Father Takes Blame for Fatal Shooting by Son : Courts: Judge receives plea for mercy in the case of a 12-year-old charged with killing a schoolmate. The boy’s father said the pistol was taken from his garage.

The father of a 12-year-old boy charged with shooting a friend to death in front of horrified Christmas shoppers at a mall here asked a Juvenile Court judge for mercy and accepted the blame for the shooting.

“I am the one who should be incarcerated and not my son,” Juan Manuel Cardenas of Orange wrote in Spanish. “Because my error is not having educated him properly. Because I never spoke with my son about the dangers of a firearm. . . . Because if I had not permitted this firearm to be brought to my house, none of this would have happened.”

Cardenas’ son is charged in the fatal shooting of Jacalyn Calabrese, 12, at the Mall of Orange on Dec. 18. Friends have said the boy had shown a .25-caliber pistol to companions from his school, Cerro Villa Junior High, as a form of braggadocio. They have said the boy did not mean to kill Jacalyn.

The father said the pistol belongs to his brother, who travels from San Francisco to visit his girlfriend in Orange County nearly every weekend. The father said he let his brother store the pistol in the garage but told him to hide it in a pile of old clothes.

The boy apparently stumbled across the pistol and took it, the father said.

To protect his father, the boy would not at first tell police where he had found the pistol, said Deputy Public Defender Chris Hilger, who is representing the boy.

“The boy was being a little kid, thinking about his dad,” Hilger said. “So he didn’t say where the gun came from. He didn’t want to get his dad in trouble.”

For his part, the father did not volunteer information about the pistol either, for fear that it would make matters worse.

However, he detailed his feelings in a letter that he gave to Hilger, who released a copy Friday after a pretrial hearing was postponed.

In the letter, the father asked the judge who will be hearing his son’s case for leniency and counseling.

“Your honor, my son is a good boy who is not lost,” Cardenas wrote. “He only needs your help to continue being a useful man in life.

“Your honor, you, he who makes the law respectable--and I respect it. But at the moment of judging my son, judge him with a little bit of your heart. We are a united family, and it’s in your hands alone to return us to be a united family, to live eternally grateful.”

Hilger said the boy continues to suffer psychologically as he awaits trial in Juvenile Hall.

“He’s trying to block it out and pretend it (shooting) never happened,” Hilger said. “When I ask him about it, he twitches and scratches his arm. He won’t answer questions about it. I’ve stopped asking him about it.”