Grieving Stockton Starts Healing Process

Fat City is in mourning.

This tough Delta town is trying to cope with a deep and terrible grief over the slaughter of its innocent children.

This weekend at places of worship all over Stockton--Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Buddhist and Unitarian--prayers are being offered not only for the victims of Tuesday’s carnage, but for the community at large.

Ministers and priests, as well as civic leaders and others, said they are urging the residents of this often maligned city to search within themselves to see what the schoolyard slaughter tells them about themselves and their society, about the importance of child-rearing and the repugnance of racism.

Few in Stockton believe the horror at Cleveland Elementary School--in which an emotionally disturbed drifter named Patrick Edward Purdy used a military assault rifle to kill five children and wound 30 other people in an apparently random attack--bared a problem unique to their town. While there have been reports that Purdy hated Vietnamese, police say he hated all races, and his motive for the attack on the predominately Southeast Asian students remains unclear.

Positive Effects

Many here hope the tragedy can be turned to some good and used to force people here to face some of the problems Stockton shares with other American cities--racial tensions, broken families, declining values and the widening gulf between rich and poor.

“I don’t know that we will ever understand why such a thing occurred,” said Father Aloys Gruber, a pastor at St. Luke’s Catholic Church, which lost a 6-year-old parishioner to Purdy’s gunfire. “All we can do from here is go on and try to draw the community together so that there might be a healing process. “

Stockton is the site of the novel and movie “Fat City,” which depicted small-time boxing and life on the town’s once huge Skid Row.

With a culturally diverse population of 190,000, growing ties to the San Francisco Bay Area and economic influence over a large part of the fertile San Joaquin Valley agricultural region, Stockton has long considered itself a city in the gritty, urban sense of the word.

But the nightmare at Cleveland Elementary School showed it is still able to feel pain and face adversity as a much smaller town might.

Actually, the community started to come together less than two hours after Purdy attacked the children and then killed himself at 11:40 a.m. Tuesday.

Before 1 p.m., business executives, street people, police officers, firefighters, people of all ages, races and walks of life crowded into Stockton’s Delta Blood Bank and rolled up their sleeves for the wounded children and teacher.

“It really was a spontaneous event,” said Dr. Benjamin Spindler, executive director of the facility. They arrived before he even appealed for aid, he added, and by Wednesday, the agency had received 270 pints of blood--more than five times its normal intake--from volunteers who waited uncomplaining for hours to make donations.

“It was like they all knew why each one was there,” Spindler said. “They were all in it together. . . . The people were all tied together in a community thing. It was really kind of moving.”

Stockton’s residents also deluged the daily paper, the Stockton Record, with calls offering help. They also sent money to the paper for the victims.

‘Could Have Happened Anywhere’

“I think the rampage could have happened anywhere,” City Editor Richard Hanner said, “I don’t think the response could have happened anywhere.”

American Savings Bank is collecting money for the victims and families at its branches throughout California and had raised about $25,000 by the end of the week. USAir and IBM are also raising money for the victims, and four local funds have been set up. The money is to be channeled through the San Joaquin County Victims-Witness Assistance Program.

“I think it’s just wonderful, the support that the town has received from all parts of the world,” said D. David Smith, executive vice president of the Greater Stockton Chamber of Commerce. “I think people realize that these things . . . can happen anywhere in the world. And I think they become much less provincial in their response to these crises.”

Indeed, the fact that the shootings occurred in a middle-class neighborhood on the city’s near-northside--not farther south, in the city’s harsh, crime-ridden downtown--has shaken people’s sense of security throughout Stockton.

“People I’ve been talking to--adults as well as children--are just scared,” said the Rev. Robert Edward Green of the First Unitarian Church of Stockton. “They feel more and more at risk. People have been unwilling to go downtown for some time; now they are afraid to walk around their own neighborhood. To have this happen at an elementary school their own children might have attended has left people ferociously insecure.”

Such concerns are evident in talking to the people of Stockton--a waitress, the mayor, a shoeshine stand operator, a priest, the chief of police. Even as they grieve for the children and comfort one another, they are trying without much success to make some sense of it all.

‘My Heart Stopped’

“When I heard the news, my heart stopped,” said Lydia Rodriguez, whose first thought was for the safety of her daughter, who is a first-grader at a school several miles from Cleveland Elementary.

Rodriguez, a waitress at a Ramada Inn coffee shop, said fear was so great immediately after the shooting that one of her fellow employees suggested that they teach their children in one of their homes rather than sending them to school.

Rodriguez, who went to public school in Brooklyn, N.Y., said she and her husband moved to Stockton so their children would not be exposed to big city violence.

“So they wouldn’t have to go through what we went through,” she said. “And then you find out it’s everywhere.”

Stockton Chief of Police Jack Calkins agreed to meet Saturday with Cambodian families concerned over their children’s safety. Mayor Barbara Fass and School Supt. Mary Gonzales Mend also agreed to answer questions at the meeting, which was added to the end of a memorial service at the Central United Methodist Church, a few blocks from Cleveland Elementary.

‘Free Society’

Calkins said he is struggling for a way to assure the families that such a shooting is not an everyday thing, that the children are safe.

“But basically this is a free society,” he said, “and law enforcement is not there to look over everyone’s shoulder . . . and in a free society people like this (Purdy) are allowed to walk the streets.”

Vic Harris heard the news and pondered it, turning the facts like a prism, this way and that to see how the light shown through, trying to understand.

Harris, who operates a shoeshine stand in a Stockton shopping mall, figured Purdy might have been a bitter Vietnam veteran, driven crazy by society’s rejection. When he learned that Purdy was not a vet, he thought maybe he was the son of a man who had served in that war and been driven mad by his father’s fate. When he learned that was not true either, Harris turned to a cosmic explanation.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I think these things are predestined to make these apathetic Americans think about the value of human life.”

That is a theme being taken up by many in the community, particularly clergy members who agreed at a meeting Thursday evening of the Stockton Metro Ministry, a type of interfaith council, to make the schoolyard shootings a common theme in all of their Sunday sermons.

Others Like Purdys?

“This (the shooting) stresses the harm, the damage one person can do,” the Rev. Green said. “One point I want to make is the importance of caring for children and bringing them up with love and care and guidance. If they end up being angry, lonely and alienated, we all can pay the price for that.

“You have to wonder,” he added sadly, “how many other Patrick Edward Purdys are being bred out there, even in the best of houses.”

Green said he also intended to use the shootings, in which all of the fatalities and most of the wounds were suffered by the children of Southeast Asian refugees, to inveigh against the discrimination and harassment those immigrants often suffer. Others concurred.

“Something like this, as horrible as it is, may be able to remind people that we have much more in common with one another, whatever our race or religion, than we have differences,” said the Rev. Mark Wharff of Holy Cross United Methodist Church in the affluent far northside of town. “No matter how they felt about Asians before, everyone who saw their grief had to share in it. They had to see, and feel, that everyone cries in the same language.”

Wharff, too, acknowledged general feelings of anxiety among his congregation.

“Maybe,” he mused, “this will get people to start thinking of the safety of the people downtown. Why can’t they feel as safe and secure in their homes as we used to here? Will we again settle for making our own homes secure and forget their needs?”

Trouble Understanding

Father Gruber of St. Luke’s said he tries to guide anxious parishioners as best as he can, but he, too, is having trouble understanding what happened.

“I’ve been trying to put something together over the last couple of days,” he said. “I’m still struggling.”

The anxiety is made worse by Stockton’s star-crossed history.

The city has been called a murder capital because of its high homicide rate. Sometimes it is the object of derision because of the antics of its public officials, such as the incident in which a councilman displayed a sample of his urine at a public meeting, offering it for drug analysis.

“It’s a city without pretentions,” the Stockton Record’s Hanner said. “It’s a lot of working people trying to do better. . . . We’re a basic town with a lot of heart and soul and I think we’re coming through in this time (of grief).”

Unlike times past, this time Stockton is not being scorned by outsiders.

When a diesel truck driver from Santa Fe rolled through town Tuesday and heard a radio report of the shooting, she pulled her rig off the highway and got a California Highway Patrol officer to lead her to the Delta Blood Bank. A busload of servicemen from Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield also came to give blood. The Police Department in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, sent a shipment of teddy bears for the wounded children. Fass and other city officials reported receiving cash, toys and other contributions from dozens of states, as well as from Japan and Australia.

Refugee Tragedies

Much of the appeal, of course, is the senseless slaughter of innocents--6- through 9-year-olds cut down by high-powered rifle fire as they frolicked at play. But there is also tremendous sympathy generated by the tragic histories of the refugee families who were victimized--people who had fled war in Asia only to find tragedy in a California schoolyard.

Thousands of those refugees have streamed into Stockton in the last decade, refugee counselors Dan Ortiz and Phong Van Tran said. Initially they were drawn by the region’s reputation as a fertile farming center, but the tremendously high cost of land has prevented all but a very few from actually tilling soil.

However, that disappointment did not dissuade others from following, the counselors said. Other refugees were drawn by the mildly warm weather, which is closer to their native climate than Pennsylvania, Minnesota or other areas to which they were originally sent after entering the country. Many more came in search of affordable housing--a draw that also is bringing to town thousands of Bay Area commuters. More recently, many refugees have come to Stockton because relatives had already settled here.

Rich Mix of Refugees

Unlike many other places, which tend to attract refugees primarily of one nationality, Stockton’s refugees are a rich mix of Cambodians, Vietnamese, Laotians and Hmong. In addition to distinct languages and cultures, each has its own rung on the socioeconomic ladder.

Vietnamese, for example, were among the first to arrive here. They also generally were the best-educated of the refugees and the most acclimated to Western customs. As a result, they have made the easiest transition and have often prospered.

Cambodians, on the other hand, have struggled. Their big families, a great asset on unmechanized Asian farms, are expensive to support in a place where one must pay for such things as housing, which they used to build themselves, and electricity, which they did not have, and water, which came free from a well.

Many are on welfare and will remain there for years, even though they dutifully continue to send $20 a month each from their meager welfare stipend to repay whichever refugee resettlement charity which provided them with the airline ticket that allowed them to emigrate to America.

Whether successful or struggling, they have attracted abuse by bigots.

“If they’re on welfare, they’re criticized for being a burden on taxpayers; if they do well, they’re criticized for taking jobs from Americans,” the Rev. Green said. “On top of that, there is a lot of misunderstanding of their languages, cultures and history.”

Such prejudices are hardly unique to Stockton, of course, nor are they the majority view of its residents.

“Most people in Stockton are very nice; they have been very nice to us,” said Thanh Huynh of the Vietnamese Buddhist Center of Stockton. “But we know there are people who do not want us here, and we are afraid of them.”

He and other refugees tentatively expressed hope that the Stockton school tragedy will win them some tolerance.

“I pray they are right,” said the Rev. Jim Dunn of the First Baptist Church. “I pray this will make Stockton a more understanding and a more compassionate community. I pray some good will come of this.”