Sentenced to Survival, Debbie Killelea’s Family Prevails

The other day Brian Killelea was driving past a group of the guys. They were getting ready to play volleyball, limbering up, joking around, wearing silly pink hats, practicing their killer serves.

“And they had these genuine, carefree smiles on their faces,” Killelea says. “And I thought, ‘How long will it be until I have a genuine, carefree smile on my face?’ ”

A while. Maybe never.

But Brian Killelea isn’t asking me. He’s turning himself inside out. His rhetorical question seems to slash at his soul, but he hopes his catharsis might help someone else.

Maybe somebody who reads this column will appreciate how fragile life is, how easily it can be corrupted and how forgiveness can lessen its pain.

Killelea became an expert on life a little more than a year ago, when his wife was killed as she strolled with the couple’s two young sons in the alley behind their home on Balboa Peninsula.

Seconds before she was killed, Debbie Killelea was standing her ground, her hands clenched at her side, appealing to reason that the joy-rider headed down the alley did not possess. She wanted him to slow down, but he was drunk and he was driving--straight at her.

Danny Ornelas was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his crime. A key piece of evidence in his trial was a jerky videotape that Ornelas’ friend shot out the passenger window. It was pierced with screams and the desperate young voices of the Killelea children: “Where’s my mom? Where’s my mom?”

“No one truly realizes how much hurt a human being can face, how much sadness, until it happens to them,” Brian Killelea says.

We are sitting in the office of Killelea’s Costa Mesa landscaping firm. I am asking this man I have never met--who until now had been just another victim behind the headlines--to talk to me about crying in the arms of his three children, then and now, about forgiving his wife’s killer, in court and in his prayers, and about reordering his life and carrying on.

Why should he talk to me? Because Killelea has something worth sharing. Pity does not consume him, nor does

revenge. He has left anger behind. If he should die today, he says, he would be ready.

“The strength that I have been forced to show, and will gladly show, is that we are doing well,” he says. “We are living. What I want people to know is that life is not the Mercedes or the $200,000 a year. It is emotional, spiritual. It is loving your wife, your children and yourself.”

This is a message that I have heard before, as I imagine you have too. But illustrated with the intensity of Killelea’s eyes, a tired, glassy blue, it penetrates the heart.

Killelea says he has always loved his family, prayed for their well-being. Leaving for work in the mornings, he would glance back at the light glowing through the bathroom window and ask God to watch over them all.

None of that has really changed, Killelea says. It’s just much more intense.

He still coaches his daughter’s soccer team, reads the bedtime stories and helps with homework. But he and his children depend on each other as never before, their love deepened by grief and a new appreciation of life. Their sentence in the aftermath of Debbie Killelea’s death is to live on.

“The children don’t understand bitterness and anger. What I want is for them to look back in 10 years and say: ‘Yes, we got dumped on. Our Mom got taken away from us, but we survived. We lived. . . . What I tell them is that Mom’s looking down on us now, and she is so happy with us.

“I’m not a complicated person,” he says. “I don’t look for bad in people. Life is too fragile. And I love life. I love sitting here right now.”

But Killelea is hardly cheery. He believes that he will never again have that “genuine, carefree smile” on his face. He cannot relax, not truly, without strings.

He offers no pretense or fake smiles. Why pretend that this has been easy? Our conversation, like Killelea’s life, rides waves of sadness and joy.

When I sat down to talk to Brian Killelea, I told him how much his wife’s death had affected me. I’ve reported on many other disasters, plane crashes where hundreds have died, an earthquake that killed thousands in Mexico City and a volcanic eruption that buried an entire town--23,000 people--in Colombia. But the horrid banality of the Killeleas’ personal disaster brought it so much closer to home.

Brian Killelea told me about others who responded in the same way, strangers who were as touched by his wife’s death as those who knew her were moved by her life.

“She was a loving, kind, gentle person, physically and emotionally beautiful,” he says. “She was my strength. What I’m feeling now is coming directly from her heart.”

Readers may reach Dianne Klein by writing her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.