Donations Roll In to Aid Victim of Alleged ‘Stalker’

A pickle jar sitting on the counter of a Mission Viejo pizza parlor, employees hoped, would collect a few dollars to help one of their lunch-crowd customers, a man some of the employees knew only from newspaper accounts of his tragedy.

Within days, the jar had netted $780 in spare change from strangers and donations from men’s softball teams and other local groups. The pizzeria would raise several thousand more dollars on what it publicized as Bill Carns Day.

Elsewhere, his friends say, a woman reportedly threw a party and collected several hundred dollars from her guests for Carns. A few neighborhood shopping centers reportedly are stewing over fund-raising ideas, and radio stations in North Dakota, Carns’ birthplace, are organizing ways for his friends back home to help.

Since Aug. 25, when William Carns Jr., 29, was shot three times in the head, his family, co-workers and the hospitals where he has been nursed back to life have received a deluge of calls from all over the country, all of them offering help to the man who police say survived an attack by the so-called Night Stalker.

The swell of concern for Carns has been so great that his friends have established a conservatorship to relieve the burden on his family and to centralize the collection of money, which will be spent on his extensive rehabilitation needs.

The donations, an organizer said Monday, also will help pay for such non-medical expenses as remodeling Carns’ Mission Viejo home to accommodate special therapy equipment and personal travel costs for Carns’ family, all of whom live in North Dakota.

“He is here with really no family, and his father is retired,” Ron Stoffel, a friend, co-worker and the conservatorship chairman, said Monday. “We don’t want the family to have to incur extensive financial burden at a time like this. . . . We’ve had a good many people calling from all over saying, ‘what can we do to help?’ but it’s not a time when the family can deal with every person that wants to give $5 to help them.”

With the magnitude of their relative’s condition, he added, “It’s just too much.”

Carns suffered “some brain damage” and is paralyzed on the left side of his body as a result of the Aug. 25 attack, Stoffel said Monday.

Carns, who worked for Burroughs Corp. in Mission Viejo, clung to life for several days after he was shot and his fiancee was raped in their home by a man authorities believe to be responsible for numerous killings and assaults in California. The suspect, Richard Ramirez, has been charged with 15 murders--14 in Los Angeles County and one in San Francisco.

Carns, a computer repairman, who only recently had moved from Fargo, N.D., to Mission Viejo with his fiancee, is in stable and satisfactory condition at Saddleback Community Hospital’s Rehabilitation Center in Laguna Hills, where he is undergoing extensive therapy, Stoffel said.

Can Use Right Hand

“It would be safe for me to say that he has some brain damage, but he can speak. He speaks in short phrases,” Stoffel said Monday. “But he can get overloaded when two people talk to him at the same time. He can use his right hand.”

Stoffel said the prognosis still is uncertain but that doctors have said that “we are dealing with probably at least a year” of “extensive outpatient, in-home care. . . . Our most optimistic hopes are that he will regain cognitive capabilities and perhaps (the use) of all his (bodily) facilities with nominal support of perhaps a cane.”

Carns’ fiancee, also employed by Burroughs, has returned to work on a part-time basis, Stoffel said.

Carns’ direct medical expenses will be almost completely covered by insurance, and Carns also may be eligible for funds from California’s Victim Witness Assistance Program, Stoffels said.

Address for Donations

Gifts to the conservatorship, which are not tax-deductible, can be addressed to the Conservatorship of William Carns Jr., care of the law offices of Lawrence S. Ross, 23521 Paseo de Valencia, Suite 201-B, Laguna Hills, Calif. 92653.

If donations exceed Carns’ expenses, Stoffel said, the surplus money will be donated to the Orange County Trauma Society for the purpose of trauma injury education.

All of the money raised thus far for Carns will be funneled into the conservatorship, a fact that pizzeria proprietor Rick Morese is tickled over.

“I didn’t know Bill personally, but we wanted to do something for him,” said Morese, one of the owners of the Mission Viejo Lamppost Pizza, a popular lunchtime spot with Burroughs employees, which donated all of its proceeds on Sept. 12.

“It was a case of ‘God forbid this should happen to any one of us.’ And it’s nice to think someone would help you if it did.”