Clear Lake, where I work and not that far from where I live, has always beena part of Houston known for it's quiet affluence, soccer moms, and safe neighborhoods. With one of the highest per capita incomes of any area in Houston, Clear Lake is the place where wealthy NASA engineers and successful businesspeople tired of Houston's crime and traffic moved to raise thier families. Now residents find themselves wondering what has happened to their peace and tranquility.
The time since their daughter's slain body was found at 3706 Millbridge Street has passed in a blur for George and Ann Koloroutis -- an aching monotony of grief and unanswered questions.
Young people die, but rarely are they savagely beaten and shot without apparent reason in the living room of a comfortable Clear Lake home. Certainly not four at once....
The killings stunned the quiet Brook Forest subdivision, where the likeliest crime is an occasional burglary. And they put Clear Lake, known mostly as the home of NASA's Johnson Space Center, into the center of a another big crime story.
In June 2001, Andrea Pia Yates, a 37-year-old homemaker, drowned her five children in the family's bathtub, thrusting the community into the national spotlight.
As the glare began to dim a year later, Clara Harris, a 44-year-old dentist from Friendswood, went into a jealous rage and ran over and killed her husband with her Mercedes Benz after finding him at a Nassau Bay hotel with his lover.
Such acts seems incongruous to the promises of Clear Lake's promotional literature. The southeast corner of Houston and its adjacent suburbs make up a place that is, as one real estate agent proclaims on her Web site, "the American dream brought to life."
The murders "speak to the fact that there is no such thing as a haven," said Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg. "These communities sell themselves as havens of safety and instant community, and when bad things happen they become more salient because they go against our expectations and assumptions"
Diane Bossom lives next door to the house where Yates killed her children and has lived in the neighborhood for more than 20 years. She does not believe there is anything about Clear Lake that breeds the sensational. To the contrary: Crimes become sensational here because they are the exception.
Clear Lake may be an area known for well-manicured lawns and well-manicured soccer moms, but it turns out that it is no more immunes to the problems of the Big City than any other place. Perhaps the past year has been an anomaly, but residents are beginning to see that the tragedies they see on the five o'clock news can certainly be played out on their street. That kind takes the bloom off the rose, doesn't it? Welcome to the real world....
