Teacher’s Actions Preserved Calm

When Paddy Kakihara glanced up from the file cabinets in her fifth-grade classroom Monday and saw a woman entering the doorway carrying two guns, one student recalled the teacher saying, “ ‘Oh, a stickup.’ . . . She thought it was a joke.”

In a matter of seconds, however, Kakihara sensed that the guns the woman in the back of the room clutched in her fists were real and that she meant to use them.

Kakihara, according to her supervisors, instantly moved to protect the 27 pupils before her at Panorama Elementary School.

Ordering her students to lower their heads to their desks and pray for the woman with a gun at her temple was, her supervisors said, Kakihara’s most profound gesture.

But other quick-thinking measures followed. For several tense minutes, Kakihara pleaded with the suicidal woman not to fire the guns, to let the students leave the room, to abandon her death wish when an initial pull of the trigger failed. The youngsters, heads bowed, joined their teacher’s pleas as the woman fired the gun into a wall. Within five minutes, however, Mary Jo Jansen had announced to the 27 children and the teacher that she had nothing to live for and fired a fatal shot into her head before crumpling to the floor of the classroom.

The alarm buzzer still droned as the shaken pupils shuffled out of their classroom--Kakihara and Principal Kathy Kessler shielding them from viewing the bleeding woman.

Within 30 minutes after the 11:30 a.m. shooting, a dozen psychologists and nurses from both the Orange Unified School District and Western Medical Center in Santa Ana had arrived to help the school’s nearly 300 students and their teachers cope with the morning’s terrifying events.

For the next few hours, they gently questioned and counseled most of the school’s teachers and students, as administrators frantically telephoned parents to advise them of the tragedy.

Students of Room 5 were rushed to the school library and, except for a recess on the fenced playground, were kept indoors until parents could personally pick up their children, district officials said.

Most also were sent home with a letter from the school offering a brief explanation of the bizarre suicide, as well as referrals for counseling services through the district and the medical center.

Counselors advised parents to encourage their children to express their feelings about the incident. They also suggested that parents hug, comfort and reassure their children that they would be protected.

“Very few (pupils) actually saw anything,” said Robert Joy, a principal in the district who was formerly principal at Panorama and also is a psychologist.

“Some of the children in some of the classrooms talked about it as though it was something they’d seen on television. Each child will handle it differently. I was very impressed with the calmness of the children,” Joy said.

Ten-year-old Carol Ridder of Cowan Heights was in Room 5 when Jansen entered with the guns and later received counseling from Ann Kelly, the district psychologist for the Panorama campus.

“She just asked me what I thought was the worst part of it,” the girl said of Kelly. “And I said just (that) Mrs. Kakihara tried to talk her out of it and she wouldn’t listen.

“It really shocked me. I never thought it would happen to me. I thought it was a joke at first. And so did my teacher--at first. . . . She said, ‘Oh, a stickup,’ because she thought it was a joke.”

Carol said that when she and her classmates reached the library, “we had calmed down a lot by then. There had been a lot of crying and screaming. And they (teachers and counselors) had a lot of water around for drinking and washing your eyes.”

Her parents said their daughter is “a pretty together girl” who appears to be coping well with the violent episode. But her father, Elvin Ridder, hollered at Principal Kathy Kessler in the school driveway because the family had not been contacted about the classroom bloodshed for several hours.

“She said she hopes that this is the worst thing that ever happens to her,” said Carol’s mother, Debi Ridder. “And I said, ‘I hope so too.’ ”

Like many parents and district officials, Elvin Ridder praised the cool thinking of Kakihara. “She just really did a fine job,” he said. “And when I picked my daughter up, she was out on the lawn directing games.”

But some parents said their children were afraid to return to the classroom today.

“I’m not so sure they can clean it up so fast,” Ridder said Monday. “I want to cross the threshold with her and make sure she can accept going back there . . . but we’ll find out tomorrow.”