Appelés par l'Évangile
In 1996, a thirty-eight-year-old security guard at a Pennsylvania middle school convinced Tanya Kach, fourteen, to leave her father and live with him. For the next ten years, the security guard kept Tanya captive in the home he shared with his elderly parents.
To keep Tanya from running away, her captor convinced the girl that no one cared that she was gone and that her parents weren’t even looking for her. He told her, “You’re stupid. You’re immature. Nobody cares about you but me.”
Eventually the security guard became so confident in Tanya’s loyalty to him that he allowed her to leave the house for short periods of time while he was at work. Through these daily excursions, Tanya became friends with Joseph Sparico, the owner of a local Deli Mart.
In March 2006, Tanya finally confessed her true identity to Sparico, who shared the information with his son, a retired police officer. Before long, Tanya was rescued and reunited with her father. Commenting on the girl’s situation, Sparico said, “She wanted to be wanted, that’s all.”
Tanya’s father, Jerry, who had desperately tried to find his daughter through the years, posting her picture several thousand times on flyers and milk cartons, was overjoyed to see her. “There wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t think of her,” he said. “I just say thank you, there is a God—and he brought my little girl back home.”
Tanya, too, was delighted to learn that her father had never given up looking for her. “He’s crying; I’m crying. All he kept saying was, ‘I got my baby,’ ” she said, describing their reunion. “I’m touching blood, and I get to say, ‘I love you, Dad.’ ”
—Daniel Lovering, “Woman Missing Since She Was 14 Is Found,” news.yahoo.com (March 23, 2006)
I. Choisis dès le commencement. v. 13
One of five gift-card recipients never used their cards in 2005, representing about $972 million in unredeemed cards. According to Consumer Reports National Research Center, the top reasons for not using gift cards:
• didn’t have time: 50 percent
• didn’t find anything they wanted: 37 percent
• lost the card: 14 percent
• card expired: 12 percent
—Jae Yang and Adrienne Lewis, “Americans Neglect a Billion in Gift Cards,” USA Today (November 20, 2006)