By Domesticating Firepower We Domesticate Tragedy

Nancy Allen called after reading my column about a 12-year-old boy who fatally shot his friend at the Mall of Orange.

Juan Cardenas, and most everybody else, says he didn’t mean to kill. He’d been Christmas shopping with Jacalyn Calabrese and her friends.

Juan was showing off. Jacalyn is dead.

Nancy Allen, like many other readers, was saddened, outraged and scared by all this.

Violence has become so mundane, virulence so commonplace, that Jacalyn Calabrese did not believe the gun that killed her really would.

Nancy Allen’s daughter, Cynthia Marie, was 11 years old when she saw her first real gun. It made her giggle.

No one can say, now, if she too thought it might have been a fake. Cindy’s neighborhood friend, a boy barely 14, killed her with it.

“Do you want to see it shoot?” the boy, standing on crutches, asked Cindy and her best friend as they sat on the couch in his living room.

The single bullet hit Cindy just below her left eye. Moments earlier, the boy had taken it from a shoe box and loaded it into the gun he retrieved from a pocket in his mother’s housecoat.

The boy, Paul Wersick, said that he hadn’t meant any harm, and a juvenile court judge in Montgomery County, Md., agreed. He ordered him to see a therapist, join the Boy Scouts and have his grandmother come live with his mother and him at home. Paul Wersick spent only a weekend in jail.

Cindy was shot on a Friday after school, 13 years ago last month, but for Nancy Allen, it could well have been last week. Everywhere are the memories of her firstborn child, concrete as one of the four birthstones on her ring, or as ethereal as a smile in another little girl’s eyes.

Thinking of them, as she often does, Nancy Allen’s eyes film with tears.

“His mother testified that she had intended to get rid of the gun but that she never got around to it,” Nancy told me when I went to see her at her family’s Anaheim construction company. “I remember sitting there, thinking, ‘You never got around to it and my daughter is dead.’ ”

Juan Cardenas’ mother says she doesn’t know where her son found the gun that killed Jacalyn Calabrese. Police investigating the case say so far they’ve traced it through its registration to Bakersfield, Sonoma County, Missouri and now to Oakland.

The prosecution says questions about the ownership of the gun and how it came to rest with Juan, both issues that are still unresolved, are not central to its case.

Kids, these days, can get a gun almost anywhere. And they do.

Heidi Behm, an eighth-grader at Santiago Middle School in Orange, wrote me this: “When I heard the news of Jacalyn Calabrese being shot, I went into shock.

“This may sound snobbish, but this is the kind of thing you are used to hearing about in the other guy’s neighborhood, but this was my neighborhood. My friend and I were standing at the exact spot of the shooting just two days before. It was scary knowing that.”

After Nancy Allen read about the death of Jacalyn Calabrese, she asked me if I might put her in touch with the girl’s mother. Later the two women talked, by phone, about the numbing loss of the children they loved.

“Do you think that they are both in heaven?” Gloria Calabrese asked Nancy Allen. “They have to be. They were both so young.”

Chris Hilger, the public defender who will represent Juan Cardenas at his trial next month, wants me to know how young his client is, too. He says Juan understands what he’s done but doesn’t fully comprehend how.

When he visits him at Juvenile Hall, they talk about his dreams: the one where he is riding his bicycle and gets shot himself, and the other where he and Jacalyn nearly lose their lives.

I told Chris Hilger about Nancy Allen, about her daughter and about how she died. Then we exchanged grim scraps of stories about other children who have killed or been killed the same way.

But there is an addendum to Nancy Allen’s story, one that Hilger calls the scariest he has ever heard.

Two years after he killed Cindy Allen, Paul Wersick found yet another gun. He used it on a 36-year-old tax assessor, a man he had never met, after stalking him in an underground garage.

He bound his victim’s hands with plastic cord, gagged him with his Boy Scout neckerchief and fired once, to the temple, killing him cold. Paul stole the man’s wallet and watch, then he took the bus home.

Nancy Allen, in hindsight, thinks the death of her daughter was no accident. The boy who killed her is now serving a life term behind bars.

“Cynthia always had a lot of fears and was easily frightened,” Nancy Allen said in a letter, dated Dec. 27, 1976, that she wrote in response to a condolence card from Paul Wersick’s mother.

“However, having never seen a gun, I am sure that she did not realize its danger. I realize that if only she had followed the rule of not being in anyone’s home without a parent, that she might have still been alive to enjoy this Christmas and many more.”

Today, when I ask her about that, Nancy Allen says perhaps she had been thinking a bit too wishfully. Kids will always be just that. They will disobey, maybe even rebel.

“I know, as a parent, that you cannot lead your child’s life,” she tells me. “I couldn’t do anything about Cindy being killed.”

But at least in Maryland, she adds, perhaps another child might be saved. This month, the same that would have seen Cynthia Marie turn 25 years old, Maryland began enforcing the nation’s strictest law regulating the possession of handguns.

Here in Orange County, I fear, such a law would never fly. Many believe that owning a handgun is some sort of inalienable right. We keep handguns next to our beds, tucked in the closet and inside the glove compartments of our cars.

We need them, we say, because they need them.

But I, for one, think that by domesticating firepower, we also domesticate tragedy. Like a child, we still don’t understand that guns really do kill us, as well as them .

Dianne Klein’s column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Klein by writing to her at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7406.