Donna
Tonight I came home to my new apartment in West Hollywood and pulled up in front of the house to find a man distractedly puttering around his car, which had a flat tire. He’d retrieved the jack from the trunk but it was some newfangled thing with the lug wrench affixed to the jack itself, and one had to perform a series of feats to disentangle it.
I came up to investigate and the thin, dark-haired man with an accent I could not place, gave a chagrined smile and admitted he hadn’t yet figured out how to maneuver this jack. I joined him in trying to peer at the directions, which may as well have been in Swahili.
As we pondered, he said, “This has not been a very good day for me. I came here to Los Angeles to try to find out more about my daughter, who is missing, and now I have a flat tire.” To say it had not been a good day seemed quite an understatement.
I sat and listened to the man talk as he changed his tire. I wished I could offer more than a towel to wipe the grease from his hands, but in the end, it was all I could do as he told me of his four month struggle to keep his daughter’s case alive with the LAPD.
She was 19 and taking classes at San Diego State. Over the summer she came up to LA where she placed an ad on craigslist offering her services as a math tutor. The man who answered, it would later surface, was a known sex offender. Donna Jou trustingly went to his house… and was never seen again.
Her father is holding on as best he can. He left Iran before the revolution to seek a better, safer life in America. Now his heart is broken. For more information, see www.donnajou.com. And teach your children well.
