Jaycee Lee Dugard and her two young daughters took their first tentative steps toward a normal life by going out to dinner with her mother this week.
But even something so simple was more than the girls could bear.
“They went out for dinner to a pizzeria,” said Carl Probyn, Dugard’s stepfather. “But they had to leave because the girls weren’t used to having people around them.”
Authorities say Dugard’s two daughters — ages 11 and 15 — have lived their whole lives in near-isolation in a warren of shacks that Phillip Garrido, the convicted rapist charged with their mother’s kidnapping, built behind his home in Antioch, Calif.
“They’re all talking, they’re just not educated,” Probyn said.
After Dugard surfaced Tuesday when she accompanied Garrido and their two daughters to a police station, her mother, Terry Probyn, and Terry’s younger daughter, Shayna — who was 1 when her sister disappeared — raced to Northern California for an emotional reunion.
“Terry told me [Jaycee] looks real good — almost like she did when she was abducted,” Carl Probyn said. “Everybody is running around. They are all together.”
Dugard — who was a tow-headed blonde when she was kidnapped — now “has dirty brown hair,” he said.
Carl Probyn was the last to see Dugard as she left for school in 1991 and gave chase after spotting two people toss her into a car and drive off outside Lake Tahoe. He and his wife later separated but remain close.
While everyone is ecstatic that Dugard — now 29 — has been found alive, her stepdad said he and Jaycee’s mom were fully aware of the long road she has ahead.
“She remembers everything,” he said. “But she isn’t showing much emotion up front right now.”
Experts say the healing will be long and difficult.
“There is an initial honeymoon period, and then serious symptoms emerge, symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome,” said Dr. Spencer Eth, medical director of Psychiatry and Behavioral Health at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan.
The real task is trying to move forward and piece together her new personality.
“Part of her work will be creating an identity,” said Dr. Katherine Muller, a clinical psychologist at Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx. “There is no such thing as going back to her old life.”
Both Dugard and her daughters will need to learn socializing mechanisms after being imprisoned in Garrido’s back yard without any contact with the outside world, experts said.
Additional reporting by Kirsten Fleming