‘He had no intention of letting me go. He simply needed a moment to muster up the nerve to rape a child’

This is a story I’ve been afraid to tell for 37 years. It happened on a Saturday morning in Los Angeles. I was 11 and riding my bike to the park for basketball practice. It had been raining hard, but the park wasn’t far, maybe only a mile, a mile-and-a-half from my house. I rode down to the boulevard, past a row of restaurants and a supermarket and turned down Slauson Avenue to travel the final eight blocks to the park. It was shortly after I had passed beneath a freeway overpass that a man approached me.

“Hey there, champ,” is the first thing he said.

I didn’t know the man and couldn’t imagine anything good would come of talking with him, so I kept going and hoped he’d leave me alone. The man didn’t leave me alone though. He trotted alongside my bike, peppering me with questions – what’s your hurry now? Where ya headed? – until we reached an intersection where there were shops and office buildings. A large brick department store across the street to my right. In front of me a plaza with a Trader Joe’s, a dry cleaner, and a Chinese restaurant where we sometimes ordered takeout. Some apartment complexes were further on and the park a block away.