Akers and Hornbeck settling in to new life

Settling in to new life
By Todd C. Frankel
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Sunday, Jan. 06 2008

Richwoods-- They still get recognized in restaurants and shopping malls.
Strangers stop to ask for hugs. "You put on a smiley face and do what you can
to accommodate," explains Craig Akers. Sometimes they find a note on their
website from someone who spied the family eating dinner at Applebee's.



They are
not trying to hide, really, but they are trying to adjust — to their new fame,
to their new life, to their new house, to new concerns, to how everything
changed the day Shawn Hornbeck came home.

Nearly a year has slipped by — vanished — since that rainy, cold Friday last
January when authorities walked into an apartment in Kirkwood and discovered
not one, but two kidnapped boys. William "Ben" Ownby, then 13, was missing for
four days. Shawn, then 15, had been gone four years.

"Shawn and I were talking about it in the car the other day," said Craig Akers,
Shawn's stepfather. "We're all having issues getting our heads around the fact
that it has been almost a year. Because it doesn't feel like it to any of us.
Not even close."

Time moved like frozen syrup for Craig and his wife, Pam, as they dealt with
the constant pang of not knowing what had happened to their son. The clock
speeds along now but with a new set of challenges, like figuring out how to be
a family again.

The unease from that first night with Shawn home — What do you say after so
long? What if you say the wrong thing? — has melted away. They are learning to
fill in the blanks created by the four years apart.

"Some days it is really, really hard for them," said Sherri Martin,
administrator for the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation, whose office rests in the
family's basement. "But I'm quietly amazed each and every day at what they've
managed to get done."

MEDIA MANIA

This is how Craig spends a fair bit of time these days: giving interviews.

On this day, Fox News.

The couch was a little deep. Uncomfortable. So Craig slipped two brown pillows
behind his back. The move allowed the prosthetic for his right leg, lost to
vascular disease while Shawn was gone, to rest flat on the carpet.

He was sitting in the basement of the family's new 2,000-square-foot,
four-bedroom home, situated on a hill in Richwoods, a smidgen of a town 65
miles southwest of St. Louis. The house was donated last summer by a group of
contractors. A trust now owns it, and Shawn and his parents and Craig's father
call it home. But it is still so new that Craig is loath to hammer nails in the
walls.

Craig had a microphone clipped to his orange-checked dress shirt. Two boom
lights loomed overhead. Craig, coached by his wife, knew to cut out the "uhms"
and keep his head still.

"You know the drill," said a Fox News producer, who had flown in from New York
just a couple of hours earlier.

And Craig launched into the story of Shawn's miraculous return, a tale he is
happy to tell and retell — a now-familiar story that still causes people to
smile and tear up and perhaps give second thought to the notion this is a world
without miracles.

When Shawn first disappeared, the Akerses begged for attention. No more. Since
Shawn was found, reporters far and wide have beaten a path to the Akerses'
door. The parking pad outside sometimes overflows with visiting vehicles.

The network morning shows call with promises of all-expense-paid trips to New
York. Pam just finished an interview with a British magazine. (But the Akerses
need to be guarded, too: In October, a New York newspaper hired someone to try
posing as a real estate agent to photograph inside the Akerses' home.)
Recently, a local TV reporter fought hard to be the first to show a single
family-provided photo of Shawn decorating the Christmas tree.

SHIELDING SHAWN

But with all of that attention, Craig and Pam seek a balance.

The family wants to keep the Shawn Hornbeck Foundation — created when Shawn
disappeared — in the news. The foundation works to find other missing kids and
prevent kidnapping.

But discussing Shawn's discovery means, in some ways, discussing the horrors
endured by the boy while he was gone. "We are aware that what we do can keep
the past in the present, more or less," Craig said.

In November, Craig and Pam helped find a 15-year-old runaway from Clayton,
hopping a plane to California to take the girl home.

That takes money. Even now, the Akerses — who were never wealthy — work just
part time at a supply chain logistics company, not even enough hours to qualify
for company health care.

But Craig and Pam also want to protect Shawn Hornbeck, their son.

So the parents, not Shawn, talk to the media.

"He's just not ready. We're not ready," Craig said.

DRIVING AGE

Shawn still resembles the young teen found one year ago, on Jan. 12. Piercings
in his lip and eyebrow are gone. But he has kept the piercing in both ears. His
once-shaggy brown hair is worn short.

He attends a private school in the St. Louis area, which his parents have
declined to identify. He is a freshman, just one year behind. He spent last
summer with a tutor trying to make up for the years he was not in school. In
testing, his education level rose from about the fifth-grade level to nearly
the eighth.

His report card is straight A's. That means his parents will allow Shawn, who
turned 16 in July, to get his drivers permit soon.

For Craig and Pam, it is difficult to imagine Shawn driving, having the freedom
of a car. It would be difficult for any parent. But the Akerses still struggle
to reconcile the 16-year-old young man Shawn is today with the 11-year-old boy
they once knew.

Back in 2002, he was out riding his bike and never came home. How could they
ever let him drive off in a car?

Shawn today is bigger and older and wiser. But the worry, it never relents.

Yes, his parents say, they know Shawn will not be kidnapped again. But the
impossible happened once. It is a thought they cannot push out of their minds.

"It would be so hard to deal with anything happening to him after getting him
back," Craig said. "I'm not sure we could do it again. It took a lot the first
time."

LETTING OUT LEASH

And still, they give Shawn small freedoms.

He goes to school. He hangs out with friends.

One weekend last month, Craig and Pam drove Shawn 90 minutes from Richwoods to
the St. Louis Mills mall in Hazelwood. Shawn was given three hours to hang out
with friends and see a movie. It was a small but important step.

"We actually left the mall," Craig said, smiling.

They did not go far. They had lunch at a Longhorn steakhouse in the mall's
parking lot. They shopped at the Cabela's outdoor store in the mall. Ten
minutes before Shawn was due out, his parents rushed back to their car and
acted as if they had just pulled up.

Shawn walked out, right on time.

SWEET MEMORY

The interview with Fox News was wrapping up.

Pam, back from a doctor's visit, joined Craig on the couch. They held hands.

The producer asks them to recall what it was like on that chilly January day to
learn that Shawn was alive. Craig provided the details, checking certain facts
with his wife. How they were driving home from work when they first learned
authorities were almost certain they had found Shawn. Tears filled Pam's eyes
as she remembered what it was like to see her son again.

"And I'm telling you there's nothing much better than that," she said.

Just beyond the camera's view, behind the boom lights, stood Shawn. He listened
to his parents talking about him, about their desperate search and its
improbable, miraculous ending.

Then he bounded up the stairs. It was time to move on.

tfrankel@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8110