ON THURSDAY night, Paul Johnson’s friends and neighbours defied thunderstorms to gather in a field behind the local firehouse. There, neighbours joined hands and lit candles. There were songs, prayers and tears for the fate of the kidnapped Lockheed Martin engineer thousands of miles from home.
The skies cleared and the chaplain of the Fire Department said it felt like divine intervention. It was a show of strength in a small, working class community.
“God moved the rain out of the way,” Dennis Seeley, the chaplain, said. And there was still hope that Johnson, a native of Eagleswood, a southern New Jersey hamlet, would escape the death sentence.
“There’s been a lot of ups and downs and a lot of fatigue and emotion,” said the Rev Kyle Huber, pastor of the Greentree Church in Northfield, who was one of the few people to see the family since they went into seclusion.
Yellow ribbons and American flags were handed out and people left feeling that maybe Mr Johnson would be coming home. But less than 24 hours later, on a scorching summer day, the same community that had sung “Amazing Grace” for the captive, were stunned by his gruesome death.
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“Oh, those poor, poor people,” Maria Waddell, who had gone to school with Johnson’s mother, exclaimed when she heard of the death. “Did they shoot him, I hope?” When she learnt that Mr Johnson had been beheaded, Ms Waddell clutched her chest in visible distress. “My heart is with them. I lost two children through disease . . . but to lose your child like that, it’s just so senseless.”
Helen Wisner, another neighbour, was upset but not surprised that Mr Johnson had been murdered. She said that she expected the militants to kill him. “Look what we’ve done and what they’re capable of doing,” she said.
When the news came that Mr Johnson’s body had been found and was being shown on an Arabic television network, Nick Janiszewski, from nearby Egg Harbour, added: “Those people are fanatics. They march to the beat of their own drummer.”
Slowly but steadily, the news began to spread through these small blue-collar communities strung inland from the Jersey shore. Many of the residents earn their living either in the fishing business or in Atlantic City, 20 miles north.
Hillary Clinton, in New Jersey campaigning for John Kerry, called for everyone to “join together heart to heart”.
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Prayer vigils began. But now, people stopped in the churches to pray for the soul of Mr Johnson, rather than for his release. At convenience stores locals gathered to whisper about Mr Johnson’s fate.
“Senseless, senseless,” Bill Dorsey, another neighbour, said.
“It’s just simply too much to think about,” Ms Waddell said, echoing the emotion of a quiet community, thousands of miles away from where Mr Johnson died.