Gone 20 years but with him every day

Even now, 20 years later, Aaron Larson plays it back daily, wondering what he might have done, said or seen to make things turn out differently.

What if he and the Wetterling boys -- Jacob and Trevor -- had just stayed at the Wetterling house that night instead of biking to the store for candy and a movie? What if the moon had been full and there'd been enough light for the boys to spot the man lurking in the weeds?

Or what if the masked gunman with the gravelly voice who stepped from the dark had somehow lost his nerve -- or taken Aaron instead of Jacob?

"It's difficult to think about all the things that might have been," Larson said softly. "It's something I think about every single day."

The abduction of 11-year-old Jacob on a warm October night 20 years ago shocked Minnesotans like few crimes before and shattered the innocence of the prairie town of St. Joseph.

For Larson, the abduction of his best friend, who was never seen again, changed him in ways that he is only beginning to understand.

For years he was intimidated by the dark. For years, Oct. 22 seemed like "a real bad birthday." For years he was known as "the kid who was with Jacob Wetterling," a stigma so overwhelming that after his freshman year in college, he fled Minnesota for a Southern school where nobody knew him or his story.

Time has added perspective, but it can't erase the terror of that night or the heartache that followed. Now 31, with a son of his own, a loving fiancée and a good job, Larson remains burdened by survivor's guilt, keeping to himself most of his feelings about that night, sharing them with only those closest to him.

"I think it's shaped his attitude toward everything, from how he values everything to how he makes choices,'' said his mother, Fran Larson. "It was such an extreme event, it shaped him pretty much down to the core."

Best of friends

Within days of meeting as second-graders at Kennedy Elementary School, the boys were inseparable.

Jacob was the outgoing kid with the brown hair and quick smile. Aaron was quieter but shared Jacob's passion for sports.

"Jacob came home and said, 'I have a new best friend and you will really like him. He's smarter than anybody in school. He's good in sports. He's funny,'" said Patty Wetterling, Jacob's mother.

Autumn afternoons were spent playing football in the cul-de-sac in front of the Wetterling house. Winter days were for shooting pucks in the driveway. Some days, they played in nearby woods or headed to the Wetterling basement to dress in costumes and perform skits or pull on football helmets and turn off the lights so they could "crash into each other," Larson said. Sometimes, they talked about girls.

"They were best friends, and it always stayed that way," Fran Larson said.

The boys lived 4 miles apart, so sleepovers were common. So it was on Sunday night, Oct. 22, 1989. With Monday a school holiday, Jacob invited Aaron over for the night.

Larson remembers it was dark by the time he arrived. Not long after, Patty and Jerry Wetterling left the house to visit friends about a half-hour away.

Jacob's older sister, Amy, was also at a sleepover, leaving Jacob in charge of his brother, Trevor, 10, and their sister, Carmen, 8.

Not long after they left, Trevor called his parents to say that the boys were bored. They wanted to ride their bikes to a nearby Tom Thumb store to rent a video. A neighbor had agreed to baby-sit Carmen while they were gone, the Wetterling boys told their father. They'd bring flashlights and wear reflective vests so they'd be safe going to the store.

Minutes later, with Larson pushing a scooter and the brothers on bicycles, they headed up the dirt road, into the night.

A flash of a gun

About halfway through their mile-long trip, Aaron heard a rustle in the tall grass by the road.

"A little shiver went through me," he said. "I didn't know if it was a person or an animal, but I kind of sped up. I don't know if Trevor or Jacob even heard it. ... It was just a strange noise that shouldn't be there."

Not wanting the others to know he was scared, he said nothing.

They arrived at the store near 9 p.m. For 10 or 15 minutes, they studied the videos, renting "Naked Gun'' because their first choice, "Major League," was checked out.

After buying some candy, the boys headed home.

Halfway back, near the same spot where Larson heard the rustle, a man wearing a mask stepped from the dark.

"The first thing I remember was the flash of the gun, and a guy saying, 'Stop, I have a gun,'" Larson recalled. "I caught my breath. I thought it was a high school kid pulling a joke on us. ... Then it hits you: this is happening, it's no joke."

The man ordered them to lie face-down in the roadside ditch.

Larson remembers his heart "going 1,000 beats a minute," but having no clue what was happening. "You didn't hear about people being kidnapped or abducted. It didn't cross my mind."

The man asked Trevor to look at him, then asked his age. He did the same with Aaron, then Jacob.

"Then he told Trevor to run as fast as he can to the woods. Trevor was not gone that long, maybe 10 seconds, and he said the same to me or he'd shoot," Larson said. "I ran as fast as I could to catch up to Trevor."

After running 100 yards, Larson looked back -- and saw nothing but darkness.

Frantic, the boys ran to the Wetterling house. The baby sitter called her father, who called 911. Within minutes, the cul-de-sac lit up with squad cars.

Petrified, Larson looked out a living room window and kept telling himself he would see Jacob again. "Sooner or later, he's going to come and he's going to get out of the car and this will all be over."

Twenty years later, there's a part of him still looking out the window, waiting for his friend.

Slow to trust

The fallout from that night was overwhelming for an 11-year-old.

Larson was so jittery in the weeks afterward that he slept on the floor of his parents' bedroom. Middle school turned to high school, and people still pointed at him on the street or when he played football and basketball.

He always knew why.

By the end of his freshman year at St. John's University, only a few miles from his home in St. Joseph, he had to get away. He enrolled at the University of South Carolina.

He returned to St. John's after a year because he missed his friends and realized "they liked me for who I was, not what I went through." He pursued a degree in psychology, largely because he wanted to better know what made people tick.

But the textbooks couldn't answer the question: Why was Jacob taken?

He was slow to trust.

"I lost my best friend that I did everything with," he said. "To me, it's a huge risk to let anyone else in."

After graduating from St. John's in 2000, Larson moved to the Twin Cities. But a year in noisy Uptown convinced him that he was better suited for rural life. So he packed his belongings and headed for southwestern Minnesota, where his parents grew up and where many relatives live.

He worked as curator for an aviation museum in Marshall and took some college courses with hopes of pursuing a teaching degree. Later, he got his job as an insurance adjuster.

Still, he was restless. Both inspired and haunted by the memory of Jacob, he enlisted in the Army Reserves in 2003.

"It was a challenge thing, a drive to do something greater," he said. "In the back of my mind I always thought that I had this great gift that I'm still here. It comes down to that."

While on break from training during the Christmas holiday several years ago, an uncle pushed him to meet a woman tending bar in the small town of Currie.

"Love at first sight, I guess," said Jackie Tentinger, the barkeep who is now his fiancée.

She knew nothing about Larson's friendship with Wetterling until days later, when she noticed the initials "JW" tattooed high on his left arm. She asked about it, and Larson told her the story that had been so difficult to tell.

"I could tell he was fairly comfortable one-on-one," she said. "And he let me know what I wanted to know."

Yet even now, Tentinger adds, "It's hard to pull things out of him."

Family ties

In March 2008, six months before he and Tentinger were to be married, Larson got word he would be sent to Iraq. The wedding was postponed.

For the next year, he worked there as a technical engineer, helping oversee and review construction projects. Though he was far from Jackie and their son, Anikan, 2, Larson brought a perspective to the experience far different from most soldiers.

"Nobody wants to be away from their family," he said. "But one year away from your family isn't so bad when you think of all the years Jacob has been gone."

His tour ended in April, when he returned to Slayton, a city of about 2,100, where he lives with Jackie and Anikan in a three-bedroom house not far from the high school football field.

Can't change the past

Weekdays are spent working insurance claims. Nights and weekends are for Jackie and Anikan, an energetic boy with curly brown hair and rosy cheeks -- and the middle name Jacob.

In his spare time, Larson often drives to nearby Lake Fremont, where he owns two acres across the water from his grandmother's home.

Someday he and Jackie will build a cabin beneath the giant oaks. For now, it's all brush and trees, but that's good enough.

"Anikan and I come stomp around out here all the time," he said.

He jokes that Anikan is "Daddy's boy," but worries that because of what he experienced, he might become too protective. Someday, he knows, he'll tell his son about Jacob.

Over the years, investigators have followed up on more than 40,000 leads from Minnesota to Europe. They've talked with psychics, checked sightings of Jacob look-alikes and cleared more than 4,000 suspects.

Larson last spoke with authorities about the case several years ago, when federal investigators attempted to hypnotize him on the chance that it might jog loose a detail buried in his memory.

Nothing.

Still, he clings to the hope that he, the Wetterlings and the rest of the world will someday find Jacob.

"To this day, Aaron will think about Jacob and what kind of man he would be," Tentinger said. "And I think Aaron hopes that Aaron is a little bit of both of them. Kind of living for both of them -- just a great guy, a great dad, a great family member. ... I really think he's trying to be, from what he can remember, the best of both of them."

Sometimes, when certain things -- a movie, the news, a sporting event -- trigger difficult memories, he'll hike or bike the countryside or talk with Jackie, his parents or with Jacob's brother, Trevor.

"I still have so many things going through my head," he said.

A few years back, when Trevor Wetterling was still in college, the two talked deep into the night. It helped.

"When you are 11, you don't have control over every single situation," Larson said. "It made me realize that this shouldn't have happened to any of us.

"I have guilt being the last one with Jacob. I was the last person to see him. There was a 50-50 chance he'd take me. And you always ask, 'What if the stars had been out? What if we never had been out?' "

The what-ifs come one after another, but he knows they'll never change the outcome.

"You can't change the past," he said. "You can't change what this guy did."

Richard Meryhew • 612-673-4425