Post by LadyBlue on Jun 20, 2007 22:32:23 GMT -5
www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7rwK6prz30
Samantha Bree Runnion was born in Massachusettes on July 26, 1996. Her parents, Erin Runnion and Derek Jackson knew she was something special since day one. Samantha's parent eventually split up and Samantha and her mother moved to south California.
Samantha was playing a board game with her 5-year-old friend, when a man drove up in a light green Honda. The two children were sitting on a short wall about 150 feet from Samantha's home. The man got out of his car next to the girls and asked them for help finding his dog. Samantha and the man spoke to each other for a minute before he grabbed her and drove off in his car. She was kicking and screaming "Tell my grandma" to her friend.
"I know she thought somebody would save her," Erin Runnion said, choking back tears.
No one was there to be Samantha's hero when a CRAZED maniac kidnapped her on July 15, 2002, then sexually molested and brutally murdered her, leaving her nude and posed body on the side of a road not far from Ortega Highway.
After learning of her daughter's abduction, Erin Runnion said she did what she could to stay calm, but she was terrified, she said. She hoped Samantha's biological father, who was living on the East Coast, might have picked her up, because her daughter would have at least been safe. He hadn't and she became much more worried.
"I just had to find her," she told jurors.
She and her husband drove around the area near their home, looking everywhere - even in trash bins - for Samantha.
"The world seemed so huge trying to find this little girl," Erin Runnion said.
At the Orange County Sheriff's Station the next day, she got word that her daughter's body had been found.
"I remember screaming out, 'Why do they have to kill them?'" Erin Runnion said, referring to the murder of other children who have been abducted. "All there was was pain. I just fell on the floor."
About two days later, Alejandro Avila, a factory worker was arrested and charged with kidnap, sexual assault and murder.
Erin Runnion began to weep as she told jurors how her daughter, whom the mother calls "Mantha," always had a thing for courage. But she "died so humiliated," Runnion said. "It was so cruel."
"She was my joy," Erin Runnion said. "She brought happiness to everything I did."
www.geocities.com/mantharunnion/1.html