The

The Back in 2009, myself, my wife and our daughter, who had recently turned four, moved into our first house up in Aurora, Illinois.

It was a very happy and exciting period in our lives, and if you'd asked me at the time, the only difficulty on the horizon was deciding where

to put my man cave in the attic or in the garage. But when I look back on that time more than two

decades later, I marvel at how blissfully ignorant I was.

We'd moved out to the high-crime inner-city area that had gotten increasingly worse following the financial crisis.

Our apartment had been burglarized once, and our car had been broken into twice in the year that preceded our move.

And we strongly suspected one of our own neighbors to be guilty of the burglary, but proving it was another

matter entirely, so when we moved out of the suburbs, I believed our trouble with the neighbors

was over. But in reality, that couldn't have been further from the truth it was exactly one week since we moved

when i decided to take my daughter over to a nearby park which had this big jungle gym on it

we'd driven past it a few times already and she was very focused on paying it a visit so with it

being a nice day and all, I figured that we could

walk down there at a casual pace, and I could introduce my daughter to the surrounding neighborhood.

So, we're walking down to the jungle gym, and I've got the stroller loaded with snacks and all this

stuff, but my kid is walking next to me, when we suddenly see a yard sale set up about 50 yards down the street.

My daughter was a very sociable little girl back then, so as we walked past and I pointed out the

two tables of various stuff to her, she immediately started just heading over to take a look.

Behind the tables was a woman who looked to be in her late 40s or early 50s,

who greeted my daughter with a smile before I told her that we were new to the neighborhood.

We exchanged a little small talk and I was taking a look at some of the stuff that she had for sale

when I suddenly noticed this small doll nestled in among some grubby stuffed toys.

...