Tustin Woman Kills Herself at Grade School

A 44-year-old woman, described by her son as having had recent physical and emotional problems, walked into an elementary school classroom near Tustin Monday and fatally shot herself in the presence of 27 fifth-graders.

The pupils in Room 5 at Panorama Elementary School and their teacher tried to dissuade the woman, who was armed with two handguns. “I’m sorry I have to do it this way,” she said just before firing a bullet into her head.

Just before the woman shot herself, teacher Patty Kakihara told her students to put their heads down on their desks, school officials said.

The first time the woman, identified as Mary Jo Jansen of Tustin, pulled the trigger, the gun misfired, school officials said. She then aimed the gun at a wall, fired a shot, put it to her head again and fired the fatal shot.

Psychologists from the school district and from Western Medical Center in Santa Ana were rushed to the school immediately to begin counseling students.

Few Saw Shooting

“Very few (pupils) actually saw anything,” said Robert Joy, a high school principal in the district, a former principal of Panorama Elementary and 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.”

The woman was declared dead at a nearby hospital at 12:17 p.m., about an hour after the shooting.

School officials said it did not appear that Jansen had any connection with the school. She was not a parent of any of the school’s 280 students, they said.

“She’s never been to that school; none of us have ever been to that school as far as I know,” said Jansen’s 22-year-old son, Jeff Wallert, at the family’s home in Tustin.

“I don’t know why she did it. The only thing I can think of is she felt she had been cheated so bad and she doesn’t want this to happen to anyone else.”

Wallert said his mother was an employee of Beverly Hills Savings & Loan in Mission Viejo in February, 1986, when she fell at her office and severely injured her back. He said she had been in a battle with her employer’s insurance company ever since.

“She’s been having a very hard time lately, both physically and emotionally. This all goes back to when the injury started. She has just been sick, very sick for the past year,” Wallert said.

When she awoke Monday morning, “she was in horrible physical condition,” Wallert said. “Her body had broken out in a rash. She was in real bad shape this morning. I told her to go see a doctor, and she said she probably would.”

Sheriff’s deputies said they did not know how Jansen arrived at the school. She apparently walked past the school library and some offices before entering Room 5.

According to school officials, Jansen entered the classroom and was standing behind students and near the teacher. Several students said they thought the appearance of a woman holding two pistols was a joke, and one said the teacher seemed at first to regard it as a joke as well.

But, according to one student, the woman said: “This is for real.”

Melissa Poncedelon, 11, one of the students in Room 5, said Jansen “was saying to the teacher to write a note to some doctors. . . . She kept saying, ‘I have nothing else to live for.’ We said, ‘No, no, no. Please don’t. Please don’t do that.’ The teacher was saying, ‘Can’t the kids leave? Can’t they go outside?’ ”

Times staff writers Sandra Crockett and Ray Perez contributed to this story.