Opinion: It's been 20 years since the Carlie Brucia murder and the hurt still lingers

It is better to see it now than to imagine it back then.

Now, near the Central Church of Christ in Sarasota, there is a baseball field, and on that field are 11-year-old kids. They are practicing for a tournament in Houston. Ask them, and they all say they want to be major-leaguers when they grow up. Presumably, they will all receive the chance.

After practice, the coach drives a cart around the outfield fence. The kids follow along on foot, retrieve the balls they hit during practice and toss them into the back of the cart. They playfully push and tease each other, and the only way this could be any more wonderfully childlike is if it started raining marshmallows.

They will pass within a few feet of a granite marker, though they do not notice. I wonder if they ever have. I hope not, because this is the marker where Carlie Brucia was left to die in 2004 when she was 11 years old, the same age the baseball players are now.

Has it really been 20 years since a mechanic named Joe Smith grabbed Carlie Brucia by the wrist behind a car wash, led her into a green station wagon, drove her here, three miles away, to where the church and the baseball field are, raped her, strangled her, then drug her body into the brush and left her for dead while he was high on drugs?

It happened the night of Feb. 1, 2004, while 95 million people were watching New England beat Carolina in the Super Bowl. Carlie Brucia was abducted around the time Beyonce was singing the National Anthem. She was possibly taking her last breath just as Justin Timberlake was revealing Janet Jackson's right breast during the Halftime Show, a "wardrobe malfunction" that led to the creation of YouTube because so many people tried to rewind it.

On the following day, the Sarasota Sheriff's Office released a photo that sent shivers down the spine of every parent in the country. A lonely video camera in the corner of the car wash had actually captured the moment Smith grabbed Brucia by the wrist.

And that's where the video stopped. The image galvanized everyone in Sarasota.

A video enhancing system that was used to determine the cause of the Space Shuttle Endeavor explosion exactly one year earlier zeroed in on the mechanic's blurry name tag. It read "Joe."

It wasn't long before detectives were hauling Joe Smith in for a probation violation and Smith began giving cryptic location details of Brucia's body to his brother, John Smith.

On the night of Feb. 5, John Smith led FBI agents to the church parking lot and Joe Smith told him where to find the body on the phone.

It was late into the evening when Brucia's body was discovered, and because of an impending storm, detectives decided to leave her untouched until the morning. The Sarasota County Sheriff's Office actually contacted the White House and received a special "No Fly Zone" order so media could not photograph her body.

Sheriff Bill Balkwill went to the home of Susan Schorpen, Carlie's mother, and informed her that her daughter was dead. Schorpen's friend, Cheri Langsworthy was there, and her description of Schorpen's reaction to me once was as heartbreaking as anything I have ever heard: "It was a mother's cry."

In the aftermath, what happened to the people closest to this case is still hard to comprehend. Many died, some turned to drugs. Even hardened detectives never quite recovered.

Wesley Weysham, whose bloodhound Ruby tracked Brucia's scent to the car wash, and who also found the Black Box of the Space Shuttle in Texas the year before, was killed by a car on I-75 in 2019 after he stopped to help a stranded motorist.

Brucia's grandmother died right before Smith's 2005 trial, of a broken heart, some say. Her grandfather, so distraught, moved to Europe where he died. Her uncle drove his truck into a tree, intentionally some believe, and died.

Carlie's mother fell the hardest. She lost custody of her son, and when she divorced her second husband, she unsuccessfully tried to obtain their only shared marital asset: A green sundial urn that said: "Carlie, isn't she lovely."

Schorpen turned to prostitution and a drug habit only deepened. She died of a heroin overdose in Polk County in 2017. According to friends, there was no service.

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John Smith, whose testimony helped send his brother to Death Row (given while high on crack), continued to struggle with drugs too. Only in recent years did he become sober. He has spent the last 20 years as everyone has: Angry at his brother.

"She was 11 years old," he told me in 2020. "I can cry thinking about that little girl kicking and screaming. There was 10 minutes of her kicking and screaming and he's committed. I don't care how high you are. You have a lot of time to back out. Just back out.

"She could have grabbed another breath, you know? I hope every time he closes his eyes he sees that."

Joseph Smith closed his eyes forever in 2021 at 55. He died of the Hepatitis C he contracted from the needles he once used to shoot drugs, and if it is any consolation to anyone, his final days were painful ones.

To stand at the site where Carlie Brucia's body was found 20 years ago, to look at the marker and the image of her chiseled upon it, evokes a sadness that is soothed by the laughter of 11-year-old baseball players with dreams of their own.

Here's hoping they all reach the majors.

There is practice again tonight.

This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Carlie Brucia was killed 20 years ago, and Sarasota was never the same