What Happened to Zahra Clare Baker?

If you’re looking for answers, you came to the wrong place. I often feel compelled to write a hub about a particular thing, but never quite like this.

It’s Friday night and I'm sitting at Carolina Place Mall in the children’s play area watching my granddaughter play. I am thinking about my two other granddaughters who live in Hickory, NC and I can’t get the photo of a disabled 10 year old girl from there out of my head.

Zahra Clare Baker’s picture has haunted me since I first noticed it on TV a few days ago. I was not paying much attention the first time I saw it and thought that the story was about the little girl beating bone cancer and getting hearing aids. Both those news items were true but the story was about much more. Zahra has been missing now for at least 6 days and maybe much longer.

I watched the Hickory Police Chief struggle with his emotions when he cancelled the Amber alert and declared the case a homicide. I read a story online about the police searching a landscaping company where a wood chipper is located. Zahra’s father works there. I found out that the stepmother wrote a ransom note asking for a million dollars and the police found it. I watched a live shot from a news helicopter hovering over a small pond that was being drained in search of the body. Today I saw a picture of police carrying a mattress out of the home for forensic tests. Stories of abuse have surfaced and no one outside the immediate family have seen the girl in about a month.

So far Zahra has not been found.

We can all pray that Zahra turns up somewhere safe, but I don’t think that is going to be the case. We may never know what happened, but something did.

How can something as inconceivable as this happen? Do we all carry within us the potential for this kind of evil?

I have come to the conclusion that none of us is all good or all bad, so does a person with some darkness suddenly snap and become a monster? I realize that I have some of that darkness in me. If someone tried to hurt one of mine I would happily set it free. Would you?

Red and yellow, black and white, the kids played together at the mall and they all had one thing in common. They all had parents or grandparents there watching over them. I watched the kids and their guardians and thought about Zahra.

I overheard a huge black guy tell his daughter he would wait on her, that he would follow her to the rest room and then they would go together to the next shop. He was watching over her.

Who watched over little Zahra?

I wrote this hub almost three months ago. Today I was at Chick-fil-et with Maddie and picked up the paper. The story I read concerned search warrant information the step-mother had given the police in the past. She says Zahra died of her illness and that her husband dismembered and threw away body parts. Cell phone records, being illegally in the US, potential sexual abuse and  chainsaws were mentioned in the article.

Heaven help us all.

Tonight I kept Maddie until time for her to go home because her parents were at meetings. I lay down with her and watched her getting sleepy. That article kept running through my mind.

She asked me what I was thinking about and of course I lied. Instead of talking about Zahara I  told her how much I enjoyed my day with her and how much fun it was to watch her go to sleep.

"You're a lucky man, Pop" she said. Then she simply rolled over never knowing how wise those words truly are.

I am a lucky man.