RALEIGH -- It takes a special kind of cruelty to murder a teddy bear - the kind of callousness reserved for kitten kickers and daisy stompers, the brand of meanness practiced by the neighborhood bully and his pimply goons.
One week ago today, villains of that variety sneaked onto Tara Wilson's front porch and stole the life-size black bear her father gave her for Christmas when she was 5. They gouged out its eyes, ripped open its gut, tore out its stuffing and wore its hide around the neighborhood like a trophy.
When the cry went out along her South Raleigh street - "Henry is missing!" - neighbors knocked on doors, quizzed the mail carrier and scoured dark corners until they spotted the culprit on a bicycle, Henry's brutalized remains around his shoulders.
Henry "was all dirty," said Wilson, 26. "And violated."
Police returned Henry with their apologies. But now Wilson looks at his lifeless husk and thinks of the joy he brought to strangers, how drivers would roll down their windows to gawk and wave, how mothers with children in the car would take detours just to see Henry.
She thinks of savagery.
"It's 'Lord of the Flies,' " said Wilson, a financial planner, referring to William Golding's fictional tale of boyhood violence. "How could anybody massacre something so innocent? Right away, they knew what they were going to do: 'Let's take it, gut it and wear it.'
"It was ugly. That bear was something good."
She got him as a kindergartner and propped him next to her bed, fell asleep in his lap, and cried on his soft black fur. With a head bigger than a prize pumpkin, Henry was too big to cuddle under the covers.
He followed her into adulthood, moving out to her first house near Buck Jones and Jones Franklin roads, taking a spot on her covered porch because he was too big to fit comfortably inside.
"People used him as a landmark," Wilson said. "Elderly people, kids. People thought he was a real bear."
When she moved to another house off Lake Wheeler Road, Henry enjoyed similar popularity.
Two weeks ago, she came home to find that someone had propped a stuffed lion and a tiger next to Henry, and when she finished laughing hysterically, she wrote "Oh My" on a card and posted it beside the happy trio.
Then, on Feb. 28 , all three were gone.
Wilson posted notices online and drew phone calls and e-mail messages from sympathetic strangers who rememberedHenry from Buck Jones Road.
An outraged neighbor took off work early and set off on a Henry safari.
When she found him, gutted and hanging from a bike-rider's back, she snapped a picture. The lion and tiger survived the abduction with only emotional scars.
Police spokesman Jim Sughrue said two suspects, ages 14 and 15, were given juvenile petitions charging them with larceny and with possession of stolen property. Those charges will be handled in a juvenile court.
Wilson hopes to piece Henry back together. Make him better. Stronger. Some of her neighbors have talked about starting up a fund to restore him through a local toy store, or maybe the Build-a-Bear Workshop.
But part of Henry will never return: the part that promised friendship and shelter to a little girl, the part that kept secrets from grown-ups, the part that guarded childhood innocence in its paws.
