Trauma causes us to have an internal experience that is frightening, angry, and shameful. When we feel threatened, as we do when we are traumatized, our entire organism is geared up to find the source of that threat and to do something about it. The newspaper stories I read in about the girl hinted that she should have been immune to violence.
A student, she had lived in Grand Forks, the small college town where I had just movedβin North Dakota of all placesβin a rural farm state that, it seemed to me as a transplant, was full of nice white people who would no more directly harm each other than they would now vote Democrat.
The murder in its time became notorious enough to make national news, most notably People Magazine. After her shift and while walking to her car around 5pm, she had called her boyfriend, an older man by a decade she had just begun seeing who worked in Minneapolis. Still no one knows why she went with her abductorβwhether by ruse or force.
Nearly three hours later her phone again dialed her boyfriend, but he heard only static. Dru was never heard from again, and it would be five months before her body was found. Stories I read about Dru Sjodin depict the man arrested a week later for kidnapping her as no stranger to violence.
Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. Since his release, he had been living in Crookston, Minnesota, about 25 miles from the town where Dru lived. Most of these stories began by stating that Alfonso Rodriguez Jr.
