On the morning of August 24, 2009, a man walked into the office of Lisa Campbell, who managed special events for UC Berkeley’s campus police, and asked for a permit to hold a religious gathering on campus. He identified himself as Phillip Garrido. He said the event was connected to a group called God’s Desire, and that it would involve the government and would be “really big.” He had two girls with him—one who appeared to be about 11 years old and one who looked around 15.
Campbell later described the man as incoherent and mentally unstable. The girls wore drab dresses, appeared pale and unusually subdued, and gave answers that Campbell found unsettling—overly rehearsed, hollow, the speech of children who had been coached. She also found herself wondering why two school-age children were not in school on a Monday morning. She had worked as a Chicago police officer and had investigated backgrounds at the LAPD. Something in her professional instincts made her hesitate to simply send him away.
She took Garrido’s name, told him to come back the next day, and then made a call.
That call—from Campbell to a police colleague, and then from law enforcement to Garrido’s parole officer—would set into motion the events that ended eighteen years of captivity for Jaycee Lee Dugard. The campus encounter did not solve the case on its own. No single moment did. But the observations made by Campbell and by Officer Ally Jacobs, a UC Berkeley police officer who met with Garrido the following day, provided the human attention that automated parole systems had repeatedly failed to deliver.