PART 2: What Waited Beneath The Water
I wanted to carry Owen over the fence and put as much distance as possible between us and that house. Before I could take a step, a car door slammed somewhere out front. Owen’s arms clamped around my neck, and he whispered Curtis’s name. With shaking hands, I called 911 and told the dispatcher that I had found my ten-year-old son locked inside a metal enclosure and that I believed the person responsible might be coming back.
The dispatcher told me not to search the property and not to confront anyone. I did exactly as she said and carried Owen toward Mrs. Doyle’s yard. By the time we reached the fence, she had already dragged over a small ladder so I could pass him across without making him climb. I will never forget her face as she reached up to steady him.
Police officers and an ambulance arrived within minutes. Paramedics wrapped Owen in a blanket and began examining him, while officers walked the backyard and documented everything. They photographed the enclosure, the broken padlock, the tarp, and the ground all around the place where I had found him.
Through all of it, Owen never let go of my hand.
“Please don’t make me go back inside.”
“You’re not going back there, buddy.”
The paramedics found that he was dehydrated and that he had bruising around his wrists and ankles, along with signs that he hadn’t been eating properly. They said nothing looked immediately life-threatening, but they wanted him evaluated at the hospital. No one yet knew how long he had been confined or what had happened to him before I arrived.
Before we left, one of the officers asked whether Owen had said anything about the swimming pool. I told him that Owen had begged me not to look at it. The officer’s expression grew noticeably more serious when Mrs. Doyle repeated what she had seen the night before, Curtis hauling large black bags to the water and throwing them in.
Police secured the property while Owen and I were taken to the hospital. In the back of the ambulance, I fought the urge to ask my son a single question. A detective had explained that a trained child interviewer needed to hear Owen’s account without anyone, even me, accidentally shaping what he remembered. So I sat with his small hand in mine and said nothing, while the siren wailed above us.
Dana still hadn’t appeared, and I couldn’t stop turning Owen’s whisper over in my mind. He had said his mother tried to stop Curtis, which meant Dana might not have known what he was doing until it was already happening. Or it meant something far worse, something I wasn’t ready to picture.
At the hospital, doctors gave Owen fluids and carefully documented his condition while a social worker stayed close by. Eventually he managed to eat a little soup, one slow spoonful at a time. Then he asked me, very quietly, whether the police had found his mother.
“I don’t know yet, buddy. They’re looking for her.”
Owen lowered his eyes to the blanket covering his legs.
“Mom tried to help me.”
Until that moment, some part of me had been terrified that Dana had allowed all of this to happen. Hearing Owen defend her changed that fear completely. I stopped myself from asking for details and told him that he could explain everything whenever he felt ready, and not a minute before.
About an hour later, Detective Renata Soto came into the room. She told me that officers had searched the house and found signs of a serious confrontation in the kitchen, along with Dana’s phone, broken, lying beneath one of the cabinets.
Neither Dana nor Curtis was inside the house.
Then Detective Soto brought up the swimming pool. Officers had pulled the black bags out of the water and opened them as part of the search.
My stomach tightened as every terrible possibility raced through my mind, each one worse than the last.
“What was inside them?”
Soto paused before answering, almost as though she already knew exactly what I was afraid she would say.
