Time Passes, But Hope Remains

Elizabeth Smart case is painful reminder for Columbia's Dinwiddie family

She was the inescapable name and face, yet no one ever found her.

More than 10 years later, the disappearance of Dail Dinwiddie is as much a mystery as it was that dark, early-autumn morning when the 23-year-old vanished from a busy Columbia entertainment district after attending a U2 concert. Her likeness has been affixed to countless light poles and store windows, circulated in bulk on airlines and, now, Web sites.

Her name and face are a metaphor. She is a symbol – perhaps the symbol, not only in Columbia, but in South Carolina – for how the most unlikely of persons can simply drop off the face of the earth.

For a decade, her parents have walked the line between hope and resignation. The recent safe return of Elizabeth Smart, the 15-year-old who was kidnapped from her suburban Salt Lake City home in June and found under bizarre circumstances, offers Dinwiddie's father, Dan, little comfort personally.

But what the Smart story proves, he says, is that a family can never give up hope, no matter how long uncertainty tears at the soul and keeps a family frozen in a state of grief.

"To give up hope is almost denying that there's a possibility that your child will come back or be brought back," Dinwiddie says of his only daughter.

The Smart case is a mixed blessing of sorts for families of missing loved ones, and there are scores of them. As of March, 879 people, both juveniles and adults, were missing in South Carolina, the State Law Enforcement Division says.

A roommate last saw Jason Knapp, a 20-year-old Clemson University ROTC student, in April 1998. Nine days later, Knapp's car was found abandoned at Table Rock State Park, where police believe he drove on the day he disappeared.

Paula Merchant was 25 when she left home in Columbia in January 1999 to attend a meeting. She never showed up. Her car was found burning, but there's been no sign of her.

A family must always be ready for the return of a loved one with the full understanding that it could never happen. The new hope that Smart provides comes at a painful cost.

But moving on is something a family of a missing child cannot do, says Margaret Frierson, director of the South Carolina chapter of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

What if a missing person sees the family or a neighbor give up? Smart apparently heard her uncle calling for her during search missions.

"Until we have proof to believe otherwise, we are going to operate under the assumption that the child is alive," Frierson says. "Whether it's nine months, 10 years or 15 years, there is that possibility."

To her family and loved ones, Dail Dinwiddie is not a symbol; she's a daughter, sister and friend. A reserved, sweet human being with an engaging personality.

A woman who vanished.

Harold Chambers, the semi-retired Columbia police investigator who has spent a decade sifting through crank calls and promising leads that go bust, always finds himself back where he started – 1:30 a.m., Sept. 24, 1992.

No evidence. No suspect. No witness. No idea where else to begin.

Meanwhile, Dail Dinwiddie herself is frozen in time, branded into the public consciousness by her posterized face, her light-brown hair distinctly swooshed to the left. Strong roots

Dail Boxley Dinwiddie had lived in Columbia almost her entire life.

When Dail was a little girl, Dan and Jean Dinwiddie built a home in the upscale Forest Hills neighborhood, a community straddling the line between the affluence of Forest Acres and the poverty on the other side.

From kindergarten to high school graduation, Dail was nurtured in an educational environment similar to her home.

Heathwood Hall Episcopal School – a pastoral, pine-dotted campus where students feel free to leave their bookbags unattended – offered a comfortable bubble apart from the troubled neighborhoods around it. Jim Gasque, Dail's high school English teacher, watched her grow up. Gasque's late mother had been Dail's baby sitter. Dail was like "a surrogate granddaughter," he says, and his mother never got over her disappearance. Dail was a quiet figure, easily liked. "She had a type of charisma that made people want to be around her," he says. Probably because of her small stature – she was 5 feet tall, 96 pounds when she disappeared – she always seemed vulnerable, he says. Gasque remembers taking her on a 10-day trip to England with 18 other high school seniors. Dail's parents were going to wire her some money, but she didn't want to go the Western Union alone.

"She was the type student who was reluctant to launch out in the city without me," he says. Being small, Dail always found herself having to speak up to be heard.

She had a sweet coating; she slept with her teddy bear, always, on into college. But underneath, others who knew her say, was a feisty spirit tempered with a sharp ability to judge character.

Dail and her mother were close. When Dail was 9, she inspired her mom to take up horseback riding, and the two rode together avidly. When it came time to go off to college, Dail's horse, Double-Time, was sold to help pay tuition.

In the fall of 1987, she enrolled at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Va., but transferred after a year to the University of Georgia.

Dail had intended to take some specialized art courses, but she soon found she was allergic to the trees and grasses in Athens, Ga., and she returned to Randolph-Macon. After graduating in 1991 with an art history degree, Dail returned home to look for a job in art restoration.

But slow economic times made finding work difficult. She hoped for better luck in Charlotte, where she found work at a frame shop. The shop closed six months later, and Dail found herself back living at home in February 1992.

She baby-sat to earn money while she volunteered at the Columbia Museum of Art, all the while preparing for graduate school at the University of South Carolina. By the time she finished grad school, she hoped, the economy would be better. A big night

Sept. 23, 1992, was to be a memorable day in Columbia, even before Dail's disappearance.

U2 was performing at Williams-Brice stadium as part of its "Zoo TV" tour, and even those who didn't have tickets made sure to be a part of the social scene.

The fall semester had begun, and many of Dail's old friends had returned from college or trips overseas and enrolled in law school, graduate school and medical school at USC.

Dail was invited by a friend to be his guest at the concert, where they met two other old high-school friends. After the concert, the group went to Five Points, a college village of boutiques and restaurants. When night falls, it transforms into mecca of revelry where bars stay open into the early-morning hours.

It was a Wednesday night. With U2 in town, the party started early that week, and Five Points was hopping. Dail and her friends ended up at their favorite watering hole, Jungle Jim's, in the heart of Five Points.

Through the night, Dail's friends came and went, and by 1 a.m. she had gotten separated from them. At about 1:15 a.m., she left Jungle Jim's after talking with the bouncer at the door.

A few minutes later, she returned, looked around the bar and then left hurriedly, telling the bouncer goodbye. He was the last person to see her. The search for Dail

Dail's father awoke about 6:15 a.m. As was his routine, he went upstairs to get the dog, who slept in his 16-year-old son's room.

He noticed that the lights in Dail's room were on, as well as her radio. Her bed had not been slept in.

It wasn't uncommon for Dail to call her father for a ride home if she needed it. Five Points is a long but doable walk from the family's home, but the neighborhoods along the way are potentially treacherous, and the drive is brief.

Trying not to panic, Dan awakened his wife and began to call Dail's friends to see if she had spent the night with one of them.

His daughter was not one to leave the family worrying.

At about 8:30 a.m., her parents called the Columbia City Police department, which, at first, was reluctant to treat the case as a kidnapping.

So many cases of missing adults are easily resolved: unexpected sleep-overs, personal sabbaticals or sometimes a stint in jail.

But as her parents described her personality, behavior patterns and demeanor on the night she left, the case was soon labeled a kidnapping.

In the days and weeks that followed, everyone with ears to hear and eyes to see learned the name and face of Dail Dinwiddie.

Her family was all over the news, with a parade of press conferences and rallies at the State House and tearful pleas for her safe return.

And the poster, everywhere – in the record store, on the lightpost, in the supermarket, passed out on passenger airlines and distributed nationwide.

Within a week, Dail was featured on TV's "America's Most Wanted," and a benefit concert at the bar where she was last seen helped raise a $2,500 reward to $50,000.

The strong support network of Heathwood Hall rallied to her cause. Young men and women stood in street medians, holding pictures of Dail, passing out fliers.

Nothing.

"One day she was here, one day she wasn't," Dan says. A frustrating case

Columbia Police investigator Harold Chambers has the look of an old grandpappy; his beige Members Only jacket, a relic of the 1980s, screams unassuming.

But his blue eyes pierce, and beneath his polite stoicism is a grandfather who doggedly wants to bring a child home.

Chambers, now a 35-year veteran, was assigned to the case from the start, and he has put off retirement in part to solve it.

He acts not only as investigator but as a counselor to the Dinwiddies, available at all times whenever they need to talk about theories or frustrations.

The job of cracking the case has been nothing if not frustrating for the grizzled investigator.

"You just can't fathom it," Chambers says. "Absolutely, it's frustrating."

He doesn't entertain theories of what might have happened, for fear that his imagination might be closed to any possibility.

Columbia police, the Richland County Sheriff's Office, the State Law Enforcement Division and the FBI have followed hundreds of leads since the police canvassed Five Points and the possible foot path home to Forest Hills shortly after Dail's disappearance.

The first 72 hours, says Columbia Police Capt. Steve Conley, is the best window to solve a missing persons case. From there, the trail only gets colder.

Investigators interviewed residents, looked in underground water lines and checked abandoned houses along the way.

Early on, police thought they might have had their guy. The morning of Dail's disappearance, a man was seen in Five Points forcing a woman into a car.

Investigators located him in Anderson County and brought him to Columbia. After interviewing him and a Sumter woman – his girlfriend – it became clear she was the one forced into the car that morning.

"It sounded real good to start with," Chambers says. "We thought we had it, but it fizzled out on us like so many more have."

Conley says the Dinwiddie case is perplexing: no crime scene, no witness among a crowd of thousands and no one enticed by the $50,000 reward. There is, however, that night, particularly memorable because of the concert, Conley says. Someone, somebody, had to have seen something, but no one is talking.

"People tend to run their mouth," he says. "It's frustrating with the amount of reward out there, when 99 times out of a hundred, a lot of people on the street would give up their brother for 500 bucks, I don't care what he did."

The only information police have ever received, Conley says, is murky at best – someone "acted strange" or "looked like."

The family and law enforcement have even entertained the visions of psychics, in hopes of any kind of lead.

Whenever an accused serial killer, kidnapper or rapist with a tie to Columbia is caught, investigators search for a link to Dail and other missing people.

That was the case in the fall of 2000 with the capture of Reinaldo Rivera.

Rivera has admitted that he raped and killed four young women beginning in 1999 in the Augusta, Ga., area. His attorney is defending him on the grounds of mental illness.

Around the time of Dail's disappearance, the now 38-year-old Rivera lived in Columbia and was a student at USC.

Investigators interviewed Rivera, but could find no link. Rivera had left a suicide note listing his victims, Chambers says, and denied any involvement with Dinwiddie (and Paula Merchant).

The trail to solving Dinwiddie's case has passed through places such as Las Vegas, Atlanta and Clarksville, Tenn. Police have "three file cabinets full" of leads.

The number of leads today has trailed off compared to a decade ago, when investigators could barely keep up with the flood of information.

But they still get them.

Last month, Conley and SLED agents spent two days in Minnesota interviewing a man in jail who was said to be involved with her disappearance.

Authorities couldn't find a connection, but they have not exhausted that lead and plan to investigate it further, says SLED special agent Dave Lawrence.

Too often, leads are built on what turns out to be a prank. Once, police received a tip that Dail's body was buried off Fish Hatchery Road southwest of Columbia.

Conley and Chambers arrived and found mounds on the property and had no choice but to dig them up with a backhoe. Eventually, they traced the call to a pay phone at USC; the date was April Fool's Day.

Some people have tried to pin the disappearance on a rival for revenge purposes. Inmates have used supposed knowledge of her disappearance as leverage to try to get out of jail.

Such is the nature of a high-profile case: a lot of potential leads but also a mess of misinformation. But investigators agree the high profile gives them a better chance at solving it.

"It seems to be the case that will not go away, which is a good thing," Lawrence says. Holding on to hope

"I'd love to see her walk through that door, like that little Smart girl," Chambers says. "Who knows? The day before Elizabeth Smart was found, no one knew if she was alive."

But Dail wasn't 14, and if she had a chance to escape, she likely would.

Because of that, investigators aren't planning to do an age-enhanced sketch of what Dail would look like at 33, soon to be 34 on April 12.

"Here, you're dealing with, if the opportunity presented itself, I feel certain she would make some kind of contact with authorities or home," Conley says.

Chambers says SLED tried to do an age-enhanced sketch four years ago, but it "didn't work out."

Hope in the Dinwiddie home is a commodity bought at an exorbitant price. Holding onto it has taken its toll.

The Dinwiddies watch TV's "America's Most Wanted" and "American Justice," Dan says, "not for the voyeur value, but to see if maybe there's something we haven't thought about. Maybe we could tie that in." Dan says he and his wife handle the loss differently. From day to day, talking about their daughter doesn't come easier, it's measured by how less difficult it is.

To talk about her daughter's case, Jean must reacquaint herself with a box of photos and news clippings. Dredging up the memories is like picking a scab from a wound that has not healed.

But, there is the hope.

"As a family, we're very private," Dan says. "We don't relish the publicity. The only reason we do this is because, one day, something that somebody has written or said might cause somebody to remember something and find Dail."

At any moment at the Dinwiddie home, an upsetting call can come – from an investigator, a prankster, a reporter, a tipster – the kind that Dan says "always makes our hearts go back in our throats."

At 3 in the morning, a woman called the Dinwiddie home, drunk, to let them know she was looking for their daughter in Five Points – a few years too late.

Sometimes, the calls are entirely well-meaning.

Dan says he got a call from a man in a bar in Green Bay, Wisc., one night: "He said, I know that your daughter is here in the bar tending bar.'"

By the next morning, law enforcement had met up with the woman in Green Bay. She indeed bore a striking resemblance to Dail, but she was nearly six feet tall.

Still, it was that type of dogged concern that found Elizabeth Smart. A couple passing by on a suburban Salt Lake City road insisted on following their instinct when they recognized Smart's suspected abductor from a sketch.

The public's vigilance is the only comfort Dail's father finds in the Smart story. Dail's case is entirely different.

He knows that if his daughter is ever to be found, it will be because people speak up about what they know, whether they realize they know it or not.

"I was very encouraged that the citizens found this child," he says. "The citizenry: That's who's going to find Dail. Insist. Just insist."

And never give up hope, no matter how much it hurts.

—

April 18, 2004

Above and beyond 

Until his death, Harold Chambers stayed true to his pledge to keep working until he found missing Columbia woman

AFTER SURGERY to remove a deadly brain tumor, Harold Chambers might have been expected to give up the search. But those who were close to the semi-retired Columbia Police investigator already knew what he would say. It was the same thing he had said for more than a decade. "I won't retire until I find that girl."

That girl is Dail Dinwiddie, a young woman who nearly 12 years ago vanished in Columbia and became, perhaps, the symbol in South Carolina of how a person can simply disappear off the face of the Earth.

 Chambers never did quit, and he never found Dinwiddie.

But his search is over. Chambers, who two weeks ago at age 62 died from complications of his illness, refused to retire from the force, even as the case had constantly perplexed him to the point of utter frustration.

 Despite the frustration, nearly every week he was investigating, searching for any shred that might set the Dinwiddie family free from their perpetual grief.

 Where there once was a force as unyielding as the Dinwiddies' suffering – a particular comfort for a family who has lost a child – there is a void, one the Dinwiddies says leaves yet another hole in their hearts.

 "He would always tell me," says Jean Dinwiddie, Dail's mother, "`We can do this. We can do it together. You don't have to do it yourself.' I don't think this family would have made it this far without this man."

Such personal relationships between police officer and distraught family are not the norm, law enforcement veterans say, but where they do exist, the professional commitment is equally as personal. Harold Chambers was a case study in the marriage of professional duty and personal mission. If anybody understands that, Tom Siegler would. Since 1978, Seigler has refused to let the case of Donna McCracken and David Clemishaw go – even though he left the Greenville County Sheriff's homicide force in 1981.

The young Asheville couple was found dead — murdered and apparently robbed — in a rural creek off Barton Road.

Seigler, now the head of the sheriff's Office of Professional Standards, says he's pretty sure he knows who did it — based on a statement implicating two suspects — but can't find enough evidence to win in court. One of the suspects is now deceased.

While he now oversees internal investigations, this is one external investigation Seigler says he will not let go. Providing peace to McCracken's family is what drives him.

He speaks regularly with McCracken's sister in Colorado and her mother in North Carolina, sharing any potentially useful information.

Cases like this aren't common, Seigler says, because "you don't have too many whodunits. Most cases clear after at least two years."

While rare, law enforcement veterans say, the commitment isn't surprising, because in every case like this, there is a personal connection with a suffering family.

"When that happens, friendships develop, and it's hard to let it go," says Columbia police Capt. Steve Conley, Chambers' boss before he died. "Anytime you can do that with a victim's family, you're better off."

In Chambers' case, the Dinwiddie family says, the grizzled but grandfatherly part-time investigator wasn't just close to the family.

"He was a member of our family," says Dail's father, Dan Dinwiddie.

A man on a mission

Dail, 23 at the time, disappeared in the early morning hours of Sept. 4, 1992, after losing friends in a bar in Five Points, the nightlife district for University of South Carolina students.

It was quickly established that Dinwiddie was kidnapped. She was not the type to leave her parents worrying, and she had no motivation to vanish.

Chambers was assigned to the case. He never knew that the trail would grow so cold, even as an outpouring of support from the community put the case squarely in the local and national media spotlight.

Up until his death, Chambers could claim not one shred of substantive evidence to work with.

In an interview with The Greenville News 13 months ago, Chambers stoically expressed his befuddlement.

"Absolutely, it's frustrating," he said at the time. "You cannot fathom it."

As a police officer, he was a rare breed, says Jenny Jacobs, a retired State Law Enforcement Division agent who worked the Dinwiddie case along with Chambers from day one.

Jacobs, too, would talk with the family, but somehow, she says, she couldn't rival Chambers' zeal and calm reassurance.

Chambers, she says, was not a man of words. "I knew him by his actions."

It was a pattern woven throughout his life, says his brother, Louie Chambers, a Fountain Inn city councilman and retired West Columbia police officer.

The two grew up together in Greenville, and Louie remembers distinctly how his younger brother always felt to him like his older brother.

Most people called Harold "Chub."

Years ago, he would go every night to a Columbia bar that Louie says had a history of rowdiness and drink coffee.

While "relaxing," he would make sure the place cleared out peaceably, Louie says.

Once, Louie remembers hopping in a car to answer a call of a robbery in progress, clear across town.

When they got to the scene, there was a cadre of police cars and blue lights. Inside was a robber who was holding a hostage.

Louie says his brother grabbed his shotgun and walked inside. Soon after, he came out with the hostage, a handcuffed suspect and the suspect's pistol in his hand.

Chub Chambers, he says, was the last guy the person who kidnapped Dail Dinwiddie would want to run into.

Chambers' daughter, Tammy, says her father was always a mixed bag. "We never knew what he was going to do next."

One predictable trait, however, was that Chambers cared for others, and far outside police work, his brother says.

"My brother took people off the street, homeless people, and carried them home to feed them," Louie says. "I could write a book about him."

More than a cop

At any hour of the night, Chambers made himself available to talk with anyone who wanted to offer ideas or ask questions about the Dinwiddie case.

To Dan and Jean Dinwiddie, Chambers was a counselor more than a cop.

Dan says Chambers would call the family on holidays, just to check in, knowing that holidays are difficult. It was his way of trying to provide assurance that there was someone out there who was committed to making it better.

Chambers also acted as a protector of the family as they answered prank calls.

Sometimes drunks in Five Points would call the home years after Dail's disappearance to tell the family that they would look for Dail.

If there was a lead, he was a conduit, a shortcut, to get the information checked out, whether he acted on it or had someone else act on it, says Shirley Haselwood, a longtime friend of the family who has helped extensively with the case, even after she moved to Greenville in 1998.

Jacobs believes that while Chambers is irreplaceable in so many ways, a set of fresh eyes could be good for the case.

Chambers, throughout his work on the case, tried to keep a fresh approach.

He said last year that he didn't entertain theories on what happened, because he didn't want to close any doors.

That, his daughter Tammy says, was a lesson learned the hard way. Chambers kept a file on a little girl who had been abducted and murdered.

He kept it, she says, long after the case was closed. Chambers homed in on one guy, only to find out someone else did it.

"I asked him why he had that file," Tammy says. "He said, 'I look at it every now and then, to remind me to never to do that again.'"

For his part, Conley, the police captain, has assured the Dinwiddie family that the case will not be shuffled under the pile. Chambers' relationship with the family can't be duplicated, he says, but the search for truth will continue.

It was Conley who just last year flew to Minnesota with Chambers to check out a lead that didn't pan out.

"It's not like he had all the files and nobody has access to them," he says. "It's not inactive by any stretch of the imagination."

In many law enforcement agencies, a special unit is assigned to longstanding cases.

In the Greenville County Sheriff's Office, Seigler says, a cold case unit spends its time on just such matters. The level of personal connection is different from case to case, and a lack of a deeply intimate relationship doesn't mean a cold case can't be solved.

Even so, once death removes the assurance that someone is on a personal mission, a large chasm opens.

A hole, a sinking feeling, but also, says Haselwood, the Dinwiddies' longtime friend, a warm sense of gratitude that will never fade.

"It is an empty feeling," Haselwood says, "like, 'What do you do now?' Besides his family, I know we'll miss him the most, because he was a part of our family. Under no circumstances would he quit — except, I guess, under these."

Terror Hangs In D.C. … Until Snowstorm Hits

Blizzard suspends fear

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The voice is flat and robotic but nonetheless pierces the discreet hum of the National Air and Space Museum: "Attention in the museum, attention in the museum …."

The pregnant pause that follows means something entirely different to the gut than it would have two years or even two weeks ago, before "Terror Alert High."

So does Virginia's interstate no-hitchhiking sign along I-95. The simple crossed-out thumbs-up hints to newcomers, "If you think everything's going to be OK, think again."

As it turns out in the museum, a high-school kid has gotten separated from his bus. There is no need for us to hold our breaths and evacuate the building or act out some other absurd scene that belongs in a doomsday action movie.

If only the speaker could add some reassuring inflection to his voice, we — the undaunted, apparently brave visitors to the heart of the nation's capital — wouldn't have to reach so deep to pull our hearts from our stomachs.

Such is the state of the American psyche in the heart of the nation's capital, a place where an orange terror alert somehow ceases to be a comfortably distant "Saturday Night Live" punch line.

Yet, for a precious few days over the President's Day weekend, the fear is smothered in white.

As the first snowflakes begin to fall, then plummet, then accumulate to near-record proportions, a more immediate concern replacs the scramble for duct tape and plastic sheeting: How in the world am I going to shovel out the car?

Perhaps the rest of our worried nation could use such a storm, a blinding white antidote to fear.

The brave few are gathered around the Washington Monument, gazing into a dreary, snowy sky, some surely wondering whether a rogue plane or an anti-aircraft missile will come into view.

Mothers endure the cold with their pink-cheeked toddlers, waiting outside the Air and Space Museum for their turn to remove their coats and submit to metal-detecting wands.

The National Mall echoes with music from a surly saxophonist, who offeres the opening notes of "Sesame Street" to elicit some change from a pregnant woman.

Meanwhile, a homeless man declares that he won't seek shelter — terrorism and impending blizzard be damned — because he "likes the outdoors."

Over the weekend, The Washington Post conducts a telephone survey of how 600 area folks are reacting to the heightened terror alert.

The survey finds that 75 percent are worried about a terrorist attack in the region and that nearly half fear they personally will be a victim.

But for those willing to come to a place that news reports suggest could become a new Ground Zero at any moment, the fear is mostly buried somewhere between denial and resignation.

At any other time, a blizzard in a densely populated metro area would be something to curse, especially one that forces the governor of Maryland to declare driving without just cause illegal.

But here, for this moment, the idea of being trapped in a home by Mother Nature — and not a dirty bomb – is somehow liberating.

Like the water rendered inert by freezing temperatures, the region's fear of terror is temporarily put on hold.

MSNBC and Fox News are unrelenting with their perpetual "Terror Alert: High" screen labels — but no one here can see it through the snowblind.

The local news heads talking about machine-gun-wielding guards on the Capitol steps disappears, suddenly, giving way to goofy weather personalities rooting for a few more tenths of an inch at Reagan National so the official snow total can be all the more historic.

The busloads of high school students visiting the Lincoln Memorial turn their attention away from the barricades and police trucks blocking passages and to the more immediate threat: the embarrassment of slipping on an icy sidewalk in front of their peers.

Then, as soon as it came, it's gone.

Skies clear, and life begins to emerge once again. Eyes squint at the first sunlight reflecting off a wholly white landscape. Blacktop emerges; customers find gas stations finally open for business.

For three days, talk of Colin Powell's presentation before the United Nations and talk of movable chemical weapons labs is silent.

Then, the sun's rays compel the long thaw, lighting places people don't want to see.

A familiar, unwelcome normalcy returns.

Perchance To Dream

Young competitors find their muse in Shakespeare

The holding room is swimming with unsettled nerves and raging teen hormones.

"My first instinct is to run," says 15-year-old Jessie Griffeth, the youngest competitor in the English-Speaking Union's High School Shakespeare competition. "If I don't run, I'm OK."

They make small talk even though they don't know one another, a nervous exercise, in part, to show that one doesn't think he or she is better than anyone else.

It's also to cope with the realization that they are about to pour out their souls to an audience of discerning strangers. The winner competes nationally in New York.

If they can simply finish, well, that's success, too.

They come to the Warehouse Theatre, the proving ground for this particular evening, from different places and stations in life but with one thing in common: A poet who lived 400 years ago has changed their lives.

One, eventual winner Mary Catalanotto of Clover, is a student at the Governor's School for the Arts.

Some are aspiring actors — their "ands" sounds like "ends." This is their chance to have professionals assess their dream in an unusual, rap-battle-like competitive setting.

Others, though, are here only because their love for Shakespeare is what gets them through the maze of adolescence. Nothing more.

While most teens find their poetry in Eminem cleaning out his closet, these kids are more inspired by Hamlet's anxious indecision.

Speaking to teens

Whether it's a story of love denied or a sharp-tongued character dissing another with language that would be profane if condensed to a single word, Shakespeare speaks to what makes teens what they are: moody, idealistic, confused.

"You can feel his pain and it corresponds to your pain; that's what's so beautiful about it," says Fermnell Dowell, a junior at Riverside High, where he's a running back on the football team.

He's among the 15 local students competing this night, all of whom earned a place here by winning preliminary competitions at their own high schools.

Dowell does a goose-bump-raising rendition of "Othello," when the Moor realizes he has been tricked into killing his love and slays himself.

There is something moving, it seems, in a handsome, nervously outgoing jock suddenly transforming into a character so tragic.

"These plays are about young people," says Dr. John Crabtree, a professor emeritus of English at Furman University, who calmed and advised the students before the competition.

After all, Hamlet was a college student who came home for his dad's funeral, and the angst of the young lovers in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Romeo and Juliet" speaks to youth of any generation, Crabtree says.

To know that hormones and nerves are forcing some of them to hesitate or forget their lines makes the marriage of youth and Shakespeare all the more magnificent a thing to behold, he says.

"An actor and an athlete have a lot in common," Crabtree says. "They're saying, 'I have something here worth watching, now watch me.' It's quite frightening."

The competitors are well aware of this before they take center stage. The deep breaths they suck in hint at the buzzing that must be going on in their stomachs.

Alyssa Dimatteo, a J.L. Mann junior, shrugs it off as "performance energy." Dimatteo, who also attends the Fine Arts Center, says she wants to be a professional actress.

She looks and sounds the part, dressed confidently but conservatively, pronouncing every "T" distinctly in ordinary conversation.

Amy Bryant doesn't have the same credentials. She's a junior at Travelers Rest High, or "TR," where the "R" usually brings out of its students a distinct Southern drawl like the one Bryant has.

Bryant wants to be a veterinarian, and in some way, she looks the part of an outsider.

Her jet black hair contrasts with her pale skin and heavily painted, blue eyelids. The multiple ear piercings add to the image, but it's all disarmed with an engaging, braced-tooth smile.

She believes others at her school were more deserving, but if she's here, she's going to give it her best.

"I just want to prove to myself that I can do it," she says.

Bryant later proves to be a crowd favorite, not for her technical skill, but because of her zeal for the part she plays, the comical Thisbe in "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

Beaudelaire Garraud, a junior at Berea, might not look the part of a Shakespearean actor.

When Garraud's father, Marc, moved to New York from Haiti years ago, he spoke only Creole.

Marc says he named his son Beaudelaire because it was his middle name and his father, who was killed in Haiti when Marc was 3, loved the poetry of Charles Beaudelaire.

Marc is a jazz musician, but never cared much for Shakespeare. Beau, as he affectionately calls his son, found Shakespeare himself growing up in a Bronx ghetto, forsaking television to read the poet's works.

"You know, he's weird," Marc says, throwing up his hands to signify how he steps back and allows his son to find his own way. "I'm like, 'You've got the Shakespeare, man.'"

Beau, by his own account, is a quiet, analytical type and a serious perfectionist. His father searches for the right word as he watches his cherub-faced son try to strike up a conversation with the other competitors. The word finally comes: "introvert."

"I like to watch people; Shakespeare does that with words," says Beau.

His slight Creole/New York accent amalgam goes well with a flawless recital of Sonnet 116.

It's in Shakespeare's words that Beau says he finds the language to describe how he sees people. On the bus one day, he scolded an irritating girl: "Get thee to a nunnery!"

She was perplexed, to say the least.

He likes Macbeth, particularly the comical character of the porter. To find humor wrapped into one of the most depressing works of literature reminds him a bit of teenage life, he says.

"It'll be really terrible and something funny will happen, and then it's, like, I don't feel like smiling, but I'm going to smile." And then he does.

Dowell, the running back, says he can find no better way to secure a date. "He's smooth with the ladies," Dowell says, half-joking but maybe a little more than half-serious. "If you quote Shakespeare, it just touches a woman's heart."

Catalanotto says she loses herself in the language. She prefers to think of Shakespeare as "400 years young."

"It's a language in which you said exactly what you meant," says Catalanotto, who wants to go into broadcasting. "There's something about that that's really wonderful. It almost makes me hurt for today, that we can't come across that beautifully with our speech."

Love, above all else, seems to resonate with these teens. "A 14-year-old girl reading 'Romeo and Juliet' is going to understand and be able to say, 'I feel that way,'" says Dimatteo, the J.L. Mann and Fine Arts Center student.

And it's difficult for her to imagine anyone missing out. "Shakespeare definitely has a stigma," Dimatteo says, referring to students who are reluctant to decipher elevated text.

"Like anything, if you only know the stereotype, then you probably won't fall in love with it. We're not like a separate breed of people. I mean, we are teenagers. We just found a different love."

Fear Hits Home

Attempted kidnapping steals community's innocence, steels parents' resolve

Parents file in, desperate for answers, or at least a sense of control.

Much of the Sparrows Point subdivision is at the East Simpsonville Fire Station, a stone's throw from their neighborhood, which just a little more than a week ago seemed the safest place on earth to live.

Greenville County Sheriff's Sgt. B.R. Donnelly is teaching the kids about "stranger danger."

"What can a stranger do to you?"

The children fidget and giggle with their friends, then a precocious voice rises above the chatter.

"A stranger could take you to someone's house you don't want to be at and kill you," the little one says matter-of-factly.

The kids are told not to just kick the shin bone, but scrape down it. If you get caught in a kidnapper's grip, the deputy says, focus on the weakness of the attacker's thumbs to escape.

Donnelly asks another question: "Are all strangers bad?"

The kids drone in unison: "Yeesss." Then, a confused mix of "yes" and "no."

They don't know for sure. No one does. But since Sept. 6, parents and children in the neighborhood of young families know a new, very real fear: A little girl in their community was almost snatched.

And much like Sept. 11 put Americans into a new state of unease, Sparrows Point residents find the incident has put them in a place they never would have imagined, both physically and psychologically.

Parents are shocked, angry. They quickly organized this gathering in an attempt to reclaim some normalcy and a sense of comfort.

Street names in the neighborhood would hint at comfort: Valhalla Lane, the heavenly; Ashridge Way, the bucolic.

Desirable neighborhoods on the Eastside with ways and lanes and drives aren't supposed to have strangers lurking for the opportunity to grab children at play.

But it was at Valhalla and Ashridge, in the absolute heart of the community and just yards from the pool, where two men in a car grabbed a 6-year-old girl as she rode her bike in the dimming light of dusk on a Friday evening.

Searching for a cat

She was helping a group of girls search for a lost cat.

Her 10-year-old friend, a small child with a cast on her arm from surgery, helped the younger girl fight off the would-be kidnappers. The men fled, and police say they are still at large.

In that instant, the bubble burst for Sparrows Point and the communities around it.

"My first thought was, 'We need to get out of here,'" says Dawn Arquette, a mother of three who moved to Sparrows Point two years ago from Los Angeles County. Her family's home is only a block away from the attempted kidnapping site.

"We know that that's reality, as it happens everywhere," she says. "But when it happens in your neighborhood to someone you know, it's very scary. This stuff really happens."

Debbie Chapman's family moved from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., seven years ago to get away from crime. At the time, her now 10-year-old daughter was only 2, and she wanted her to grow up in a safe environment.

Chapman lives in Gilder Creek Farm, not far from Sparrows Point.

The mother of two says now she won't let her kids play baseball in the street like she used to do when she was young.

And, since the abduction attempt, she says parents will no longer let their children play outside between services at nearby Emmanuel Lutheran Church.

"They can't do what I used to," Chapman says. "It changes everybody's way of life."

How could this happen here?

Sparrows Point is one of those places — more common with each clearing of pasture land — where the nearly 400 houses are so close together that a seeming wall of double-garage doors lines the streets, just steps from the road.

Windows facing the street make it feel that a hundred eyes are watching. Each yard-of-the-month sign seems to scream that this place is normal and innocent.

Child abductions happen in California or Utah or Oregon, as everyone saw on television and in the papers this past summer, not in Greenville County.

Certainly not in a quiet neighborhood like this.

Greenville hasn't had a case like this in the past 15 years, says Sgt. James McCann, a spokesman for the Greenville County's Sheriff's Office.

But as the incident proves, it could happen anywhere, to anybody, McCann says. And anyone could be a predator.

The perpetrators are described as a white man with gray hair in his 50s, wearing a gray shirt and black and red hat, and a black man in his 30s, about 5-foot-6, 200 pounds, and wearing a blue and green Hawaiian shirt.

They never said a word.

They drove an older model white, box-type car with rust spots. A day before the attempted abduction, a neighbor reported that she saw the two men walking around the community as if they were selling something, McCann says.

There's no way to know for sure whether the two men have been seen in other communities, because the description is so general, he says.

But Brian Kelly is convinced they will strike again.

"Every other neighborhood is wide open right now," says Kelly, head of the Sparrows Point Neighborhood Crime Watch. "I'm afraid it's going to take them doing it again to somebody else … to stop them."

Since the abduction attempt, Kelly says he's constantly fielding calls about white cars and license numbers. He relays the information to authorities, but how many white cars with rust spots are there?

The fact that two men were together is not necessarily odd in an abduction case, McCann says. "There's no way to profile an abductor," he says.

And while history has shown that anyone can kidnap a child, statistics paint a general picture. Most children are abducted by a friend, acquaintance or family member.

In the worst-case stranger abductions, when the child is killed, almost all perpetrators are male, under age 35; and 85 percent are unmarried and are unemployed, according to a U.S. Justice Department report.

Two-thirds of stranger abductions are sex related.

Overall, abduction cases are down over the past decade, the FBI says.

Last year, the FBI listed 28,765 people — adults and children — as missing under involuntary circumstances, such as abduction.

That number is down 8.8 percent from 2000.

On average, about 100 children are kidnapped and killed each year in the United States, down from the estimated 200 to 300 cases in the 1980s, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

In the face of such numbers, parents are left in a wilderness, without much to guide them. How can they talk to their children without robbing them of their innocence?

It's a delicate balance, says Ben Stephens, a Clemson University psychology professor.

Parents must try to tailor their discussions to each child, he says. Children handle such information differently.

"What might work with one kid might not work with another," Stephens says.

Also, parents should try to avoid talking about the "gory details of why" kids need be aware of their surroundings. Rather, parents should simply impose rules and enforce them consistently, he says.

Chapman, the Gilder Creek Farm mom, says neighbors must learn from this and change attitudes and preconceptions.

"It's not me watching out for my children and you watching out for your children," she says. "It's everybody watching out for all children. Whether you have a child or not, they're still children of your community. That's the important thing that needs to get through."

‘You’ve Been Deported’

Wofford student, mother caught in the law of the land they love

It's when Hitesh Tolani can't seem to find the words that he sounds most like other college guys his age: the kind of fellows who dye their hair blond and regret it, forsake socks for flip-flops and post comical pictures on the Internet mugging with basketball buddies.

But one phone call and the 20-year-old Wofford College honor student realized just how different he is.

After a recent night out with friends, barely through the door of his family's Columbia apartment, he rushed to answer the phone. A distraught family friend was on the line.

The words were quick and harsh. "Is your mother OK? You've been deported."

The quiet between shock and realization seemed like an infinity.

Hitesh sounds so simply American as he struggles to explain the weight of the moment.

"I was, like, 'Wow,'" he says.

As much as Hitesh wants to be American — and as much as every "like" and "you know" and "y'all" says that he must be — he isn't.

His father, a native of India, died in 1995, one month before he won the right to claim his family's citizenship. Even though Gulab Tolani had spent years in the government's citizenship process, his death left Hitesh without an umbrella for legal status.

Hitesh's widowed mother, Jaya, must go to India, too, likely, their attorney says, by the end of the year. His 14-year-old brother, Ravi, will not, because he was born in New York.

Last month, the family was denied a hearing by an immigration appeal board, the final step before deportation in the eyes of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Once out of the United States, the two would not be allowed to return for 10 years.

Hitesh would leave behind a promising academic career and lofty job goals.

He graduated from Irmo High School with a 3.9 GPR and has continued his success at Wofford, the private liberal arts college in Spartanburg where he ranks near the top of his class.

India is a place alien to him; he spent exactly one month there as a toddler when the family visited for a wedding.

"I can't fathom it," he says. "It's like someone coming to your home and saying, 'Leave Earth, live on Mars.' What do you know? The only thing you know is it's a red planet."

But Hitesh's story isn't unique. In fact, it's far from it, says Angela Kelley, deputy director of the National Immigration Forum, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group that challenges the INS and immigration law.

Kelley says immigration laws are a tangled web of loopholes and contradictions, and personal hardships often find no place in decisions.

In Hitesh's case, the INS wasn't looking for him; he went to the agency to clear up his status.

"As counterintuitive as it seems that we would turn our back on someone with these kinds of skills and this kind of prospect, we do turn our backs on people like that regularly," Kelley says. "It's a heartbreaking story that plays out every day in towns and cites across this country."

However, INS spokesman Russ Bergeron says the agency is merely doing its job. Only so many exceptions can be made, he says, and the rest is left up to the courts.

"We are meeting our obligations under the law," he says. "Should we arbitrarily ignore immigration law based solely on intelligence?"

And so a family agonizes over the prospect of being split apart.

Ravi — who hopes to follow in his brother's academic path as a freshman at Irmo High — wouldn't accompany his family to India.

His mother won't let him go out of fear that she can't provide for him in a place where the family knows no one. He is faced with the possibility of living his teen years in a foster home, far from the opportunity his father had worked to afford him.

"When I was 7, I lost my dad," Ravi says, with a stoicism that is the antithesis of his outgoing sibling. "Now I'm 14, and I'm about to lose my brother."

The family has some hope, however slim.

Once lawmakers reconvene in Washington this week, South Carolina's longtime U.S. Sens. Fritz Hollings and Strom Thurmond say they will push a bill that would provide relief for the Tolanis.

But it's a long shot. Of 292 such private relief bills since 1999, only 29 have passed, about 10 percent.

Hollings helped the Tolanis secure a stay from the INS that will buy the family time until the end of the year, says their attorney, immigration lawyer Allen Ladd of Spartanburg.

Ladd also has filed an appeal to a federal appeals court in Atlanta, but isn't optimistic.

Increasing criticism of the INS since Sept. 11 is leading to more deportation, Ladd says. But the INS rejects this notion.

So much love lost

Oct. 23, 1995, 3:47 p.m.

Although he was only 13 at the time, Hitesh remembers to the minute the afternoon his father died of hepatitis. So much love and support was lost when Gulab Tolani took his last breath.

In 1984, Gulab had brought Jaya and 18-month-old Hitesh, who was born in Africa's Sierra Leone, to Utica, N.Y., on a tourist visa. There, the family opened a clothing store.

Gulab's brother would sponsor the family for citizenship, a process begun soon after the family arrived.

Hitesh says Gulab was a father both "serious and jolly," serious about his children's education, but calmed by his devout Hindu faith.

The family moved to Columbia in 1991. Gulab liked the earlier springs and warmer Southern weather and hospitality.

They opened a clothing store just west of Interstate 26, an area dotted with pines, where apartments with peeling shingles now hint at its fading status as a middle-class suburban mecca.

Hitesh remembers his father waking him on school mornings, ironing his clothes while Jaya cooked breakfast in the family's small apartment kitchen.

On summer days, Hitesh and his father would wake up early to walk five miles down busy St. Andrews Road to a Hindu temple.

It's in the memory of those walks that Hitesh now finds an infinite space to live with his father and ponder the lessons of education, responsibility and respect.

"Those are the times I connected most with my dad," Hitesh says.

He recalls how they joked about dodging balls from a miniature golf course along the way.

The Food Lion across the street is still there. The Putt-Putt course isn't. Like the time with his dad, it exists only in memory.

Faith allowed Gulab to live longer than anyone thought, Hitesh says.

In his last month, waiting on a liver transplant, Gulab faded in and out of consciousness in a Charleston hospital room. Doctors had said he wouldn't emerge from his coma.

Jaya refused to leave his side. Then, near the end, seven days of unconsciousness broke, and Gulab called his family together.

He was waiting for the Hindu holy day, Diwali, a day as cherished to Hindus as Christmas is to Christians.

A floating day determined by the phase of the moon, Diwali came early in 1995. Hindus believe, as Gulab did, that if you die on Diwali, you skip reincarnation and go straight to heaven.

For days, Gulab meditated and chanted. He had made it. Diwali came. Hours later, as Jaya, family friends and hospital staff looked on, he sat up in his bed, stretched his arms upward, fell back and died.

Hitesh's mother cried every day for a year.

Like anyone battling chaos with faith, Hitesh finds meaning in the early Diwali, just as he tries to find meaning in everything else.

Stepping into a new role

Since his father's passing, Hitesh has assumed the role of family leader, which fits his firstborn status and Type A personality (the clothes hangers in his closet are separated, plastic on one side, metal on the other).

When his mother's car breaks down and he's home from school, Hitesh is there to take her to the clothing store she owns 20 minutes across town.

He watches over his brother in the family's modest apartment, where a penny is taped — heads up — over the door frame, a Hindu good-luck token. The "Don't Quit" poster framed on one wall — like something you'd read on a greeting card from an overly sentimental mother — hints at their resolve.

Hitesh makes sure the PlayStation 2 sprawled across the floor isn't too much of a distraction from his little brother's education.

Ravi rarely calls Hitesh by name. Rather, he refers to him as "bahya," which means "respected older brother."

At home, they share a room; when Hitesh is away at Wofford, Ravi calls his brother frequently, still hungry for guidance.

"He's always there for me," Ravi says.

Hitesh looks and sounds nothing like the foreigner he's told he is, save for what he calls his "lightly toasted" complexion.

He wears an orange golf shirt with a garnet University of South Carolina hat, which might hint at a conflict were it not for years of cheering in the stands of Williams-Brice stadium.

The bill of his hat isn't pulled down over his eyes. It points upward, letting free his affable nature and signifying his openness.

Were it not for his honesty and his determination to attend a university, Hitesh and his mother might have flown under the immigration radar.

All his life, Hitesh had been told he was born in Chicago, not in Sierra Leone. Jaya says she and Gulab decided it was best so that Hitesh wouldn't feel alienated from his peers.

Getting citizenship, Hitesh explains, is like going to the movies: First you stand in line to get your ticket (permanent residency), then you wait again for the ticket to be torn (citizenship).

The family's attorney early on in the process kept telling them that any day they would reach the end of that long ticket line. No need for Hitesh to be anxious, his mother thought.

"We knew that we were going to get it," Jaya says. "We thought, 'By the time he grows up, we're going to get it.'"

The end of the line, as it happened, was a month after Gulab died. He was the family's legal link to permanent residence.

Hitesh has always placed school above play, almost to the point of obsession.

When the family first opened their clothing store in Columbia, a robber pointed a gun at young Hitesh's head. All Hitesh could think about was his history homework — that is, until he felt gunmetal pressed to his head. In high school — where he served time as "The Sting Man," the school's mascot — Hitesh was a teacher's dream, says Mylla Markland, a guidance counselor at Irmo High

She says she bonded early on with the young man who "lived in the guidance office."

He worked tirelessly to find ways to fund his education. His dream always was "to go to an Ivy League school."

"He just goes full blast," Markland says. "It makes you think, 'Whatever he's taking, I want some of it.'"

Fighting to be strong

In 1997, Jaya had sat down with her son to tell him of his status as a non-citizen. Tears flow when she speaks of this encounter.

A year earlier, just after Gulab died, Jaya was stricken with breast cancer and was forced to fight the disease with chemotherapy.

The death of her husband meant a frightening new world.

"I was so much dependent on my husband," Jaya says. "I didn't know how to buy groceries."

But Jaya fought to be strong. After surgery to remove a breast, after each chemotherapy, she was back to work within days.

She says she didn't want her children to see weakness. "I don't want to be dependent on anybody," she says.

As her husband did, she finds strength in faith; she "sees God in every person." But still, she is afraid, and she worries about losing health insurance.

"I don't have a home anywhere," Jaya says. "Everything I have is here. I'm a beggar anywhere else I go."

Amid the chaos of her husband's death and her own cancer, Jaya wasn't able to keep track of the family's status, leaving them exposed as "undocumented aliens." In that time, Congress changed immigration laws, making it tougher for undocumented aliens to gain citizenship.

The family's medical troubles had drained their finances. When time came for Hitesh to secure financial aid for college, he soon realized that his legal status made him ineligible.

Hitesh believed the best route was to go to the INS to straighten out the problem. The INS immediately put him into deportation proceedings.

An inescapable fate?

As a high school senior in 2000, Hitesh had acceptance letters from Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Emory and the USC Honors College. The tripwire each time was his lack of legal residency.

Wofford made a special effort to enroll Hitesh despite his citizenship struggles. A Byrnes scholarship pays a small portion of his tuition; Wofford pays the rest.

In August 2000, just before Wofford students reported for class, an immigration judge ruled that Hitesh and his mother would have to leave the country.

During a six-hour hearing, the judge sympathized, but could find no way around the law. Hitesh petitioned the Board of Immigration Appeals.

It would take two years to learn the resolution. In the meantime, the family was allowed to stay.

Hitesh moved on with his college life. He had always wanted to study biomedical engineering, but Wofford didn't offer that. So he chose computer science and a program that would allow him to transfer to an engineering program at Clemson or Columbia University in New York.

And he continues to impress teachers, just as he did at Irmo High.

He's the kind of student that professors notice — for the right reasons, says Carol Wilson, a Wofford English professor who lives in Greenville.

"There's an idealism in him that I admire," Wilson says.

But no amount of idealism can change his immigration status.

Last month the two-year reprieve ran out. The Board of Immigration Appeals declined to hear his case and told Hitesh that he and his mother had to be out of the country in a matter of weeks.

Not even the lowbrow humor of the latest Austin Powers movie could distract him from his fate. He went to see "Goldmember" a few days after learning of the decision, and while his friends laughed, Hitesh just stared. He says the idea of moving to India is as foreign to him as anything he can imagine.

Whenever he hears his parents' native language, he relies on his mother to interpret. He can only make out a few words.

"It's not home," he says. "This is home."

Like most people when they're young, Hitesh has found a circle of friends — many of them with Indian heritage, though he says relating to Indian immigrants is a much different story.

"I cannot relate to them," he says. "They are on a totally different level. I'm distinctly American. I have Indian friends here, and I relate to them very well."

Nikhil Sharma, Hitesh's best friend from high school, is one of those friends. He speaks of Hitesh's selflessness.

"He puts, like, everyone else before himself," Sharma says. "That's a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing."

The 19-year-old University of California-Berkeley student doesn't understand how Hitesh can be forced to leave if he's making every effort to be honest.

"His honesty is what got him trapped in this situation," he says. "Being an American citizen is more than some check mark on a file."

But as far as immigration law is concerned, that check mark matters.

And if it didn't, the country would "surrender its national sovereignty," says David Ray, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington, D.C., group that pushes for tougher laws and better enforcement.

"If people come here and flout the immigration laws and get away with it, there's really no reason to obey the immigration laws in the first place," Ray says. "There have to be repercussions for failing to follow by the rules, as in every aspect of life."

So many people living life in America aren't here legally, says Kelley, of the immigration advocacy group, but the image of illegal immigrants crossing the border in the black of night is only partly true.

The immigration forum estimates 8 million undocumented aliens. Of those, 40 percent enter legally but run out of eligibility, like Hitesh and his mother, Kelley says.

In 2000, there were 184,775 people deported from the United States, and of that number, 3,279 were deported from the Atlanta region. The INS says that's the nearest it can come to determining how many are deported from South Carolina.

Of the 3,279 who were deported from the Atlanta area, 702 "failed to maintain status," a category Hitesh and Jaya fall under.

The Tolanis face tough changes that were made in immigration law in 1996, an infamous year in the eyes of immigration advocates.

One example: After 1996, immigrants legally here but without citizenship could be deported for crimes committed before the law was passed.

That meant infractions like smoking marijuana or getting into a barroom brawl in college would be deportable offenses, Kelley says.

Currently, lawmakers are working to ease that restriction, but changes overall are slow to come, she says.

"Our immigration policies are broken," Kelley says. "As this story shows, it's really hard for people who want to play by the rules to be here legally."

However, Ray says the 1996 changes were needed to ensure that immigrants played by the rules early on. And he says the estimate of 8 million illegal immigrants in the United States proves the laws aren't too stiff.

The 1996 law, he says, offers discretion by the U.S. Attorney General's Office for cases with special hardships.

But the fallout of Sept. 11 changed attitudes, says Ladd, the family's attorney. Immigrants are more likely to have special appeals brushed aside now, he says.

With more pressure to crack down on potential terrorists and with criticism for 9/11 failures, the immigration system — both the INS and the courts — is taking an even harder line, he says.

The family is appealing to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta on grounds that Hitesh and Jaya were denied due process by the appeal board.

"Sept. 11 really put the nail in the coffin," Ladd says.

The 11th Circuit appeal might be the family's last chance, he says. Lawmakers aren't likely to pass the private relief bill sponsored by Sens. Hollings and Thurmond in so short a time, he says.

Kelley says it's rare for illegal immigrants to approach INS as Hitesh did, and she says she would have advised against it until laws changed.

However, Russ Bergeron, the INS spokesman in Washington, says that "it's not unusual" for aliens to approach the agency.

And while the INS generally targets criminals for deportation, any illegal aliens are liable to be placed into deportation proceedings if the agency discovers them, Bergeron says.

"Our priority is to search out and find individuals who are illegally in the United States and who are committing crimes," he says. "That doesn't mean that we don't apprehend and place into deportation proceedings people who are non-criminals."

Bergeron says that of the 103,505 people deported in an eight-month period following the terrorist attacks, more than half were not criminals.

The year before — from Oct. 1, 2000, to June 30, 2001 — 135,772 people were deported, 82,372 of them non-criminals.

Those statistics also debunk a Sept. 11 "myth," Bergeron says.

Deportations are down 24 percent over those time periods, largely because fewer people are entering the country since the terrorist attacks, he says.

"The claim that you have a lot more people being deported from the United States because of 9/11 is simply not true," he says.

Bergeron says Hitesh and Jaya might have had the option of voluntarily leaving to avoid a deportation blight on their record, then applying for a waiver back into the States.

But without guarantees. Ladd says if they had left, their chances of returning to the United States would be slim to none.

Because their status lapsed for more than a year, the two face a legal hurdle that could bar them from returning to the States for 10 years, even if Ravi sponsored them in seven years when he turns 21 and is eligible.

Ladd says the INS should be criticized for failing to exercise discretion, much as a police officer would refrain from giving a speeding ticket to a woman in labor.

Bergeron says the labor analogy is unfair. The woman is in a state of emergency and duress. Hitesh's circumstances, he says, are for the judicial system to consider.

Ladd argues that the death of a father, a mother stricken with breast cancer and a brother who would be left behind sounds like duress to him.

Uncertain future

Hitesh is beginning another school year, pressing forward as if December won't be his last month at Wofford, where he says a "smile greets him around every corner."

He's hoping lawmakers can agree to let him stay or the appeals court will grant some relief. He's done all he can — and he's asking anyone who's interested in helping to visit his Web site, chickna1.tripod.com/HELP.htm .

He is preparing himself for the outcome, even if it means he must leave this country behind.

"I have to keep it real," he says, again in youthful American vernacular. "I have to be practical. There's been many, many times where my hopes have risen up and been floored in a matter of seconds."

Through it all, though, Hitesh says he's learned something invaluable: People care.

"God forbid, if we have to leave now, I'm going to leave feeling extremely loved."

Michael Allen

  

Pokemon and playgrounds. Two months ago, that's what 6-year-old Michael Allen's life was all about.

The silver-haired Ellen Woodside Elementary kindergartner is best known by his teacher for his empathy for other students and the intense activity bursting through a small frame and shy, quiet demeanor.

At his family's Honea Path home, he often burned the energy inside him by vacuuming. "He loves a clean house — especially vacuuming," said his mother, Tammy Allen. "He loved to vacuum."

Now Michael doesn't have the time to think of those things. He struggles to communicate through a barrier of pain killers as he battles to breathe with the one working lung that survived pneumonia.

He's fighting for his life against a rare immune-deficiency disease called Chediak-Higashi Syndrome, a genetic disorder signified by Michael's albino pigmentation. But he's not fighting alone — the community has rallied around him.

After a "pretty amazing" recovery, Dr. Michael Avant said Michael is gaining ground in his fight. Surprisingly, Avant said, Michael should be able to go home in a couple of weeks.

More infections will come, though, and a trip to Duke University for a bone marrow transplant is his only hope. Throughout the ordeal, his mother and father struggle to stay by his side while facing the demand of caring for two younger children, ages 3 and 17 months.

Tammy Allen stays at Greenville Memorial Hospital 12 to 15 hours a day, holding Michael's hand as he is weened from a respirator. Nick Allen stops by to comfort his son during the day before working nights.

"It's really rough, but I'm trying to be in there and hang strong," Tammy Allen said. "My husband is trying to work as much as he can."

The community around Michael has joined in his fight.

At Ellen Woodside, children are bringing their allowances — penny by penny — and throwing it into a jar, said Michael's teacher, Kim Gray. So far, the school has raised $1,127.

Gray organized a blood drive to help with Michael's transfusions. Ellen Woodside netted 93 donors, Fork Shoals Elementary 34 and Greenbriar 27.

Wednesday, Hampton Inn on Pelham Road near Interstate 85 will buy pizza for all Ellen Woodside students to reward them for giving up their allowances. And the teacher who raises the most money will get a free weekend stay in one of the hotel's jacuzzi suites.

If you talk to Michael's teacher, it's not hard to see why people want to help him.

"If it was raining outside, he was the sunshine when you came in," Gray said. "The playground's not the same without him."