SAN DIEGO -- Ten years ago on the morning of Feb. 2, a Saturday, Brenda van Dam went upstairs to her 7-year-old daughter’s bedroom to wake her.

But Danielle, who would be graduating from high school this year if she were alive, wasn’t in her bed.

“It still hurts so much,” van Dam said Wednesday.

The kidnapping and murder of Danielle in 2002, and the subsequent arrest and death-penalty trial of a 50-year-old neighbor that unfolded within just a few months, shocked and riveted the San Diego area like very few cases ever have.

Brenda van Dam doesn’t want her daughter to ever be forgotten, but she also doesn’t want to see the name of that neighbor, David Westerfield, in print or even uttered.

“She was the victim. Her family was the victim. We are all victims,” she said.

“To this day,” said former District Attorney Paul Pfingst, under whose office Danielle’s murderer was prosecuted, “I think it’s one of those cases that strikes at the core of a civilized society. ...

A society where people can’t go to sleep and trust that their children will not be kidnapped out of their bed is a society without rule of law.”

Within a day of Danielle’s disappearance, the family’s upper-middle class Sabre Springs neighborhood of well-kept two-story homes teemed with detectives and the news media. Police identified a suspect within days but didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him. Westerfield, a design engineer and inventor, lived alone just two doors down.

He would eventually be charged with Danielle’s murder even before volunteer searchers found the little girl’s remains alongside a semirural road in East County almost a month later

Former Deputy District Attorney Jeff Dusek, the lead prosecutor, said only Westerfield knows exactly what happened in the dark hours before Danielle disappeared. “Hopefully he will share that with us before he takes his last breath.”

Dusek said he thinks Westerfield sneaked into the van Dams home through a side garage door while her father, Damon, and two brothers slept. “I’m convinced he was still inside the house when Brenda and her friends got home,” from a night out at a Poway pub.

Westerfield’s lawyers decided the best defense was to not grant any continuances in hopes of beating forensic evidence into the courtroom, and within a few months, Westerfield’s murder trial began. Never before or since has a death penalty case gone to trial so quickly. It usually takes years. It was nationally televised on what was then called Court TV, and an entire downtown city block next to the courthouse was blocked off for months to accommodate huge satellite TV news trucks from all over the nation.

Today Brenda van Dam has few kind things to say about the media, some of which pestered the couple about their personal lives.

“Going through that gave me a whole new perspective on the media. I was naive. I thought that everything on the news was fact,” she said. “I quickly realized that it’s not. They’re just there to make a buck. That’s their job. That’s what they do. I don’t think they had my family priorities in mind. They raked us over the coals when they should have been raking an evil monster over the coals.”

The search for Danielle was conducted all over the county by thousands of people. It was volunteer searchers, average citizens, who found her.

The trial largely focused on forensic evidence. A trace of blood on a jacket. Fingerprints on a cabinet in Westerfield’s RV. A single orange fiber caught in a tiny choker necklace found on Danielle’s body.

DNA and fingerprint evidence eventually convinced the jury of Westerfield’s guilt. Judge William Mudd sentenced him to death in January 2003. Westerfield now sits on San Quentin’s death row, one of 700 condemned inmates. His case is being appealed, as all death cases must be.

The van Dams don’t seek publicity. ”Every time it does come up it’s just so painful,” Brenda van Dam said. “I’ve raised two amazing boys. They don’t want people to feel sorry for them and pity them. ... I don’t want (Danielle) to be forgotten,” she said. “That’s something I pray will never happen. She was such a wonderful person and such a unique individual.”

For other stories from our news partner, go to utsandiego.com.