DATE: Sunday, May 11, 1997                  TAG: 9705090023

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J5   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS

DATELINE: RICHMOND                          LENGTH:   81 lines

THE LISK MURDERS NO DEFENSE AGAINST SUCH CRUELTY

To live in central Virginia this week is to be exhausted, bone tired.

It is to have run out of explanations, strategies, possibilities.

It is to confront that moment when there is no good to be found, no silver lining, no rationality, no deeper meaning to justify pain.

Just now, public policy debates seem as futile as sand bags flicked away in a flood. All the early childhood intervention programs in the world cannot alter enough lives. All the prisons imaginable will not contain enough destruction.

The killer(s) of Kristin and Kati Lisk has taken the best that a family and community could do to protect its young, and he or she has shown it to be as useless as a Band-Aid against a viper's sting.

Whoever abducted the Spotsylvania County sisters, ages 12 and 15, from their rural home and murdered them no doubt has a story to tell as well. Only derangement could produce such venom toward innocence and life.

No parent within earshot of the news this week could have been immune from empathy and fear. I dialed the telephone with Ron Lisk as he made the daily 3:10 p.m. check to see that his daughters were home safely. I listened to the unanswered beep, hurried home and opened the unlocked door, began telephoning neighbors as a stopgap against the rising panic.

There, identification stops. Hundreds of volunteers have combed woods. Thousands, no doubt, have prayed. Friends and neighbors are raising funds to compensate for lost salary and other costs.

But no one who has not walked where Ron and Patti Lisk now go can possibly know what they feel or how they will survive. All we can do is mumble about ``parents' worst nightmare,'' and know that this is one of the few times in life when fear is a pale sister to reality, not the reverse.

No one, good or bad, conscientious or irresponsible, deserves what the Lisk family is facing. But the sense of impotence their story instills is heightened by the fact that they appear to have followed all the rules, taken all the safeguards, lived the ``right'' way to guard against harm.

By numerous accounts, the parents - a nursing instructor at Germanna Community College and a self-employed photographer, retired from NASA - were child-centered, active in community and church. The girls were good students, happy and well-adjusted. The house was equipped with a burglar alarm. There was a daily, mandatory telephone check when the children arrived home from school.

Given such diligence, it is hard to imagine that they did not follow all the other ``safety tips'' that are now being handed out like life preservers to area children: Do not open the door to strangers, know who to call in an emergency, stay on the beaten path.

Knock on wood. Throw salt over your shoulder. Wish on a star.

On the morning after the girls' bodies were found floating in the South Anna River by a highway department work crew, administrators at the Spotsylvania Middle School and High School offered what solace they could.

``We've met with our crisis team at the school and with representatives from the Sheriff's Department,'' said Thomas Saville, the high school principal. ``We've made plans . . . we've got an early faculty meeting scheduled. We'll have additional counselors on hand and we've canceled all evening events.''

Faculty, students and staff know the drill. Too well. Last Sept. 16, another Spotslyvania high school student was abducted from her home after school. Her body was found a month later in a King George swamp. A suspect is in custody.

One county over is the hamlet of Lignum, where three bodies have been found in the past 14 months. They include those of Alicia Reynolds, 25, who was kidnapped as she drove from Baltimore to Charlottesville on March 2, 1996; Anne McDaniel, 18, an Orange County resident reported missing last Sept. 18 and Thelma Scroggins, a 74-year-old who was killed in her Lignum home last July 13.

What explanation can counselors and teachers and parents possibly give children for all that random violence? How, even, can they comfort themselves?

Those of us lucky enough to get up today with our children or loved ones intact have one certainty: We cannot be robbed of this exact moment. About tonight or tomorrow or next week, there are no guarantees.

We have it now.

Cherish it. Share it.

Use it gently or tenderly, or gaily or passionately or in any way that flies in the face of the cruelty and evil against which we may never find an adequate defense. MEMO: Ms. Edds is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

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