Slain Girl, Suspected Slayer Talked Tough, Acted Kindly, Friends Say

But for the loaded pistol that 12-year-old Juan hid in the left front pocket of his jacket, Monday would have been just another day at the mall, as he and his friend Jackie Calabrese milled among the Christmas shoppers, met up with classmates and whiled away the afternoon.

Juan, however, was not satisfied just with showing off the gun to his friends, witnesses said. And when they doubted whether it was real, he reportedly pulled it out of his pocket one last time, steadied it with both hands and fired once into Jackie’s forehead.

“He didn’t mean to kill her,” said Keli Edwards, a seventh grader who stood just a few feet away from Jackie when the shooting occurred. “He just wanted to impress her, to show off.”

Edwards and other students and friends of the two youths gathered in front of Cerro Villa Middle School on Tuesday, piecing together the events that led to Jackie’s death and Juan’s arrest the night before. Inside the school some cried and appeared shaken, students said, but outside most spilled over with details about their classmates, describing them as a tough but popular pair of kids who took no back talk, but whose bravado was mostly affected.

“He was sensitive in a way,” said seventh grader Marsha Obleda, one of many students who spoke of Juan in the past tense, as though the act he is suspected of committing extinguished him along with Jackie. “He would talk tough, but he would give you a shoulder to cry on if you needed it. We used to say we were cousins or something.”

Obleda and other Cerro Villa students said Juan told them he wanted to join a local gang identified as the Highland Street Crips. Police say Juan had no gang affiliations, and the youngster’s friends agreed, though they added that he would fight people who criticized the Crips in order to demonstrate his loyalty to the gang.

Those fights, according to several students, earned the wrath of at least one local high school dropout. They said he threatened the burly Juan. Students said that to protect himself, Juan stole a gun from his father and showed it off to friends. But Juan’s relatives that deny that his father owned a gun.

Monday, Juan reportedly brought the weapon with him to Jackie’s house, picking her up on the way to the nearby Mall of Orange.

“From what I understand he was a boy whom Jackie knew in school. I only saw him twice,” a sobbing Gloria Calabrese, Jackie’s mother, said Tuesday afternoon. Calabrese said she saw Juan on Monday but that neither she nor other family members sensed anything amiss.

Like Juan, Jackie was tough; a girl who did not take kidding lightly and was quick to show her disapproval to people she did not like, classmates said. “She would give you this look,” one student said, mimicking a steely stare.

But the brown-haired 12-year-old also enjoyed dancing and using cosmetics and was described as kind and thoughtful. Her abruptness with some people did not reflect coldness so much as caution, friends and relatives said.

“She had the biggest heart. She cared about everybody--the kids around here, at school and even the homeless. She loved everybody,” said Jackie’s 15-year-old sister, Angie Calabrese.

But that apparently did not stop her from defending herself.

“She was tough,” said Keli, who struck up a friendship with Jackie in a physical education class. “She didn’t like some people, and she didn’t take anything from anybody.”

Other friends agreed. “She was like that,” said Angie Tripp, 14, a friend of Jackie’s who lives in the same brown stucco apartment complex as the Calabreses. “She was always calling people’s bluffs.”

Her willingness to call a bluff led Jackie to challenge Juan over the gun, Keli said. Juan had been toting the gun and pointing it at people for hours, even once leveling it at Keli, according to witnesses.

Jackie and the others, though frightened by the weapon, did not believe it was real or that Juan would use it if it were. Juan, one student said, was tough, but “not the kind of person who would kill somebody.”