Just the boy next door

KIRKWOOD, Mo. – Like father, like son, figured Michael Devlin’s neighbors when they saw the bulky 41-year-old and the black-haired 15-year-old boy who lived with him.

Devlin, who was a manager at a pizza parlor and worked nights answering phones at a funeral home, kept to himself. The youth everyone assumed was Devlin’s son was just as private, fleeing into their small apartment when neighbors even smiled at him. He rode his bike around this comfortable suburb even during school hours – Shawn was apparently not enrolled – or occasionally taking Devlin’s white pickup for a spin.

No one suspected that the two had only the most sinister relationship – Devlin had allegedly kidnapped Shawn Hornbeck more than four years ago. Devlin, who grew up in the area, was being held Saturday on $1 million bail.

A day after police found Shawn and a 13-year-old boy missing since Monday in Devlin’s apartment, residents struggled to understand how Shawn could have been a captive who lived in plain sight.

And, they recalled, he appeared to have as much freedom as a teenager could have.

He sported multiple piercings and regularly carried a skateboard. Neighbors said he had a friend who regularly came over, tossed a football around with him and occasionally spent the night. A girl recently began to visit, and she and Shawn were seen holding hands. Though the door to Apartment D was almost always firmly closed, neighbors occasionally spotted Shawn sitting on the couch inside, playing video games.

Still, there was much they did not know.

Many neighbors were unaware of Shawn’s name before Friday. Shawn’s “father” seemed to only speak to his neighbors to scold them for parking in his designated spot, the closest one to the door of his ground-floor apartment. Devlin pulled up in his pickup with Shawn one night last August and started yelling at a neighbor who had taken his spot. Devlin called the police, who spoke with him, but ended up issuing a citation to other residents.

Neighbor Cynthia Dixon, 54, spoke for many in trying to understand Shawn’s dilemma. “He didn’t look depressed or anything,” she said. “He could have come to any grown-up and said ‘this guy has taken me.’ “

In an interview Saturday with “Good Morning America Weekend Edition,” Hornbeck’s stepfather said Shawn was unable to flee. “He’s been held against his will, and since that time he’s been threatened with his life,” said Craig Akers. “He thought that … it would be the end of his life if he tried to tell anyone or do anything.”

Shawn accompanied his mother and stepfather at an emotional morning news conference in the auditorium of an elementary school near the small town southwest of St. Louis where he vanished in the fall of 2002. The stage was festooned with yellow and blue balloons and signs saying “Welcome back” and “We’ve all missed you Shawn.”

The gangly teen looked far different than the 90-pound, 4-foot-8inch boy who vanished four years ago. He did not speak, and reporters were told not to direct questions to him. Dressed in a dark blue hooded sweatshirt, Shawn tightly hugged his mother, Pam Akers, as the conference began.

“I want to give other families out there hope that their child can come home, also,” she said, her voice shaking. “I feel like I’m in a dream, only this time it’s a good dream, it’s not my nightmare that I’ve lived for four years.”

She sobbed briefly, then added: “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

Shawn, then 11, was last seen Oct. 6, 2002, riding his green mountain bike from his home to a friend’s house in the dense woods around the town of Richwoods. Police received a 911 call that someone had spotted a boy tied in a pickup truck, but authorities could not find him. Some speculated Shawn had been hit by a car and killed, but his mother and stepfather did not give up. They formed a foundation in his name to help search for him and other missing children.

Shawn’s disappearance captivated the region for weeks, and locals compared it to the kidnapping of Elizabeth Smart, the Salt Lake City teen whose disappearance a few months earlier had become a national sensation. After she was found being openly held by a religious zealot in 2003, people struggled with the question of why she hadn’t fled.

The circumstances under which the two Missouri missing children were found caused some to recall the California case of Steven Stayner. In 1972, at the age of 7, Steven was kidnapped in Merced on his way home from school. When he was 14, his abductor, Kenneth Parnell, kidnapped another boy, 5-year-old Timmy White. Steven later escaped, taking Timmy with him.

On Monday, when William “Ben” Ownby vanished after leaving his school bus near his home in tiny Beaufort, about 50 miles west of St. Louis, it galvanized the community. A classmate spotted a white pickup with a Nissan camper shell as Ben was leaving the bus, and police began to scour the region for the vehicle.

That pickup was why Mario Emanuel, 29, always gave Devlin a wide berth. Emanuel, his wife and two young children live directly across from Devlin’s apartment in a working-class notch of this generally affluent suburb. The block is bounded by train tracks on either side, and a row of identical, two-story apartment buildings creates a series of grassy courtyards along the north side of the street.

Emanuel runs a business installing satellite dishes, and occasionally his contractors would park in the tenants’ spots in the alley behind the buildings. Devlin would honk his horn if he drove by and spotted unauthorized cars there. “If you’re not parked in his parking spot, there’s no trouble with that man,” Emanuel said. “He will not look at you, he’ll go straight into his apartment.”

Last August, neighbor Rob Bushelle, 29, pulled his car into Devlin’s spot at about 10 p.m. Suddenly, Devlin’s white pickup appeared right next to him, with Shawn in the passenger seat. Bushelle said Devlin began screaming at him and Shawn ran inside. Across the way, Emanuel and his family were barbecuing outside but also went indoors, sensing trouble.

Devlin called the Kirkwood police, who separated the men and spoke with them individually. Bushelle watched Devlin go from raging to calm the moment the officers appeared. “He was so smooth that when he slept, sheep were counting him,” Bushelle said.

Devlin finished talking to the officers and pointed them to the Emanuel apartment. Emanuel said they questioned him and later called his landlord and gave his wife a citation for allegedly running the satellite installation business from home without a license. Kirkwood police confirmed Devlin’s call and that a citation was issued to a neighbor.

“I thought he was racist,” said Emanuel, who is Hispanic, of Devlin, who is white. Now, he said, he knows that Devlin was just “bad.”

It was Friday night that the neighbors found out how bad Devlin allegedly is. That’s when police were serving an unrelated warrant in the area and spotted the white pickup they’d been searching for since Ben Ownby vanished earlier in the week.

Devlin’s family released a statement through lawyers Saturday saying they were glad Ben Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck were reunited with their families. “Just as we are relieved that both Ben and Shawn are now safe, we hope that Michael will be safe as the facts of his case are revealed.”

Employees at the pizzeria where he worked for 15 years say they’ve been directed not to talk by management. The funeral home where he worked two nights a week for the past year issued a statement saying he was not well-known there.

At another jubilant Saturday morning press conference, Ben Ownby’s parents said they did not want to talk about Devlin. “Now that we’ve got our son back,” Don Ownby said, “we’re not going to think about (Devlin).”