A policeman once told her to scream to attract attention. Her mother told her to kick, push, bite or anything else to stir up a fuss.
But 12-year-old Rebecca Savarese did none of the above when a stranger with a handgun ordered her into his pickup truck - she used her wits to fake out her abductor.Rebecca, a Catholic school student with a slight build, eyeglasses and braces, did more than get away. She also gave police the breakthrough they needed to capture a man they suspect as a pedophile killer.
Rebecca says she isn't tortured by thoughts of what might have happened if she had gotten into that truck.
"It hasn't upset me," she said Friday at the apartment where she lives with her single mother. "My mother, she's having all the nightmares for me."
Lewis Lent Jr., 43, has been charged with the attempted kidnapping of Rebecca and the murder-abduction of a 12-year-old boy in 1990.
Based on directions from Lent, police also were searching in New York's Adirondack Mountains for the body of a 12-year-old girl who disappeared in August. No signs of her were found Saturday.
An interstate task force is trying to retrace Lent's activities over the past three years.
Rebecca says she was walking to school alone on Jan. 7 when a man who seemed to come out of nowhere stuck a pistol in her side.
"I don't even know why I wasn't scared by it," she said of the gun. "I just wasn't."
She played along, walking beside the gunman for about 20 yards. He forced her toward his pickup and told her to climb in. For Rebecca, this was the moment to grow up.
She had been warned about strangers by her mother and a policeman who came to school last year. She knew she needed to avoid that truck no matter what.
In a lighting flash of maturity and street genius, she faked losing her breath, then bolted.
The gunman, who was caught off guard and left only with the girl's backpack in his hand, jumped into his truck and sped through two red lights.
"For that little moment when she said she had to catch her breath, she took control back," said her mother, Christine Paoli. "If she panicked for one moment, it would be over."
A witness caught a partial license plate number that helped police arrest Lent that night.
"She's a very lucky and very smart girl," said police Detective Peter McGuire.
When she picked Lent out of a police lineup, if there was fear in anyone'e eyes, it wasn't hers.
"It was, like, ha ha. I got you," Rebecca said.