being a part of things.
So maybe it was a simple matter of chemistry, making Rachel unwilling to be a normal teenager who had to (at least pretend to) obey her parents’ rules.
Still, teens were responsible for their actions. Everyone’s behavior wasn’t influenced by social and environmental factors. Rachel’s behavior should have been maturing.
On November 11, 2006, after a few months off, she ran away again. She dropped out of school as soon as she turned sixteen. She told friends her badass boyfriend was expelled, so she didn’t want to go to school, either. Her parents tried taking her to counseling and got her a job at Paws of Paradise, a doggie day care business.
On January 26, 2007, Rachel took off, and Janet notified the authorities. Rachel returned, although not until January 28. A police officer spoke to Rachel to try to figure out what was up. Rachel was back to giving elaborate yet unhelpful explanations of her whereabouts. She said she didn’t know what the big deal was. She’d left a note for her mother before leaving. Who was she with? Rachel said she was with a friend named Hiram. She didn’t know his last name, and they’d gone together to Lakeland, Florida, to see a football game. She’d planned to come home the previous night, but Hiram had car trouble and they spent the night in the car “somewhere in Polk County.” She made it home on January 28, only after Hiram got gas.
Somewhere in this time frame, Rachel acquired a new beau, a guy named Nick Reynolds (pseudonym). He had his own place, a great place to hang out. There was a lot of sex and drugs going on.
On March 6, at 2:30 A.M., Rachel was a passenger in a car Nick was driving. According to their story, the car in front of them stopped abruptly, as if to purposefully cause an accident. Nick’s car rear-ended the guy so hard that although they were not injured, Nick’s car suffered extensive frontal damage, so bad he needed a tow. Nick and Rachel told police they’d gotten a pretty good look at the guy who’d done it to them: white male, sixteen to eighteen years old, with “bushy hair.” They didn’t know the make of the car. Police ended the investigation after it was discovered that surveillance cameras in the area had failed to capture the car accident.
On March 26, Officer John Lagasse responded to yet another call from Janet Wade. Rachel ran away again. This time Janet offered the authorities a key piece of intelligence. She gave Nick Reynolds’s address to Officer Lagasse. Sure enough, Rachel was there, and the cop went and got her.
On April 14, Rachel told her mom on her way out the door that she would be home by early evening. Instead, she had not come home all night, and wasn’t answering her cell phone. Rachel was again listed as a missing person. Lagasse found Rachel and spoke with her. Rachel said she had been out with friends, but she refused to give names.
“I was in East Lake, near Oldsmar. I didn’t have phone reception and no one would give me a ride home,” Rachel explained.
Not that Rachel ever had a relationship with a boy that went smoothly, her relationship with Nick was particularly rocky. She still loved him and all, but … she no longer felt it was necessary to keep her blinkers on when it came to looking at other boys. Rachel liked to think of herself as an open person, a girl who always had her heart open for new romance.
Rachel ran into Joshua Camacho at a party. She hadn’t talked to him in a long time and was instantly smitten.
On November 9, 2007, cops were called, responding to a domestic dispute at Nick’s apartment. Nick and Rachel apologized for the noise, stated that they had been arguing about a relationship problem, but they were through, and the fight was not physical.
After fighting the good battle for many long months, after dealing with police on at least fourteen occasions when Rachel ran away, the Wades stopped calling.
Rachel had Nick, and the Wades understood that she was going to be there, with him, most of the time. You could see the defeat in their shoulders.
That didn’t mean, however, that the PPPD was through with Rachel Wade—or her friends. Or her enemies.
It was also at about this time that one small subsection of the Pinellas Park population—young people who knew Rachel Wade—did its best to keep the PPPD busy all by themselves.
The instant Sarah Ludemann had received her driver’s license, she demonstrated no fear of speed. Her father was a cabdriver, so it only made sense she’d drive like a pro, and that meant fast. She enjoyed playing road tag with her friends, weaving in and out of traffic, playing games of pursuit, playing chicken at high speeds.
At two in the afternoon on November 29, 2007, Sarah was burned by her own carelessness. She and three other drivers were allegedly using the roads as their personal playground. When the reckless parade of young people encountered a car accident on the road, the front car slowed down abruptly, starting a chain reaction that injured no one but caused medium to severe damage to all of the cars.
On December 6, 2007, cops were