When I became a mother at the age of seventeen, I could suddenly relate to news stories. The Oklahoma City bombing. Susan Smith drowning her little boys. Everything suddenly touched me on an entirely different level when it hit me that I was suddenly responsible for raising a child—no, helping a child survive, when you think about it—in a truly frightening world.
The 2000 murder of 21-month-old Kassidy Bortner, though, is the one that will stay with me forever, a situation I still think about a lot.
Although I was …