16. Ice cream man pedophile
Let me just preface this with the fact that this was the ONE TIME my parents let me stay home unsupervised for an entire day without a much older baby sitter. And so begins my story…..
It all started one hot, boring afternoon in the suburbs. I was spending the day with some of the neighborhood kids while our parents were at work. Although I was only 10 years old, my parents let me spend the day with the two girls that lived across the street because the oldest of the two sisters was 13. The other, my best friend Sarah at the time, was 9 years old. We were laying out on the trampoline, playing the “What do you wanna do?”….”I dunno…what do YOU wanna do?” game. Then we heard that exciting little jingle in the distance: The ice cream man! We all started scrambling out the door after the older sister (Tammy) who had the money.
We rushed down the street to the waiting ice cream man, joining the group of boys who were outside playing lacrosse at the time. As soon as we walked up and saw the driver, i got an eerie feeling. Something just seemed off about him. At first I thought I was just being paranoid considering he had a massively wretched scar down the side of his face, but he didn’t stop smiling. It was a sinister type smile, coupled with an unrelenting gaze fixed right on us. We quickly bought our ice cream and bubble gum and left.
As we were walking back towards our cul-de-sac, bossy Tammy ordered us to stop and sit on our neighbor’s driveway and eat our ice cream. She said “Look, I’ve heard stories on the news of these guys stealing kids, so lets just sit here on Ms. Day’s driveway until he drives away.” Up until this point Tammy had a history of telling us bogus stories to try and scare us, so Sarah stared whining. On any other day I would have agreed with her, but I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that something was off. The ice cream truck then continued towards us, driving incredibly slow around our cul-de-sac. He was still smiling, and his eyes were still trained on the three of us. When he passed us, he even winked.As soon as he disappeared around the corner, we made a mad dash for Tammy and Sarah’s house. We locked the doors, and then fled to her parent’s bedroom. A few minutes go by, and we had all calmed down a bit, and had settled onto her parents bed to watch some terrible daytime TV like Jerry Springer or something. At that point, out of her parents window (that faces in towards the cul-de-sac on the second floor) we saw the ice cream truck stopped outside of Ms.Day’s house. We didn’t know how long he had been there, considering he didn’t have the jingle playing. He wasn’t parked there very long, and eventually slowly drove away.
By this time, we are all hyperventilating. But before we could take a minute to recover, he drove by a third time. This time, however, we saw him get out of the truck in front of Ms. Day’s house and walked up towards the front door, examining the outside of the house. He had a pad of paper out, and began to jot some things down. We all started panicking at this point, as Tammy yelled out “HE’S WRITING DOWN THE ADDRESS!?”He returned to the ice cream wagon, and as he started the turn the truck around he looked up and saw us in the window. We hit the floor like we were under fire, and watched him out of a side window. He stopped the truck right in front of Tammy and Sarah’s house, and jotted more down on his pad of paper.
As soon as he drove away that time, we saw our neighbor arrive home from work. In a complete frenzy, we ran over to her (knowing she worked at the police station) and told her what had happened.
Ultimately, they found the guy, along with a notepad of descriptions of each one of us, the addresses of Ms. Day’s house and Tammy and Sarah’s house, as well as plans for when he was going to “come back for us”. The guy was a registered child sex offender, with a warrant out for his arrest. I’m not sure how he got in that position to be selling ice cream to children in the first place, but he was. So now every time I hear the Ice Cream Wagon jingle, I feel nauseous and unnerved.
