Advertisement

Little League Goes to Bat for Mall Suspect : Tragedy: The 12-year-old awaiting trial for classmate’s shooting death wins the support of adults and teammates, who start a defense fund. All agree that the boy never meant for Jacalyn Calabrese to die.

Share
TIMES STAFF WRITER

While 12-year-old Juan Manuel Cardenas waits in Juvenile Hall to be tried for the death of one of his classmates, the boy’s Little League has begun raising money for his defense.

“I understand that little Juan is just in a desperate state,” said Linda Hurley, a member of the Olive Little League board of directors. “This is the same kid that would go up to bat and cry when he struck out. . . . I feel so sorry for him.”

Hurley’s husband, Steve, who was the boy’s coach, described him as a child who “needs strokes” and “would do anything to get attention”--but who wasn’t a killer.

Advertisement

“He’s got a conscience,” Steve Hurley said. “He’s not a heartless person. It’s a tragedy.”

The Hurleys and another board member, Connie Sumner, have already collected about $500 from teammates and neighbors to help the boy’s family pay for psychological counseling or a private lawyer. Juan is now being represented by a public defender, who entered an innocent plea on his behalf.

The boy is scheduled for a pretrial hearing Dec. 28 on charges of assault with a deadly weapon, using a gun to commit a crime and involuntary manslaughter in Monday’s death of his 12-year-old friend, Jacalyn Calabrese.

He is accused of holding a loaded gun first to another girl’s temple, and then to Jacalyn’s forehead, in a mall jammed with holiday shoppers. Police and witnesses said Jacalyn dared him to shoot her, and he pulled the trigger.

Jacalyn Calabrese will be buried Saturday. Funeral services will begin at noon in St. Norbert Catholic Church on 300 E. Taft Ave., followed by burial in Holy Sepulcher Cemetery, 7845 Santiago Canyon Road.

Meanwhile, friends and teammates have begun making a giant Christmas card for the boy, who is being closely supervised at Juvenile Hall because he is considered a possible suicide risk.

“I don’t know how we will get (the card) to Juan,” said Sumner, who is collecting signatures from as many neighborhood children as possible. “We just want him to know that he is very well thought of. He’s a good kid.”

Advertisement

Sumner said Juan played Little League with her 14-year-old son, Michael.

“This has hit too close to home,” Sumner said. “It’s like one of our kids. . . . I’ve got three sons of my own. Any 12-year-old child, they don’t think, they just react if they’re dared to do something by their peers.”

“A lot of prayers are coming from this house,” Sumner added.

Steve Hurley said he coached the boy on and off since Juan was 9 and last summer coached him on the league’s All Star team.

“He did great,” said Hurley, who owns a jewelry shop in the Brickyard Shopping Center, about half a mile from the Orange Mall. “In All Stars, we won one out of three games, and Juan pitched the winning game. He’s an excellent baseball player.”

Hurley described the boy, who is large for his age, as “a big teddy bear” who liked to ride bicycles and go fishing with his family.

The Cardenas family was loving, but Juan seemed to crave attention from others, the coach said. Juan once confided that his parents told him to improve his grades if he wanted to keep playing baseball, the coach said.

“Juan needs strokes,” Hurley said. “He’d do anything to get attention. . . . He did go a little overboard.

Advertisement

“You know how kids goof off. He’d get to goofing off and acting stupid, and if they (other kids) would laugh, he’d act even stupider. You can kind of see how (the mall incident) somehow evolved, and he would do more. But I know for a fact, I would stake my life on it, he wouldn’t hurt anybody. He wouldn’t show off to the extent of killing somebody. There had to be some kind of misunderstanding.”

A week and a half before the shooting, Juan dropped by Hurley’s jewelry shop.

“He said there were some kids at the park and they were smoking, and he left and came over here to get away from it,” Hurley said. “He tried to be a good kid.

“He’s not a mean kid or a cruel kid. He’s just a kid. That’s the tragedy of it all.”

Two boys who attend school and play baseball with Juan said his friends are still talking about the shooting and are convinced it was an accident.

“They can’t believe Juan would do that,” said Brett Chavez, a fellow seventh-grader. “He’s usually real nice. He’s real tough, but he would never do that on purpose.”

“It wasn’t right for him to have a gun, but I’m sure he didn’t mean to shoot it,” said 12-year-old Sean McMahon. “That’s not the kind of person he is.”

Sean and Brett said they did not know Juan had a gun, although other classmates have said he showed them the .25-caliber semiautomatic and its bullets for several weeks before the shooting.

Advertisement

Orange police Sgt. Art Romo said investigators are still trying to find out where the boy got the weapon. Romo said the gun is registered to a person who lives outside Orange County and who has moved frequently.

“We’ve tracked it to three different locations,” Romo said. “We’re still trying to track down the registered owner of the gun.”

Romo did not comment on reports by neighbors that Orange police were searching the Cardenas home on Thursday.

A juvenile trial is tentatively scheduled for Jan. 10. The charges against the boy carry a total maximum sentence of 10 years. Deputy Dist. Atty. John Conley said a six-year sentence is “the utter outside maximum that is conceivable.”

Conley said if the boy is found guilty, his sentence would more likely range from no punishment to counseling, probation and a year in a county facility, or at most two years, before he could be considered for parole by the California Youth Authority.

“We haven’t even taken a position on what’s a fair sentence yet,” Conley said.

Advertisement