School Trying to Cope After Suicide

By 10:15 p.m. Monday, workers had repainted and recarpeted Room 5 at Panorama Elementary School near Tustin, where Mary Jo Jansen died after shooting herself once in the head earlier in the day.

Less than 24 hours after Jansen walked into the fifth-grade classroom with two pistols and shot herself in the presence of 27 students, most of those children were back in the same room and ready to learn again. There were three absences, school officials said.

The Sheriff’s Department has closed its investigation into the death of the 44-year-old woman, who lived within a quarter-mile of the school. Her son said Monday that she had been having both emotional and physical problems recently.

“We’re just interested in getting back to a state of normalcy,” David P. Burgdorf, assistant superintendent at Orange Unified School District, said Tuesday. “The outward signs indicate that we’re already there.”

But Tuesday, some of those outward signs said otherwise.

A sheriff’s deputy was stationed at the small, quiet school. Its library had been turned into a temporary counseling center, where the superintendent of schools, school board president and a psychologist from the Orange Police Department met with parents and students before class.

Many teachers set aside a few moments early Tuesday to answer students’ questions about the shooting. Counselors were available to help teachers and students alike through the day.

The school parking lot was choked with parents’ cars, arriving to pick up their children after classes ended at 2:15 p.m. As they waited for their children to leave Tuesday afternoon, they were all talking about the same thing: the suicide.

It was at 11:20 a.m. Monday that Jansen walked into Room 5 and, after teacher Paddy Kakihara and her students tried to dissuade her, fired a bullet into her head and collapsed, school officials said. Jansen was carrying .380- and .45-caliber handguns. She shot herself with the .380, police said.

Jansen was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital an hour later. Family members said she was despondent about losing her secretarial job, a subsequent battle with her employer’s insurance company and her deteriorating health.

Michael Wright, 8, was walking by Room 5 as the crying children ran out Monday after Jansen fired the fatal shot, his mother, Jean Bercsa of Santa Ana, said Tuesday.

“He said she (Jansen) was sitting on the floor with her head down and blood running down her face,” Bercsa said.

The sight so disturbed the first-grader that “he didn’t eat dinner and complained about being sick to his stomach,” she said. “He had a restless night, and he didn’t want to come to school this morning.”

Many of the children at the school complained of nightmares and sleepless nights, their parents said Tuesday.

“My son slept 30 minutes last night,” Mike Donnell of Cowan Heights said of his son, Jason, 11. “Every time he closed his eyes, he saw that lady’s face.”

Donnell said Tuesday that he was pleased about the way teacher Kakihara handled her class during the incident, telling the children to put their heads down on their desks so they would not see the shooting and then shielding the body from their view. But he said he was appalled that the children were returned to Room 5 so soon after the incident:

“They took him back to that death room. They can paint the walls as many times as they want. It’s still the same room.”

District Supt. John Ikerd said he, Principal Kathy Kessler and the assistant superintendent of schools made their decision to return the children to Room 5 “based on the unanimous recommendation of the police psychologist and our own psychologist that it was important to everyone to get business back to usual as quickly as we can.”

“Plus I would add there are no additional classrooms out there,” Ikerd said Tuesday. “That’s another consideration. . . . But it (the room) looks great. The only thing is you find the smell of the carpeting. That’s the only thing that would lead you to believe that anything unusual had happened.”

Kessler said the school day “went very positively for the children.”

“They were in classes and supported all day,” she said. “When I went up to look, they were involved in instruction. . . . Counselors talked to every class yesterday.”

Kakihara and school counselors were not available for comment Tuesday, Kessler said.

A hot line set up at Western Medical Center for students and parents received just two telephone calls Monday, said Sharon Mass, director of social work services at the hospital in Santa Ana.

Both calls were from parents, Mass said. One was from a parent whose child was in the room during the shooting and the other was from a parent whose child attended the school but was not present during the ssuicide. The parents both asked about how best to deal with their children’s questions and fears.

“I’m not surprised that it would only be two,” Mass said. “This kind of a situation is such a shocking one that it takes a while before people will react. . . . The children may have some behavior manifestations. They may become frightened of strangers, become anxious about separating from their parents and home. They could have nightmares in a couple of days or a couple of weeks.”

Mass said parents should feel free to talk about the shooting with their children. “You can’t act as if it didn’t happen,” she said.

It seemed Tuesday as if many parents and children had taken Mass’ advice.

“We talked about it a lot,” said Louise Dismore, whose 10-year-old son, Bobby, was in a neighboring class when Jansen shot herself. “This morning he got up, and when he was getting ready, he said, ‘Why did someone have to do something like that?’ ”

Christie Stark, 12, who is a student at Panorama but was not in Room 5 when the shooting occurred, said: “I slept bad and had nightmares. I was dreaming that the lady was killing me instead.”