Sierra LaMar: Anatomy of a Search Day 98

As the seasons change, the fresh hope of spring yields to the dog days of summer, yet missing 15-year-old Sierra LaMar continues to elude our grasp. Unpicked summer fruit falls from trees, bushes and vines, spoiling in the unyielding heat of late July, but it is the putrid stench of rotten fruit that commands our attention. A pair of child rapists, a father and his son, resides in the Santa Clara County Jail, protected from other prisoners who jeer, threaten and, given a chance, would possibly slit their throats.

The father, Genaro Garcia-Fernandez, committed crimes that spanned a decade as he lurked within the walls of his home sweet home and  with regularity and certainty. His boy, , preferred a blitzkrieg strike against unsuspecting females. He’d rather prowl for victims in a supermarket parking lot at night or the blustery storm shrouded early morning roads in his hometown of Morgan Hill, Calif.

He was a good student though. His father’s crimes taught him that it is best to strike in isolation and to . In a rational world, one would hope that the son would atone for generational perversion by coming clean with his God and the authorities. Unfortunately, the psychopath is not rational: his only god is instant self-gratification and the authorities will only learn the details that advance his needs. Now, it is only a matter of time before the sins of the father establish the foundation for the defense of the son.

Enough about the dark side: the Sierra search has demonstrated that hope reigns eternal and that the powers of good can triumph over the power of evil. On Saturday, more than 70 . The morning prayer circle gave thanks for the cloudy skies and temperature that hovered in the low 60s. As usual, the search teams left hopeful that this would be the day the case was resolved. In the meantime, we prepared for the , requested by Sierra’s mother, , which was scheduled from 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.

The KlaasKids Foundation Print-A-Thon has traveled the country since the mid 1990s. We have fingerprinted and photographed more than 1,000,000 children without charging a family for the service or for databasing personal and private information. We provide a suite of child safety tools in the hopes of providing families with information they can share to avoid a victimization in the first place. However, if there is an emergency, we provide a nine-point plan on what to do in those types of situations.

The weather did not fully cooperate. When the exhausted teams returned later in the afternoon, the skies were blue, the sun was beating down and we had fingerprinted and photographed more than 130 children. It is our hope that we have provided young families with a viable path to child safety. Unfortunately, Sierra’s whereabouts remain unknown.