First-Person: At the Scene of the Jaycee Lee Dugard Kidnapping

What is it like living near the house where Jaycee Lee Dugard was allegedly held prisoner for 18 years by Phillip and Nancy Garrido?

Luckily, I am not in the direct neighborhood, but that I'm close enough to go over to the house in Antioch is more than disconcerting. When the Dugard/Garrido story first broke, I was stunned, disgusted, angry and for Jaycee and her two children -- and very happy she was found alive with a chance for a new life and a way to be reunited with her real family.

I went over to the neighborhood in the middle of the night, wanting to see where she had been held, to do a news piece, but also to try to understand why it went undiscovered for so long. I don't know what I was really expecting to see. The man strung up on a post for people to throw stones at? Garrido chained to the front fence? Some sign that showed me how it could have happened? Why no one saw it?

I was sure even then that Walnut Avenue would be mobbed with people, police, FBI, signs of this frightening story, but it was silent. The only signs I saw of anything out of the ordinary was the presence of a portable toilet set up for the throngs of media that would return the next day. (See photos from the scene.)

It was quiet in the Garrido neighborhood on Walnut Avenue in Antioch in the middle of the night. There was nothing to show that Jaycee Lee Dugard -- a young girl, now a woman -- had been imprisoned there, that she had been held for 18 years, raped, forced to bear children fathered by her captor. For a moment, I thought I was on the wrong street. The house was dark, no sign of life, nothing.

I have read some press coverage that insinuates it has to be the odd permissive California society that allowed this to happen. That is just insulting. This area is no different than any other suburban area in the rest of the country, normal lives, regular people who care about their families and who work hard. It is a nice area, these small cities by the Delta.

How much do you know about your own neighbors in the part of the country you live in? Here, in this area of suburbia, the fences are often tall wooden fences. It is easy to maintain separation from your neighbors, if that is what you want. Obviously, Phillip and Nancy Garrido didn't want people knowing the details of their lives. They barricaded their yard, and, police say, within the confines of that barricade, three innocent human beings, too.

From the street, you cannot see into the back yard where the "compound" is. It isn't a compound. It is a makeshift prison camp. Calling it a compound makes it sound glamorous. There is nothing glamorous about this. It is frightening. It is evil.

I have known about the existence of the sexual offender's Web site the state of California maintains, but I had never looked it up until that night. I am a protective mother, often overly so. I watch over my daughter carefully. I hold my breath if she rides her bike to school until I get that signal she has arrived safely. Even now as a teenager, I am hesitant to allow her too much freedom to wander around.

I sat and typed the names of the small quiet cities by the Delta into the search line of the site. Between Antioch and Oakley alone, pages of convicted sex offenders came up with accompanying photos and listing what crime they were sentenced for. My skin crawled. I felt like pulling my daughter to me and not letting her go anywhere. But they are all over the country.

This is a very frightening thing, knowing that for the years I have lived where Phillip Garrido could have been prowling my street, watching my blue-eyed, blond-haired daughter at her school, planning, plotting. It made my stomach turn. This is way too close to home. How easily it could have been my child or any child in the area. I wonder if he victimized other children or women around here. Now the police are wondering too, a little late.

I have been hearing a helicopter overhead now and then. I know why they are there as they circle and hover toward the Garrido home. By daylight, the street has been mobbed with reporters, lined with television crews, camera people, satellite dishes, towers and on either end of the street police cars parked, preventing anyone but residents and press to get near the house, to enter the street.

A once-quiet neighborhood in an older area of Antioch has turned into a media circus. And it really is a circus, complete with performers, and audiences. Some of the neighbors have put chairs on the front porch and are sitting and watching the sudden spectacle their small community has become. I am glad I don't live on their street. Nighttime has turned into a hot day full of the spectacles that accompany a media blitz.

I am angry at the system that didn't bother to check his yard, follow up thoroughly on reports, that released him from prison in the first place, decades before he was scheduled to be let out. It never should have happened. The car Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped in was sitting there, probably the whole time she was missing, like a sick trophy to be stored in the back yard along with Nancy and Phillip Garrido's prisoners, hidden away. With his record and on lifetime parole, no one bothered to check thoroughly.

What is it like living in the same area as the Garridos after finding out what went on in that house? (I will not call it a home. That wasn't a home. It was a prison camp run by disturbed prison guards.) It is chilling. They could have been anyone's neighbors. They could have been next door to me. Would I have seen that something was terribly wrong there?