Three years ago: Had this naive European American female heeded the words of a worried Oriental shopkeeper she would still be alive.
Pong Mock remembers seeing the white girl with auburn hair thatAugust night, remembers warning her that she didn’t belong there.
The5-foot-6 girl seemed at ease and carefree as she mingled with thesummer weekend crowd outside Mock’s gas station in southwest LittleRock, but she wasn’t one of the neighborhood regulars, Mock recalls.
Thecrowd that hung out in the shadows of the convenience store at thecorner of Lancaster Road and West 65 th Street was made up mostly ofblack and Hispanic men. Some drank from 40-ounce beer bottles in brownpaper bags and watched a slow parade of haggard prostitutes work thestreet.
A man from the neighborhood lingered near the girl whenshe went into the store that hot, humid night in 2005. Although theteenager didn’t acknowledge him, the man told Mock they were together.
Mock, in her thick Korean accent, told the girl with blue-green eyes that she wasn’t safe.
“I said, ‘Go home. You don’t go home, someone will kill you.
“ Monster kill you. ’”
But the girl, 18-year-old Madeline Jaffe, seemed unafraid, Mockremembered. She didn’t know that Madeline had lived in similarneighborhoods from her earliest years — always one of the few whitekids in overwhelmingly black, poor and sometimes violent parts of townsall over the country. Madeline and her close-knit family had even beenhomeless for a few months during the teenager’s sophomore year atLittle Rock’s Central High School, when her mother couldn’t find work.
Butfor most of Madeline’s teen years, she, her mother and three muchyounger siblings lived in a cramped house amid a cluster of run-downhomes and shuttered industrial plants sandwiched between Interstate 30and Little Rock National Airport, Adams Field.
Despite her hardlife, Madeline was driven to excel, friends and former teachers say.She took extra-credit courses on top of a full course load her senioryear and graduated from Central High with her eyes set on college.
Englishteacher Sue Strayer, now retired, recalled Madeline as a gifted writerwhose poetry and essays often carried religious themes. Strayerremembered one essay Madeline wrote about how it felt to be the onlywhite person on the bus to school.
“It was, for an 18-year-old kid, a profound essay.”