{"product_id":"for-laci-isbn-9780307338297","title":"For Laci","description":"Laci Rocha Peterson, 8 months pregnant, was last seen by her sister, Amy, in the late afternoon of December 23, 2002. She spoke to her mother, Sharon Rocha, at 8:30 p.m. that night. This would be the last time anyone from her immediate family ever spoke to her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA search began which lasted an agonizing four months. Sadly, Laci Peterson and her son Conner were found dead on the shores of San Francisco Bay on April 18, 2003.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHer husband, Scott, was eventually arrested and charged with the murder of Laci and Connor. After a sensational, media-saturated trial, Peterson was found guilty of capital murder and was sentenced to death on March 16, 2005.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis book deals with the  story in three separate sections: first, Sharon describes the ordinary, loving life her daughter led, including fond memories of her childhood and adolescence. Second, it covers her marriage, disappearance, the community's moving search for her, and her and Connor's eventual recovery from San Francisco Bay. Third, it tells the story of the trial in detail not before revealed. Sharon will also talk about victim's rights, a subject on which she now campaigns regularly.SHARON ROCHA is the mother of Laci Peterson. After the murder of her daughter and unborn grandson, she has campaigned for victim's rights, and helped launch Laci and Conner's Law, which makes it a crime to harm a fetus during an attack on a pregnant woman. The law, specifically the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, was signed into law by the President in April 2004. She lives in California.\u003cp\u003eChapter One\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt was spring 2005, and I heard a sound at home that had been absent  for a long time—laughter.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTwo of Laci’s longtime girlfriends, Stacey Boyers and  Lori Ellsworth, were at my dining room table. Both were in their late twenties, the  same age Laci would have been. They were dressed casually, they looked nice, and  they radiated a youthful glow. I marveled at how much life they had in them. I pictured  them as little girls at that table doing homework, snacking on cookies, and giggling  at which boys liked which girls. Now they were reminiscing about Laci.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI gave Lori  a cold beer, put a glass of Chardonnay in front of Stacey, and took one myself. Soon  they were telling Laci stories that made them laugh, especially the latest one. Stacey  started to describe what they’d done at the cemetery but abruptly cut herself off.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSeeming alarmed, she looked at Lori and, while trying not to laugh, asked, “Should  I tell her what we said today?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Oh my God,” Lori said. “You can’t.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI looked around  the table. There were four chairs and three of us. If Laci were in that fourth chair,  she’d be the one most eager to hear what was making them laugh. I said exactly what  Laci would’ve said to Stacey: “Go ahead. Tell me.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eStacey—whom I’ve known since  she was eight—didn’t require much coaxing, and neither did Lori, once they got started.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Lori and I went to visit Laci today,” Stacey said. “We were standing there, talking  to her, like we always do, catching her up with all the gossip.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Then we were quiet  for a minute and I said to Lori, ‘I know what’s going on with her. I can hear Laci  now, knocking on her neighbors’ caskets, saying, Hello! Anybody in there? Who’s there?  I need to talk to somebody.’”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs she said this, Lori was turning red from embarrassment.  She was probably thinking, Oh my gosh, how’s Sharon going to take this? Here’s what  I did: I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It had been so long since I heard the sound  of laughter at home. At one time, it had been common. Laci had a terrific sense of  humor. She laughed a lot. Listening to Lori and Stacey, I was reminded of all the  times the girls had sat around the table, talking and laughing.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“You know she’s  down there talking nonstop,” Lori said, laughing. “She’s down there going, Hey, excuse  me! Pardon me! We haven’t met. I’m Laci . . .\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“I want to tell you about my little  boy,” Stacey said in a Laci-like voice. “I want to tell you what I’m cooking today  . . .”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLori pretended to be Laci’s neighbors.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Who put her here?” she said in a  deep voice. “Can somebody please move her! She doesn’t stop talking.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThey were  right. That was Laci.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAnd I missed it. I missed her so much.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWithout her, a part  of me was gone forever, too.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI grew up in Escalon, a small agricultural town of  about 2,000 people adjacent to Modesto in central California. I remember Escalon  as a picture-postcard of rural small-town life: cattle ranches, farms, dairies, and  orchards. The Sierras rose in the distance.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI was the second of four children. My  father, Cliff Anderson, was a foreman on a peach and almond ranch, and my mother,  Elta, was a full-time homemaker. In high school, I was an A-student, a cheerleader,  and Homecoming princess. I don’t know where I got the nerve to be a cheerleader.  Unlike Laci, I was always shy, self-conscious, and easily intimidated.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDuring my  freshman year, I started dating Dennis Rocha, the son of a dairyman whose Portuguese  family had deep roots in Escalon. Dennis was already attending Modesto Junior College  when a mutual friend introduced us at a dance in Turlock. We became serious very  quickly. After I graduated from high school in 1969, Dennis and I married in a traditional  ceremony at St. Patrick’s Church attended by four hundred people, most of them Dennis’s  relatives, or so it seemed. We moved into a new three-bedroom home on the north end  of his family’s 365-acre ranch.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI started Modesto Junior College but left by the  end of the year, feeling pressure to be a wife, not a student. My first child, Brent,  arrived in 1971. As much as he became the center of my world, I sensed that I had  married and left school too young. I couldn’t articulate it then, but I felt I might  have cheated myself from life experiences.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSo much was going on in the world, so  much was happening up the highway in the hippie-populated San Francisco, and I was  curious about life beyond the small California town I knew way too well. I was just  nineteen, a child myself, and I had barely started to live my own life. I wondered  what opportunities I might be missing.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut I kept those thoughts to myself. Besides,  my life wasn’t terrible.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNearly four years later, I got pregnant again, this time  with Laci. I wish I could remember more about carrying her for those nine months,  but I’m afraid the pregnancy was uneventful other than the time I got sick eating  a bowl of banana-nut ice cream, which, in reality, I didn’t even like. I also craved  hot fudge sundaes and See’s candy, and ate my fair share.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“No wonder I’m chubby,”  Laci said when she was twelve years old and I told her about the significant amounts  of chocolate I’d consumed while pregnant with her. “I didn’t stand a chance because  of all the chocolate you ate while you carried me.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTrue to form, Laci arrived right  on time, on her due date of May 4, 1975, and she was in a hurry. It felt as if I  had just checked into Doctors Medical Center when I complained to the nurse, “I think  the baby’s coming.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“The doctor’s not here,” the nurse snapped. “That baby can’t  come yet.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI said, “Oh yes it can,” and we went back and forth like that for what  seemed to me a cruel number of hours.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn reality, I was at the hospital only two  hours before I gave birth. When the doctor said I had a baby girl, I was ecstatic.  Then, as I’ve always joked, I saw her. Laci was wrinkly, with a mess of dark hair,  and my first impression was that she looked like my grandmother on my father’s side,  not exactly the personification of beauty. But as time passed, Laci got much cuter.  She was all smiles and spunk. And no one ever thought of my grandma when they saw  her.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI named Laci after a pretty girl I had met when I was in high school. I’d done  the same with Brent, his namesake being one of Dennis’s college buddies who I thought  was very handsome.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHaving felt so good through my pregnancy, I sensed Laci was going  to be an easy baby, and I was right. It took just two weeks until she slept through  the night, and she almost always woke up in the best mood. On most mornings, I found  her sitting in her green spindle crib with a smile on her face, staring at the yellow-and-orange  elephant quilt on the wall. She amused herself and smiled all the time. I hate to  boast, but she was so cute. I still look at those pictures and want to squeeze her.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eJust after Laci turned one, I split from Dennis—proof that I spoke from experience  when I later declared to Scott that divorce is always an option, not murder! At the  time we split, I thought the reasons were complicated, but I now know that I was  simply facing what I felt in my gut. I’d married too young. Except for my children,  nearly everything in my life was left over from high school, and it didn’t feel right.  I was still in my early twenties, and I craved more.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI’ve read that Dennis is the  one who left, but I’m the one who moved out, and it wasn’t easy or pleasant. I wrote  him a letter, explaining my thoughts and feelings as best I could, and then we talked  about it. He wasn’t happy about getting a divorce, and as often happens when feelings  are raw and unclear, we had a hard time for a while.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI took Brent and Laci and moved  in with a friend in Escalon, then we rented a house in Modesto. Around Christmastime,  Dennis and I got back together. The holidays were hard on both of us. But the reconciliation  lasted only a few weeks, and this time when we split, it was permanent (though today  we have a good relationship).\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn early 1977, I moved to San Jose, thinking that  was the change I needed, and got a job at an insurance company dealing with workmen’s  comp. But San Jose turned out to be too big a city for me. The nightly news was filled  with reports of crime and violence, and I thought, Who needs this when I can have  the quiet, comfort, and relative safety of a small town?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWithin six months, I moved  back to Modesto and rented a small two-bedroom duplex. The woman next door, Susan,  had a son the same age as Laci, and we became friends. I also met her sister, Roxie,  who had kids the same ages as mine. I appreciated being back home and woke up mornings  feeling as if the sun was shining on me again.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eI got an office job in the shipping-receiving  warehouse for Standard Brands, which, after mergers and acquisitions, became Nabisco  and then RJR. A few months later, my cousin Gwen called me at work and said she wanted  me to meet a guy\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEven though it was a Friday night in November and I didn’t have  plans I said no. I wasn’t in the mood for any kind of romantic stuff.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Sharon, his  name is Ron Grantski, and he’s a nice guy,” she said.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303948439781,"sku":"NP9780307338297","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307338297.jpg?v=1767727541","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/for-laci-isbn-9780307338297","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}