A reminder to remember Georgia Moses

I visited Georgia Moses' little roadside shrine the other day, thinking there might be something new.

After all, she's been in the news quite a bit lately. It turns out that besides his interest in JonBenet Ramsey and Polly Klaas, celebrity weirdo/suspect John Mark Karr also expressed interest in the 1997 murder of 12-year-old Georgia when he was living in Petaluma in 2001.

That's the bad news. The good is that on Friday, a new group home for foster children opened in Santa Rosa, and it was dedicated to the memory of Georgia. Lia Rowley, founder of the Children's Village, said she was inspired to pursue the idea after learning of Georgia's death nine years ago.

It's nice to know Georgia hasn't been forgotten.

Her memorial, though, doesn't reflect any renewed interest in her story or her still-unsolved murder. Tucked under a redwood tree next to the Petaluma Boulevard South on- ramp to Highway 101, it is covered in dust and strewn with garbage. Dan- delions provide the only fresh color.

Despite the roar of traffic just a few feet away, it's a contemplative spot. A visitor can't help but think about the body of a 12-year-old girl lying here for six days before anyone bothered to report her missing, and another four days before a Caltrans worker came across her remains.

One wonders if she would have been found sooner if she had been a rich white girl who disappeared from Rincon Valley instead of a poor black girl who vanished from the streets of Roseland. But skin color and address didn't determine her fate; her family situation did.

Georgia was neither a good kid nor a bad kid, she was just a 12-year-old trying to find out what kind of adolescent she was going to be.

Unfortunately, for her and for what seems to be a growing number of kids in our community, she didn't have much guidance in that search.

Her mother struggled with mental illness and lived with a convicted child molester. Georgia sometimes looked after her 7-year-old sister, laughed with her friends, danced and dreamed of becoming a nurse. But she also regularly left home for days at a time. She was street smart, often absent from school, sometimes in minor trouble with the law.

Then one August night she got into a car with a man in Roseland.

If Georgia Moses had managed to become a teenager, she might have ended up in a place like the Child- ren's Village, or Juvenile Hall, or a court-ordered residential program that tries to change the ways of rebellious adolescents. Hundreds of Sonoma County kids end up in such places every year and - yes, it's true - many of them go on to become healthy, productive adults.

Because Georgia never had that opportunity, the best we can do now is prevent more Georgias from slipping through the cracks.

There are those who will call or e-mail me today to say the solution is for people like Georgia's mom not to have children. In fact, I'll get calls saying everyone ought to knock off getting knocked up because there are just too many children in the world, and overpopulation is the root of many of our problems.

There is some truth to that. But we don't live in the kind of country that legislates the size of families, and people like Georgia's mother aren't likely to respond to such things as tax incentives for family planning.

So we're going to have kids among us whose parents are too debilitated or distracted by their own problems to take care of their own children.

We might be justified to respond, "Those children aren't my responsi- bility." But we wouldn't be right.

When the family breaks down, the community is left with a choice. Take on the responsibility of guiding the child through the storm that is adolescence, or be prepared to see more roadside shrines like the one next to Highway 101 in Petaluma.

It's a monument to indifference.