Putting life together after the cameras leave / Child victim of a predator tells how recovery takes years

The story dominated the local news for more than a week, as horrific stories like this do. A fourth-grader from San Jose had been kidnapped and held captive for three days in her abductor’s house, where she was repeatedly raped and nearly killed before being left at a market in East Palo Alto.

She is home now. Reporters have moved on to other news. But the story isn’t over. A 9-year-old San Jose girl has to piece her life back together.

Meghan Ratto understands. She knows what happens after the cameras leave.

Meghan was 6 when an intruder abducted her from her West Pittsburg home. He carried her to a schoolyard, where he sexually assaulted her. Then he bound her hands and drove to his townhouse in Martinez.

For the next 25 hours, he assaulted her, injected her with methamphetamines to keep her awake and gave her milk and orange soda laced with alcohol. He had covered his own face in duct tape so she couldn’t see him. The man dropped her in front of her house the following night.

“I remember it all like it happened yesterday,” said 17-year-old Meghan, who graduated last weekend from Cordova High School in Rancho Cordova near Sacramento.

(Chronicle policy is not to identify sexual assault victims, which is why the San Jose girl is not named. But Meghan Ratto and her legal guardian believe that any stigma about rape belongs to the rapist, not the victim, and they chose to allow Meghan’s name to be used.)

Meghan remembers her eyes covered with tape as he carried her “like a sack of potatoes” from her house and down the road. She remembers worrying about him leaving her underpants at the schoolyard. She remembers banging her head on the car door to attract attention when he stopped to buy liquor. She remembers his blue carpet, his lizard tattoo, the bottle of Winnie the Pooh bubble bath in the bathroom, the socks he gave her when her feet got cold, the towel he handed her when she threw up, the sweat that dropped on her through the duct tape on his face.

She also remembers her mother bathing her repeatedly when she got home, telling her she had a smell that wouldn’t come off.

But now she wants to know more. “I need to find out what I don’t remember and make sure that the memories I do have are real,” she said. “I feel I didn’t really let it affect me too bad, but it’s affecting me more as I get older.”

She was diagnosed four years ago with post-traumatic stress disorder. She takes medication for depression. She struggles with her weight and with intimacy. She is anxious in crowds.

She has rarely talked about her experience since it happened. But vivid memories resurfaced two years ago when a 12-year-old girl was kidnapped in Rancho Cordova. The girl went to the same junior high that Meghan had attended and had been snatched on a street Meghan often walked. The girl was later found dead.

“It was really, really hard to read that,” Meghan said. “It really, truly messed with me.”

A month later, she called Contra Costa County Deputy District Attorney Jim Picco, who prosecuted Meghan’s case. She asked to read her files, which she plans to do this summer. “I know it will dredge stuff up,” she said, “but it’s something I feel I really need to do for my own healing.”

She said that’s why she also wants to confront her attacker. Tracy Arthur Stone, who was 30 at the time of the attack, is serving a sentence of 109 years at Corcoran State Prison. (He was also convicted of sexual assault on a 2 1/2-year-old and a 9-month-old.) He will be eligible for parole when he is 85. Meghan, however, would like to see him dead. She said she wishes she could pull the switch on the electric chair herself.

“I want to ask,” she said, “what the hell is wrong with him that he could do this to a child?”

But she has come to terms with the question, “Why me?”

“If it wasn’t me,” she said, “it would have been another girl who maybe wouldn’t have handled it like I did and helped the police catch the guy. Maybe if it wasn’t me, he would have kept going.”

Meghan was able to give detailed descriptions of Stone’s tattoos, a key to identifying him. She has always been a gregarious, talkative girl, and that didn’t change after her abduction. She joined the Girl Scouts, had sleepovers, gabbed on the phone like other girls. But she says she doesn’t let anyone get too close. She rebelled at age 11, smoking pot and drinking. She now lives with a legal guardian who took her in when she became too much for her grandmother to handle.

Her grandmother, with whom Meghan had lived on and off for most of her life, had been granted legal custody shortly after the abduction. She slept with Meghan in her bed for three years after she was returned home. She drove her to and from school every day.

“It’s been a long time, but it still hurts her,” said the grandmother, Myrtice Ratto, who now lives in Oregon. Her voice cracked as she began to cry. “She’s a strong, extraordinary girl. I think she has survived pretty doggone good given all she’s been through.”

Meghan said her stomach tightened when she read about the recent abduction of the San Jose girl. She hopes the girl’s parents don’t push her to talk about it; the knotty clump of anger and fear has to unravel in its own way and time. If Meghan could talk to the girl herself, she would warn her about the voice in her head that will tell her she should have fought harder, or screamed louder, or run faster.

“She needs to know there is nothing she could have done to change anything, ” Meghan said. “No matter how many times people told me when I was little it wasn’t my fault, I thought, ‘What if I had done something differently?’

“You can’t think like that. I’ve done that, and it tears you up. But after all these years, I still find myself doing it.”