For Megan’s Dad, a Way to Make an Impact, Again

By KEVIN COYNE

Published: March 12, 2009

Hamilton Township

RICHARD KANKA floated the idea first among a few of the people he knew best, at a dinner-dance in a firehouse ballroom in the town he grew up in and never left, despite what he lost here.

It was the annual Valentine’s Day fund-raiser for the foundation named after his daughter, Megan, whose cherubic face, forever 7, has broken the heart of anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at the news over the last decade and a half. Mr. Kanka told a few of his friends that he was considering a run for the township’s school board.

“They said, ‘That’d be a great idea,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, really?’ “ Mr. Kanka, 57, said a few days after filing his candidacy papers, as he sat in the living room of the house where he has lived with his family since 1979. The shelves flanking the fireplace were filled with the angels his wife, Maureen, has collected since Megan’s death in 1994. The bay window looked out toward the spot across the street where their daughter’s murderer lived — the house long since bulldozed and replaced by a memorial pocket park still dormant with winter.

“Maureen has always said that men have to fix things, that’s how they grieve,” he said, talking about his decision to join seven other candidates running for three seats in the April 21 election. “I just wanted to do some more.”

The Kankas have tried to fix things on a large scale since July 29, 1994, when Megan was lured across the street with the promise of seeing a puppy by the neighbor they didn’t know was a twice-convicted sex offender, then raped and strangled. If they had only known, the Kankas said — and parents everywhere who clutched their own children tighter agreed — things might have been different. Their outrage touched off a national movement to keep a closer watch on sex offenders, and state after state quickly passed versions of what came to be known as Megan’s Law. Within two years there was a federal version.

Maureen Kanka runs the Megan Nicole Kanka Foundation from their home in this neighborhood of modest 1950s ranches and split-levels and has always been its most familiar face, speaking widely and often in public forums. Richard Kanka has mostly stayed in the background since 10 of the hardest minutes of his life: the impact statement he read to the jurors who were about to decide whether Megan’s killer, Jesse Timmendequas, should be executed.

Mr. Timmendequas received a death sentence in 1997, but a decade later it was commuted to life without parole when the State Legislature abolished the death penalty — a decision that Mr. Kanka opposed, and one that in a roundabout way set in motion the thinking that led to his run for the school board.

“What that did for me was probably enticed me, because I saw how the system was working,” he said. Or not working, really — how manipulative politicians can be, he said, “when they stack the deck.” Mr. Kanka had served in 1998 on a state commission about the death penalty, which included many members who favored it. But he said he believed that a more recent panel was weighted toward opponents, and when he testified at a State House hearing in 2007, he could see that nobody’s mind was changing.

“When you see that, you want to try harder to do something else,” he said.

The something else came along in late January, when he saw a notice in a newspaper about a local organization seeking candidates for the school board. He, his wife and their children are all products of the Hamilton public schools, and he said he was concerned last year when local voters rejected both the annual budget and a large construction project in a referendum. He had some opinions, and he knew — more directly than most people — that if you wanted things done the way you thought they should be done, sometimes you had to try to do them yourself.
“I really want to give back to my community more than I have,” he said. “There’s a lot of satisfaction you gain by volunteering. There’s no satisfaction by standing there complaining all the time.”

By KEVIN COYNE
Posted Tuesday, March 24, 2009

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