Just Another Homeless Casualty? No, Family Says : Indigent: The trial of Regina Lillian Bisignano’s accused slayer begins. There was an upbeat side to the transient victim that made people who knew her proud of her.

Regina Lillian Bisignano was not a bum. Her mother wants people to know that.

She was a regular at the Orange Coast Interfaith Shelter for the homeless on Wallace Avenue in Costa Mesa. A few times she spent the night; more often she came to use its free showers.

She would arrive on her bicycle in clean jeans and tennis shoes, a fanny pack around her waist containing her comb and purse.

“She’d been on the streets for some time,” said Cindy Ochs, director at the shelter. “But she always seemed happy; she was very friendly.”

It was at the shelter, on the patio next to the shower room, where Regina Bisignano’s grapple with life ended in October.

Bisignano said something in English to a man who spoke only Spanish. Whatever it was, police said, it prompted him to pull a gun and fatally shoot her as she combed her hair.

Tragedy for another of the homeless. She was 44.

Her assailant’s murder trial began last week in Superior Court in Santa Ana. The testimony is about the defendant’s knowledge of firearms, specifically the .9-millimeter, slide-action automatic pistol used in the Oct. 16 incident. It’s like most trials: By nature of their purpose, the victim’s name is rarely mentioned.

But her mother, Lucy J. Shirley of Paramount, is in the courtroom--as a symbol, she says, “so that Sis (the family name for the victim) will know someone was there for her.”

A tally of the sadness in Bisignano’s past might help explain her circumstances toward the end: two children she had not seen in years; three grandchildren she had never seen, two broken marriages, two jobs long forgotten.

But family members said there was an upbeat side that makes them proud of her. Until the bullet struck her chest, she had been a survivor. She’d found her own happiness and a way to make it in life.

“They’re saying my daughter was homeless, but that’s not really true,” Shirley said. “She always had a home with us when she needed it. But Sis wanted to take care of herself. It’s the way she was.”

She loved children--maybe because she had seen so little of her own--and she was always nice to everyone, her family said.

As destitute as Bisignano may have seemed to many, she spent considerable time helping those worse off, her family said.

“I saw her once give the shoes on her feet to a girl that needed them more than she did,” Shirley said. “She actually walked home barefoot.”

Charles Bisignano of Kingston, Pa., Regina’s eldest brother and the sibling closest to her, recalled his visit to the family in Southern California three years ago. Regina Bisignano lived in a house then, in Costa Mesa.

“Sis was living in the garage, because there were some homeless people she let have her bedroom,” he recalled. “She’d rented out a couple of rooms to make money for her own rent payment. But these people she’d let stay in her room for free, because they had nowhere else to go.”

Howard Shirley, her stepfather, said he still can’t get over how she talked a caterer into giving leftover food to a group of 14 homeless families.

Feeding the homeless, the Shirleys said, was almost an obsession of Bisignano’s. She would make the rounds of grocery stores and find items on the shelf that had passed their expiration date. She would talk store owners into letting her have them, then take them by bicycle to homeless people she knew.

That’s why the family has such difficulty with the defendant’s version of how she was killed.

Police said Bisignano and Alonzo Marquez, 20, were on the patio together. She had just showered, and he was waiting for his turn.

While Marquez understands almost no English, he told police that she “had challenged his manhood.”

He told jurors that he had complimented her on having a nice body. She had responded by calling him a name, he said.

Police said Marquez had a gun he had taken from his brother’s house in Los Angeles eight days before.

Marquez said he pulled it out and pointed it at her to scare her, but it accidentally discharged. Prosecutors call it murder.

Marquez said he had seen Bisignano before. When Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher J. Evans asked him where, he replied: “On the streets.”

Shirley is convinced that her daughter’s dependence on homeless shelters must have been temporary, because Bisignano had always tried to keep a place of her own. But it does not surprise Shirley that her daughter was at the shelter for a shower.

“Sis was always very clean,” Shirley said. “She was no bum. She was not just a street person.”

Ochs of the interfaith shelter said Bisignano “stood out from the others.”

“She tried to dress young, wear something a little sporty,” Ochs said. “And she was always very clean. We’d see her for showers quite often.”

Her youth may have been her happiest time. Life had once been promising for Regina Bisignano. She was a high school graduate and the oldest daughter of eight children who lived first in Redding, Pa., then in central Florida.

Shirley carries in her purse a tattered picture of her daughter from those years. Striking a model’s pose, with long, flowing blond hair, she gives the camera a mischievous grin.

Bisignano married early and had her first child at 17, a boy. A few years later, she had a girl. By then she and her husband had followed her mother to Southern California. But the marriage broke up when her children were small. They stayed with their father.

Charles Bisignano, Regina’s brother, said losing her children was the great tragedy of her life.

“She always regretted she’d given them up,” he said. “But I think she feared she couldn’t support them, that it was better for them to be with their father.”

She did see them some as they were growing up. She would meet them at a park in Norwalk, where her former husband lived. But he moved away--about eight years ago, Shirley remembers--and Bisignano had no luck tracking down the new address. The children did keep in touch with her at times, apparently against their father’s wishes.

Bisignano’s daughter, who married and moved to Arkansas, once wrote in a cheerful letter: “You’re a grandma now.”

There were three grandchildren in all, but Bisignano never saw them before her slaying, Shirley said.

Bisignano also remarried, but that union, too, had gone bad.

Her death certificate lists this occupation: homemaker, 25 years.

She had a couple of jobs, including some preliminary work as a beautician, but she had not finished the training. She had a good job while it lasted, Shirley said, doing cleanup work for a company building trailers in Anaheim.

But near the end, when her lack of formal skills kept her out of the marketplace, Regina Bisignano lived by her wits. And that’s what her family takes pride in.

“She paid back every cent she ever borrowed,” Shirley said. “When she died, she didn’t owe us a thing.”

It remains unclear just how much Bisignano told her family about her homeless situation. She kept in touch with Charles, her oldest brother, by letters and telephone. He thought everything was fine for her. She visited other family members nearby by bus.

Ochs said she believes that Bisignano spent much of her time moving from one shelter to the next.

Shirley said that just a few days before her death, her daughter said she had a room somewhere in Costa Mesa, and someone was letting her use their garage for storage.

But she never gave her mother the address. And when Shirley asked about her daughter’s possessions after Bisignano’s death, she learned that the yard-sale items Bisignano said she was storing had been sold off by someone.

Bisignano’s children signed papers giving Shirley control of their mother’s body. She had her daughter cremated.

But Shirley held a memorial service for her in Paramount. Most of her brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews were there. It was a huge turnout, Shirley said.

Regina Bisignano’s two children sent flowers.